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Konrad Zuse
|
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.
Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).
Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany. Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.
Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin on 22 June 1910. In 1912, his family moved to East Prussian Braunsberg (now Braniewo in Poland), where his father was a postal clerk. Zuse attended the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg, and in 1923, the family moved to Hoyerswerda, where he passed his Abitur in 1928, qualifying him to enter university.
He enrolled in the Technical University of Berlin and explored both engineering and architecture, but found them boring. Zuse then pursued civil engineering, graduating in 1935.
After graduation, Zuse worked for the Ford Motor Company, using his artistic skills in the design of advertisements. He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Schönefeld near Berlin. This required the performance of many routine calculations by hand, leading him to theorize and plan a way of doing them by machine.
Beginning in 1935, he experimented in the construction of computers in his parents' flat on Wrangelstraße 38, moving with them into their new flat on Methfesselstraße 10, the street leading up the Kreuzberg, Berlin. Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, he produced his first attempt, the Z1, a floating-point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.
In 1937, Zuse submitted two patents that anticipated a von Neumann architecture. In 1938, he finished the Z1 which contained some 30,000 metal parts and never worked well due to insufficient mechanical precision. On 30 January 1944, the Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed with his parents' flat and many neighbouring buildings by a British air raid in World War II.
Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.
In 1939, Zuse was called to military service, where he was given the resources to ultimately build the Z2. In September 1940 Zuse presented the Z2, covering several rooms in the parental flat, to experts of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (DVL; German Research Institute for Aviation). The Z2 was a revised version of the Z1 using telephone relays.
In 1940, the German government began funding him and his company through the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute, forerunner of the DLR), which used his work for the production of glide bombs. Zuse built the S1 and S2 computing machines, which were special purpose devices which computed aerodynamic corrections to the wings of radio-controlled flying bombs. The S2 featured an integrated analog-to-digital converter under program control, making it the first process-controlled computer.
In 1941 Zuse started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Construction), to manufacture his machines, renting a workshop on the opposite side in Methfesselstraße 7 and stretching through the block to Belle-Alliance Straße 29 (renamed and renumbered as Mehringdamm 84 in 1947).
In 1941, he improved on the basic Z2 machine, and built the Z3. On 12 May 1941 Zuse presented the Z3, built in his workshop, to the public. The Z3 was a binary 22-bit floating-point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. Despite the absence of conditional jumps, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer. However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who was unaware of Turing's work and had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).
The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government-supported DVL, which wanted their extensive calculations automated. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer—who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938—for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant".
In 1937, Schreyer had advised Zuse to use vacuum tubes as switching elements; Zuse at this time considered it a crazy idea (Schnapsidee in his own words). Zuse's workshop on Methfesselstraße 7 (with the Z3) was destroyed in an Allied Air raid in late 1943 and the parental flat with Z1 and Z2 on 30 January the following year, whereas the successor Z4, which Zuse had begun constructing in 1942 in new premises in the Industriehof on Oranienstraße 6, remained intact.
On 3 February 1945, aerial bombing caused devastating destruction in the Luisenstadt, the area around Oranienstraße, including neighbouring houses. This event effectively brought Zuse's research and development to a complete halt. The partially finished, telephone relay-based Z4 computer was then packed and moved from Berlin on 14 February, arriving in Göttingen approximately two weeks later.
These machines contributed to the Henschel Werke Hs 293 and Hs 294 guided missiles developed by the German military between 1941 and 1945, which were the precursors to the modern cruise missile. The circuit design of the S1 was the predecessor of Zuse's Z11. Zuse believed that these machines had been captured by occupying Soviet troops in 1945.
While working on his Z4 computer, Zuse realised that programming in machine code was too complicated. He started working on a PhD thesis, containing groundbreaking research years ahead of its time, mainly the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül ("Plan Calculus") and, as an elaborate example program, the first real computer chess engine.
After the 1945 Luisenstadt bombing, he fled from Berlin to the rural Allgäu. In the extreme deprivation of post-war Germany Zuse was unable to build computers.
Zuse founded one of the earliest computer companies: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Capital was raised in 1946 through ETH Zurich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents.
In 1947, according to the memoirs of the German computer pioneer Heinz Billing from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, there was a meeting between Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse in Göttingen. The encounter had the form of a colloquium. Participants were Womersley, Turing, Porter from England and a few German researchers like Zuse, Walther, and Billing. (For more details see Herbert Bruderer, Konrad Zuse und die Schweiz).
It was not until 1949 that Zuse was able to resume work on the Z4. He would show the computer to the mathematician Eduard Stiefel of the ETH Zurich. The two men settled a deal to lend the Z4 to the ETH. In November 1949, Zuse KG was founded and the Z4 was delivered to ETH Zurich in July 1950, where it proved very reliable.
In 1949, Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG, in Haunetal-Neukirchen; in 1957, the company's head office moved to Bad Hersfeld. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1950. At that time, it was the only working digital computer in Central Europe, and the second computer in the world to be sold or loaned, beaten only by the BINAC, which never worked properly after it was delivered. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, up to Z43, were built by Zuse and his company. Notable are the Z11, which was sold to the optics industry and to universities, and the Z22, the first computer with a memory based on magnetic storage.
Unable to do any hardware development, he continued working on Plankalkül, eventually publishing some brief excerpts of his thesis in 1948 and 1959; the work in its entirety, however, remained unpublished until 1972. The PhD thesis was submitted at University of Augsburg, but it was rejected because Zuse forgot to pay the DM 400 university enrollment fee. The rejection did not bother him.
Plankalkül slightly influenced the design of ALGOL 58 but was itself implemented only in 1975 in a dissertation by Joachim Hohmann. Heinz Rutishauser, one of the inventors of ALGOL, wrote: "The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language was undertaken in 1948 by K. Zuse. His notation was quite general, but the proposal never attained the consideration it deserved." Further implementations followed in 1998 and then in 2000 by a team from the Free University of Berlin. Donald Knuth suggested a thought experiment: What might have happened had the bombing not taken place, and had the PhD thesis accordingly been published as planned?
In 1956, Zuse began to work on a high precision, large format plotter. It was demonstrated at the 1961 Hanover Fair, and became well known also outside of the technical world thanks to Frieder Nake's pioneering computer art work. Other plotters designed by Zuse include the ZUSE Z90 and ZUSE Z9004.
In 1967, Zuse suggested that the universe itself is running on a cellular automaton or similar computational structure (digital physics); in 1969, he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space).
Between 1989 and 1995, Zuse conceptualized and created a purely mechanical, extensible, modular tower automaton he named "helix tower" ("Helixturm"). The structure is based on a gear drive that employs rotary motion (e.g. provided by a crank) to assemble modular components from a storage space, elevating a tube-shaped tower; the process is reversible, and inverting the input direction will deconstruct the tower and store the components. In 2009, the Deutsches Museum restored Zuse's original 1:30 functional model that can be extended to a height of 2.7 m. Zuse intended the full construction to reach a height of 120 m, and envisioned it for use with wind power generators and radio transmission installations.
Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart attack midway through the project. It cost 800,000 DM (approximately $500,000) and required four individuals (including Zuse) to assemble it. Funding for this retrocomputing project was provided by Siemens and a consortium of five companies.
Konrad Zuse married Gisela Brandes in January 1945, employing a carriage, himself dressed in tailcoat and top hat and with Gisela in a wedding veil, for Zuse attached importance to a "noble ceremony". Their son Horst, the first of five children, was born in November 1945.
While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.
After Zuse retired, he focused on his hobby of painting. He signed his paintings as "Kuno [von und zu] See".
Zuse was an atheist.
Zuse died on 18 December 1995 in Hünfeld, Hesse (near Fulda) from heart failure.
Zuse received several awards for his work:
The Zuse Institute Berlin is named in his honour.
The Konrad Zuse Medal of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, and the Konrad Zuse Medal of the Zentralverband des Deutschen Baugewerbes (Central Association of German Construction), are both named after Zuse.
A replica of the Z3, as well as the original Z4, is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1 and several of Zuse's paintings.
The 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated by exhibitions, lectures and workshops.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany. Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin on 22 June 1910. In 1912, his family moved to East Prussian Braunsberg (now Braniewo in Poland), where his father was a postal clerk. Zuse attended the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg, and in 1923, the family moved to Hoyerswerda, where he passed his Abitur in 1928, qualifying him to enter university.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "He enrolled in the Technical University of Berlin and explored both engineering and architecture, but found them boring. Zuse then pursued civil engineering, graduating in 1935.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After graduation, Zuse worked for the Ford Motor Company, using his artistic skills in the design of advertisements. He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Schönefeld near Berlin. This required the performance of many routine calculations by hand, leading him to theorize and plan a way of doing them by machine.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Beginning in 1935, he experimented in the construction of computers in his parents' flat on Wrangelstraße 38, moving with them into their new flat on Methfesselstraße 10, the street leading up the Kreuzberg, Berlin. Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, he produced his first attempt, the Z1, a floating-point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1937, Zuse submitted two patents that anticipated a von Neumann architecture. In 1938, he finished the Z1 which contained some 30,000 metal parts and never worked well due to insufficient mechanical precision. On 30 January 1944, the Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed with his parents' flat and many neighbouring buildings by a British air raid in World War II.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1939, Zuse was called to military service, where he was given the resources to ultimately build the Z2. In September 1940 Zuse presented the Z2, covering several rooms in the parental flat, to experts of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (DVL; German Research Institute for Aviation). The Z2 was a revised version of the Z1 using telephone relays.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1940, the German government began funding him and his company through the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute, forerunner of the DLR), which used his work for the production of glide bombs. Zuse built the S1 and S2 computing machines, which were special purpose devices which computed aerodynamic corrections to the wings of radio-controlled flying bombs. The S2 featured an integrated analog-to-digital converter under program control, making it the first process-controlled computer.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1941 Zuse started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Construction), to manufacture his machines, renting a workshop on the opposite side in Methfesselstraße 7 and stretching through the block to Belle-Alliance Straße 29 (renamed and renumbered as Mehringdamm 84 in 1947).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1941, he improved on the basic Z2 machine, and built the Z3. On 12 May 1941 Zuse presented the Z3, built in his workshop, to the public. The Z3 was a binary 22-bit floating-point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. Despite the absence of conditional jumps, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer. However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who was unaware of Turing's work and had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government-supported DVL, which wanted their extensive calculations automated. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer—who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938—for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as \"strategically unimportant\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1937, Schreyer had advised Zuse to use vacuum tubes as switching elements; Zuse at this time considered it a crazy idea (Schnapsidee in his own words). Zuse's workshop on Methfesselstraße 7 (with the Z3) was destroyed in an Allied Air raid in late 1943 and the parental flat with Z1 and Z2 on 30 January the following year, whereas the successor Z4, which Zuse had begun constructing in 1942 in new premises in the Industriehof on Oranienstraße 6, remained intact.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 3 February 1945, aerial bombing caused devastating destruction in the Luisenstadt, the area around Oranienstraße, including neighbouring houses. This event effectively brought Zuse's research and development to a complete halt. The partially finished, telephone relay-based Z4 computer was then packed and moved from Berlin on 14 February, arriving in Göttingen approximately two weeks later.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "These machines contributed to the Henschel Werke Hs 293 and Hs 294 guided missiles developed by the German military between 1941 and 1945, which were the precursors to the modern cruise missile. The circuit design of the S1 was the predecessor of Zuse's Z11. Zuse believed that these machines had been captured by occupying Soviet troops in 1945.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "While working on his Z4 computer, Zuse realised that programming in machine code was too complicated. He started working on a PhD thesis, containing groundbreaking research years ahead of its time, mainly the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (\"Plan Calculus\") and, as an elaborate example program, the first real computer chess engine.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After the 1945 Luisenstadt bombing, he fled from Berlin to the rural Allgäu. In the extreme deprivation of post-war Germany Zuse was unable to build computers.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Zuse founded one of the earliest computer companies: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Capital was raised in 1946 through ETH Zurich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1947, according to the memoirs of the German computer pioneer Heinz Billing from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, there was a meeting between Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse in Göttingen. The encounter had the form of a colloquium. Participants were Womersley, Turing, Porter from England and a few German researchers like Zuse, Walther, and Billing. (For more details see Herbert Bruderer, Konrad Zuse und die Schweiz).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "It was not until 1949 that Zuse was able to resume work on the Z4. He would show the computer to the mathematician Eduard Stiefel of the ETH Zurich. The two men settled a deal to lend the Z4 to the ETH. In November 1949, Zuse KG was founded and the Z4 was delivered to ETH Zurich in July 1950, where it proved very reliable.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1949, Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG, in Haunetal-Neukirchen; in 1957, the company's head office moved to Bad Hersfeld. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1950. At that time, it was the only working digital computer in Central Europe, and the second computer in the world to be sold or loaned, beaten only by the BINAC, which never worked properly after it was delivered. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, up to Z43, were built by Zuse and his company. Notable are the Z11, which was sold to the optics industry and to universities, and the Z22, the first computer with a memory based on magnetic storage.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Unable to do any hardware development, he continued working on Plankalkül, eventually publishing some brief excerpts of his thesis in 1948 and 1959; the work in its entirety, however, remained unpublished until 1972. The PhD thesis was submitted at University of Augsburg, but it was rejected because Zuse forgot to pay the DM 400 university enrollment fee. The rejection did not bother him.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Plankalkül slightly influenced the design of ALGOL 58 but was itself implemented only in 1975 in a dissertation by Joachim Hohmann. Heinz Rutishauser, one of the inventors of ALGOL, wrote: \"The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language was undertaken in 1948 by K. Zuse. His notation was quite general, but the proposal never attained the consideration it deserved.\" Further implementations followed in 1998 and then in 2000 by a team from the Free University of Berlin. Donald Knuth suggested a thought experiment: What might have happened had the bombing not taken place, and had the PhD thesis accordingly been published as planned?",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1956, Zuse began to work on a high precision, large format plotter. It was demonstrated at the 1961 Hanover Fair, and became well known also outside of the technical world thanks to Frieder Nake's pioneering computer art work. Other plotters designed by Zuse include the ZUSE Z90 and ZUSE Z9004.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 1967, Zuse suggested that the universe itself is running on a cellular automaton or similar computational structure (digital physics); in 1969, he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space).",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Between 1989 and 1995, Zuse conceptualized and created a purely mechanical, extensible, modular tower automaton he named \"helix tower\" (\"Helixturm\"). The structure is based on a gear drive that employs rotary motion (e.g. provided by a crank) to assemble modular components from a storage space, elevating a tube-shaped tower; the process is reversible, and inverting the input direction will deconstruct the tower and store the components. In 2009, the Deutsches Museum restored Zuse's original 1:30 functional model that can be extended to a height of 2.7 m. Zuse intended the full construction to reach a height of 120 m, and envisioned it for use with wind power generators and radio transmission installations.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart attack midway through the project. It cost 800,000 DM (approximately $500,000) and required four individuals (including Zuse) to assemble it. Funding for this retrocomputing project was provided by Siemens and a consortium of five companies.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Konrad Zuse married Gisela Brandes in January 1945, employing a carriage, himself dressed in tailcoat and top hat and with Gisela in a wedding veil, for Zuse attached importance to a \"noble ceremony\". Their son Horst, the first of five children, was born in November 1945.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort. Much later, he suggested that in modern times, the best scientists and engineers usually have to choose between either doing their work for more or less questionable business and military interests in a Faustian bargain, or not pursuing their line of work at all.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "After Zuse retired, he focused on his hobby of painting. He signed his paintings as \"Kuno [von und zu] See\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Zuse was an atheist.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Zuse died on 18 December 1995 in Hünfeld, Hesse (near Fulda) from heart failure.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Zuse received several awards for his work:",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Zuse Institute Berlin is named in his honour.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Konrad Zuse Medal of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, and the Konrad Zuse Medal of the Zentralverband des Deutschen Baugewerbes (Central Association of German Construction), are both named after Zuse.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "A replica of the Z3, as well as the original Z4, is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1 and several of Zuse's paintings.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated by exhibitions, lectures and workshops.",
"title": "Awards and honours"
}
] |
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer. Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum. Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany. Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.
|
2001-09-05T17:01:57Z
|
2023-12-11T01:52:41Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
|
16,812 |
Kenesaw Mountain Landis
|
Kenesaw Mountain Landis (/ˈkɛnɪsɔː ˈmaʊntɪn ˈlændɪs/; November 20, 1866 – November 25, 1944) was an American jurist who served as a United States federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death. He is remembered for his handling of the Black Sox Scandal, in which he expelled eight members of the Chicago White Sox from organized baseball for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series and repeatedly refused their reinstatement requests. His iron rule over baseball in the near quarter-century of his commissionership are generally credited with restoring public confidence in the game.
Landis was born in Millville, Ohio. Raised in Indiana, he became a lawyer, and then personal secretary to Walter Q. Gresham, the new United States Secretary of State, in 1893. He returned to private practice after Gresham died in office.
President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Landis to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 1905. Landis received national attention in 1907 when he fined Standard Oil of Indiana more than $29 million (approximately $800 million in 2021) for violating federal laws forbidding rebates on railroad freight tariffs. While Landis's action was reversed on appeal, he was seen as a judge determined to rein in big business. During and after World War I, Landis presided over several high-profile trials of draft resisters and others whom he saw as opposing the war effort. He imposed heavy sentences on those who were convicted, although some of the convictions were reversed on appeal, and other sentences were commuted.
In 1920, Landis was a leading candidate when American League and National League team owners, embarrassed by the Black Sox scandal and other instances of players throwing games, sought someone to rule over baseball. Landis was given full power to act in the sport's best interest, and used that power extensively over the next quarter century. Landis was widely praised for cleaning up the game, although some of his decisions in the Black Sox matter remain controversial: supporters of "Shoeless Joe" Jackson and Buck Weaver contend that he was overly harsh with those players. Others blame Landis for, in their view, delaying the racial integration of baseball. Landis was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by a special vote shortly after he died in 1944.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis was born in Millville, Ohio, the sixth child and fourth son of Abraham Hoch Landis, a physician, and Mary Kumler Landis, on November 20, 1866. The Landises descended from Swiss Mennonites. Abraham Landis had been wounded fighting in the U.S. Army at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, and when his parents proved unable to agree on a name for the new baby, Mary Landis proposed that they call him Kenesaw Mountain. At the time, both spellings of "Kenesaw" were used, but later "Kennesaw Mountain" became the accepted spelling of the battle site.
Abraham Landis worked in Millville as a country physician. When Kenesaw was eight, the elder Landis moved his family to Delphi, Indiana, and subsequently to Logansport, Indiana, where the doctor purchased and ran several local farms—his war injury had caused him to scale back his medical practice. Two of Kenesaw's four brothers, Charles Beary Landis and Frederick Landis, became members of Congress.
As "Kenny", as he was sometimes known, grew, he did an increasing share of the farm work, later stating, "I did my share—and it was a substantial share—in taking care of the 13 acres ... I do not remember that I particularly liked to get up at 3:30 in the morning." Kenesaw began his off-farm career at age ten as a news delivery boy. He left school at 15 after an unsuccessful attempt to master algebra. He worked at the local general store and then as errand boy with the Vandalia Railroad. Landis applied for a job as a brakeman, but was laughingly dismissed as too small. He then worked for the Logansport Journal, and taught himself shorthand reporting, becoming in 1883 official court reporter for the Cass County Circuit Court. Landis later wrote, "I may not have been much of a judge, nor baseball official, but I do pride myself on having been a real shorthand reporter." He served in that capacity until 1886. In his spare time, he became a prize-winning bicycle racer and played on and managed a baseball team. Offered a professional contract as a ballplayer, he turned it down, stating that he preferred to play for the love of the game.
In 1886, Landis first ventured into Republican Party politics, supporting a friend, Charles F. Griffin, for Indiana Secretary of State. Griffin won, and Landis was rewarded with a civil service job in the Indiana Department of State. While employed there, he applied to be an attorney. At that time, in Indiana, an applicant needed only to prove that he was 21 and of good moral character, and Landis was admitted. Landis opened a practice in Marion, Indiana, but attracted few clients in his year of work there. Realizing that an uneducated lawyer was unlikely to build a lucrative practice, Landis enrolled at Cincinnati's YMCA Law School (now part of Northern Kentucky University) in 1889. Landis transferred to Union Law School (part of Northwestern University) the following year, and in 1891, he took his law degree from Union and was admitted to the Illinois Bar. He began a practice in Chicago, served as an assistant instructor at Union and with fellow attorney Clarence Darrow helped found the nonpartisan Chicago Civic Centre Club, devoted to municipal reform. Landis practiced with college friend Frank O. Lowden; the future commissioner and his law partner went into debt to impress potential clients, buying a law library secondhand.
In March 1893, President Grover Cleveland appointed federal judge Walter Q. Gresham as his Secretary of State, and Gresham hired Landis as his personal secretary. Gresham had a long career as a political appointee in the latter part of the 19th century; though he lost his only two bids for elective office, he served in three Cabinet positions and was twice a dark horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Although Gresham was a Republican, he had supported Cleveland (a Democrat) in the 1892 election because of his intense dislike for the Republican nominee, President Benjamin Harrison. Kenesaw Landis had appeared before Judge Gresham in court. According to Landis biographer J. G. Taylor Spink, Gresham thought Landis "had something on the ball" and believed that Landis's shorthand skills would be of use.
In Washington, Landis worked hard to protect Gresham's interests in the State Department, making friends with many members of the press. He was less popular among many of the Department's senior career officials, who saw him as brash. When word leaked concerning President Cleveland's Hawaiian policy, the President was convinced Landis was the source of the information and demanded his dismissal. Gresham defended Landis, stating that Cleveland would have to fire both of them, and the President relented, later finding out that he was mistaken in accusing Landis. President Cleveland grew to like Landis, and when Gresham died in 1895, offered Landis the post of United States Ambassador to Venezuela. Landis declined the diplomatic post, preferring to return to Chicago to begin a law practice and to marry Winifred Reed, daughter of the Ottawa, Illinois postmaster. The two married July 25, 1895; they had two surviving children, a boy, Reed, and a girl, Susanne—a third child, Winifred, died almost immediately after being born.
Landis built a corporate law practice in Chicago; with the practice doing well, he deeply involved himself in Republican Party politics. He built a close association with his friend Lowden and served as his campaign manager for governor of Illinois in 1904. Lowden was defeated, but would later serve two terms in the office and be a major contender for the 1920 Republican presidential nomination. A seat on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois was vacant; President Theodore Roosevelt offered it to Lowden, who declined it and recommended Landis. Other recommendations from Illinois politicians followed, and Roosevelt nominated Landis for the seat. According to Spink, President Roosevelt wanted "a tough judge and a man sympathetic with his viewpoint in that important court"; Lowden and Landis were, like Roosevelt, on the progressive left of the Republican Party. On March 18, 1905, Roosevelt transmitted the nomination to the Senate, which confirmed Landis the same afternoon, without any committee hearing; he received his commission the same day.
Landis's courtroom, room 627 in the Chicago Federal Building, was ornate and featured two murals: one of King John conceding Magna Carta, the other of Moses about to smash the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The mahogany and marble chamber was, according to Landis biographer David Pietrusza, "just the spot for Landis's sense of the theatrical. In it he would hold court for nearly the next decade and a half." According to Spink, "It wasn't long before Chicago writers discovered they had a 'character' on the bench." A. L. Sloan of the Chicago Herald-American, a friend of Landis, recalled:
The Judge was always headline news. He was a great showman, theatrical in appearance, with his sharp jaw and shock of white hair, and people always crowded into his courtroom, knowing there would be something going on. There were few dull moments.
If Judge Landis was suspicious of an attorney's line of questioning, he would wrinkle his nose, and once told a witness, "Now let's stop fooling around and tell exactly what did happen, without reciting your life's history." When an elderly defendant told him that he would not be able to live to complete a five-year sentence, Landis scowled at him and asked, "Well, you can try, can't you?" When a young man stood before him for sentencing after admitting to stealing jewels from a parcel, the defendant's wife stood near him, infant daughter in her arms, and Landis mused what to do about the situation. After a dramatic pause, Landis ordered the young man to take his wife and daughter and go home with them, expressing his unwillingness to have the girl be the daughter of a convict. According to sportswriter Ed Fitzgerald in SPORT magazine, "[w]omen wept unashamed and the entire courtroom burst into spontaneous, prolonged applause."
Landis had been a lawyer with a corporate practice; upon his elevation to the bench, corporate litigants expected him to favor them. According to a 1907 magazine article about Landis, "Corporations smiled pleasantly at the thought of a corporation lawyer being on the bench. They smile no more." In an early case, Landis fined the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company the maximum $4,000 for illegally importing workers, even though his wife's brother-in-law served on the corporate board. In another decision, Landis struck down a challenge to the Interstate Commerce Commission's (ICC) jurisdiction over rebating, a practice banned by the Elkins Act of 1903 in which railroads and favored customers agreed that the customers would pay less than the posted tariff, which by law was to be the same for all shippers. Landis's decision allowed the ICC to take action against railroads which gave rebates.
By the first decade of the 20th century, a number of business entities had formed trusts, which dominated their industries. Trusts often sought to purchase or otherwise neutralize their competitors, allowing the conglomerates to raise prices to high levels. In 1890, Congress had passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but it was not until the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901–09) that serious efforts were made to break up or control the trusts. The dominant force in the oil industry was Standard Oil, controlled by John D. Rockefeller. Modern-day ExxonMobil, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Sohio, Amoco and Continental Oil all trace their ancestry to various parts of Standard Oil.
In March 1906, Commissioner of Corporations James Rudolph Garfield submitted a report to President Roosevelt, alleging large-scale rebating in Standard Oil shipments. Federal prosecutors in several states and territories sought indictments against components of the Standard Oil Trust. On June 28, 1906, Standard Oil of Indiana was indicted on 6,428 counts of violation of the Elkins Act for accepting rebates on shipments on the Chicago & Alton Railroad. The case was assigned to Landis.
Trial on the 1,903 counts that survived pretrial motions began on March 4, 1907. The fact that rebates had been given was not contested; what was at issue was whether Standard Oil knew the railroad's posted rates, and if it had a duty to enquire if it did not. Landis charged the jury that it "was the duty of the defendant diligently in good faith to get from the Chicago & Alton ... the lawful rate". The jury found Standard Oil guilty on all 1,903 counts.
The maximum fine that Landis could impose was $29,240,000. To aid the judge in determining the sentence, Landis issued a subpoena for Rockefeller to testify as to Standard Oil's assets. The tycoon had often evaded subpoenas, not having testified in court since 1888. Deputy United States Marshals visited Rockefeller's several homes, as well as the estates of his friends, in the hope of finding him. After several days, Rockefeller was found at his lawyer's estate in northwestern Massachusetts and was served with the subpoena. The tycoon duly came to Landis's Chicago courtroom, making his way through a mob anxious to see the proceedings. Rockefeller's actual testimony, proffered after the judge made him wait through several cases and witnesses, proved to be anticlimactic, as he professed almost no knowledge of Standard Oil's corporate structure or assets.
On August 3, 1907, Landis pronounced sentence. He fined Standard Oil the maximum penalty, $29,240,000, the largest fine imposed on a corporation to that date. The corporation quickly appealed; in the meantime, Landis was lionized as a hero. According to Pietrusza, "much of the nation could hardly believe a federal judge had finally cracked down on a trust—and cracked down hard ". President Roosevelt, when he heard the sentence, reportedly stated, "That's bully." Rockefeller was playing golf in Cleveland when he was brought a telegram containing the news. Rockefeller calmly informed his golfing partners of the amount, and proceeded to shoot a personal record score, later stating, "Judge Landis will be dead a long time before this fine is paid." He proved correct; the verdict and sentence were reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on July 22, 1908. In January 1909, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and in a new trial before another judge (Landis recused himself), Standard Oil was acquitted.
A lifelong baseball fan, Landis often slipped away from the courthouse for a White Sox or Cubs game. In 1914, the two existing major leagues were challenged by a new league, the Federal League. In 1915, the upstart league brought suit against the existing leagues and owners under the Sherman Act and the case was assigned to Landis. Baseball owners feared that the reserve clause, which forced players to sign new contracts only with their former team, and the 10-day clause, which allowed teams (but not players) to terminate player contracts on ten days notice, would be struck down by Landis.
Landis held hearings in late January 1915, and newspapers expected a quick decision, certainly before spring training began in March. During the hearings, Landis admonished the parties, "Both sides must understand that any blows at the thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution". When the National League's chief counsel, future Senator George Wharton Pepper referred to the activities of baseball players on the field as "labor", Landis interrupted him: "As a result of 30 years of observation, I am shocked because you call playing baseball 'labor.' " Landis reserved judgment, and the parties waited for his ruling. Spring training passed, as did the entire regular season and the World Series. In December 1915, still with no word from Landis, the parties reached a settlement, and the Federal League disbanded. Landis made no public statement as to the reasons for his failure to rule, though he told close friends that he had been certain the parties would reach a settlement sooner or later. Most observers thought that Landis waited because he did not want to rule against the two established leagues and their contracts.
In 1916, Landis presided over the "Ryan Baby" or "Baby Iraene" case. The recent widow of a prominent Chicago banker, Anna Dollie Ledgerwood Matters, had brought a baby girl home from a visit to Canada and claimed that the child was her late husband's posthumous heir. Matters had left an estate of $250,000. However, a shop girl from Ontario, Margaret Ryan, claimed the baby was hers, and brought a writ of habeas corpus in Landis's court. Ryan stated that she had given birth to the girl in an Ottawa hospital, but had been told her baby had died. In the era before blood and DNA testing, Landis relied on witness testimony and awarded the child to Ryan. The case brought comparisons between Landis and King Solomon, who had judged a similar case. Landis was reversed by the Supreme Court, which held he had no jurisdiction in the matter. A Canadian court later awarded the child to Ryan.
Although Landis was an autocrat in the courtroom, he was less so at home. In a 1916 interview, he stated,
Every member of this family does exactly what he or she wants to do. Each one is his or her supreme court. Everything for the common good of the family is decided according to the wishes of the whole family. Each one knows what is right and each one can do whatever he thinks is best. It is purely democratic.
In early 1917, Landis considered leaving the bench and returning to private practice—though he greatly enjoyed being a judge, the salary of $7,500 was considerably lower than what he could make as an attorney. The entry of the United States into World War I in April ended Landis's determination to resign; a firm supporter of the war effort, he felt he could best serve the country by remaining on the bench. Despite this decision and his age, fifty, Landis wrote to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, asking him to take him into the service and send him to France, where the war was raging. Baker urged Landis to make speeches in support of the war instead, which he did. The judge's son, Reed, had already served briefly in the Illinois National Guard; during the war he became a pilot, and eventually an ace.
Landis's disdain for draft dodgers and other opponents of the war was evident in July 1917, when he presided over the trials of some 120 men, mostly foreign-born Socialists, who had resisted the draft and rioted in Rockford, Illinois. According to Pietrusza, Landis "was frequently brutal in his remarks" to the defendants, interrogating them on their beliefs and actions. Landis tried the case in Rockford, and found all guilty, sentencing all but three to a year and a day in jail, the maximum sentence. The prisoners were ordered to register for the draft after serving their sentences—except 37, whom he ordered deported.
On September 5, 1917, federal officers raided the national headquarters, in Chicago, of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, sometimes "Wobblies"), as well as 48 of the union's halls across the nation. The union had opposed the war and urged members and others to refuse conscription into the armed forces. On September 28, 166 IWW leaders, including union head Big Bill Haywood were indicted in the Northern District of Illinois; their cases were assigned to Landis. Some 40 of the indicted men could not be found; a few others had charges dismissed against them. Ultimately, Landis presided over a trial against 113 defendants, the largest federal criminal trial to that point.
The trial began on April 1, 1918. Landis quickly dismissed charges against a dozen defendants. Jury selection occupied a month. Journalist John Reed attended the trial, and wrote of his impressions of Landis:
Small on the huge bench sits a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment-like skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead ... Upon this man has devolved the historic role of trying the Social Revolution. He is doing it like a gentleman. In many ways a most unusual trial. When the judge enters the court-room after recess, no one rises—he himself has abolished the pompous formality. He sits without robes, in an ordinary business suit, and often leaves the bench to come down and perch on the step of the jury box. By his personal orders, spittoons are placed by the prisoners' seats ... and as for the prisoners themselves, they are permitted to take off their coats, move around, read newspapers. It takes some human understanding for a Judge to fly in the face of judicial ritual as much as that.
Haywood biographer Melvyn Dubofsky wrote that Landis "exercised judicial objectivity and restraint for five long months". Baseball historian Harold Seymour stated that "[o]n the whole, Landis conducted the trial with restraint, despite his reputation as a foe of all radical groups." Landis dismissed charges against an elderly defendant who was in obvious pain as he testified, and allowed the release of a number of prisoners on bail or on their own recognizances.
On August 17, 1918, following the closing argument for the prosecution (the defendants waived argument), Landis instructed the jury. The lead defense counsel objected to the wording of the jury charge several times, but Haywood believed it to have been fair. After 65 minutes, the jury returned with guilty verdicts for all of the remaining accused, much to their shock; they had believed that Landis's charge pointed towards their acquittal. When the defendants returned to court on August 29, Landis listened with patience to the defendants' final pleas. For the sentencing, according to Richard Cahan in his history of Chicago's district court, "mild-mannered Landis returned a changed man". Although two defendants received only ten days in jail, all others received at least a year and a day, and Haywood and fourteen others received twenty years. A number of defendants, including Haywood, obtained bail during the appeal; even before Haywood's appeals were exhausted, he jumped bail and took ship for the Soviet Union. The labor leader hung a portrait of Landis in his Moscow apartment, and when Haywood died in 1928, he was interred near John Reed (who had died of illness in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution) in the Kremlin Wall—they remain the only Americans so honored. President Calvin Coolidge commuted the sentences of the remaining incarcerated defendants in 1923, much to the disgust of Landis, who issued an angry statement. After leaving his judgeship, Landis referred to the defendants in the Haywood case as "scum", "filth", and "slimy rats".
Landis hoped that the Kaiser, Wilhelm II would be captured and tried in his court; he wanted to indict the Kaiser for the murder of a Chicagoan who lost his life on the RMS Lusitania in 1915. The State Department notified Landis that extradition treaties did not permit the rendition of the Kaiser, who fled into exile in the Netherlands as the war concluded. Nevertheless, in a speech, Landis demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm, his six sons, and 5,000 German military leaders "be lined up against a wall and shot down in justice to the world and to Germany".
Even with the armistice in November 1918, the war-related trials continued. The Socialist Party of America, like the IWW, had opposed the war, and had also been raided by federal authorities. Seven Socialist Party leaders, including Victor Berger, who was elected to Congress in November 1918, were indicted for alleged anti-war activities. The defendants were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it illegal "to utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language" about the armed forces, the flag, the Constitution, or democracy. The defendants, who were mostly of German birth or descent, moved for a change of venue away from Landis's courtroom, alleging that Landis had stated on November 1, 1918, that "[i]f anybody has said anything about the Germans that is worse than I have said, I would like to hear it so I could use it myself." Landis, however, examined the transcript of the trial in which the statement was supposedly made, failed to find it, declared the affidavit in support of the motion "perjurious", and denied the motion. While the jury was being selected, Berger was indicted on additional espionage charges for supposedly violating the law during an earlier, unsuccessful political campaign. At the conclusion of the case, Landis took an hour to dramatically charge the jury, emphasizing the secretive nature of conspiracies and pointing at the jury box as he noted, "the country was then at war". At one point, Landis leapt out of his seat, twirled his chair around, then sat on its arm. Later in his charge, he lay prone upon the bench. The jury took less than a day to convict Congressman-elect Berger and his four remaining codefendants. Landis sentenced each defendant to twenty years in federal prison. Landis denied the defendants bail pending appeal, but they quickly obtained it from an appellate court judge. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rule on the case itself, sending it on to the Supreme Court, which on January 31, 1921, overturned the convictions and sentences by a 6–3 vote, holding that Landis should have stepped aside once he was satisfied that the affidavit was legally sufficient, leaving it for another judge to decide whether it was actually true. Landis refused to comment on the Supreme Court's decision, which ordered a new trial. In 1922, the charges against the defendants were dropped by the government.
The postwar period saw considerable deflation; the shortage of labor and materials during the war had led to much higher wages and prices, and in the postwar economic readjustment, wages were cut heavily. In Chicago, employers in the building trades attempted a 20% wage cut; when this was rejected by the unions, a lockout followed. Both sides agreed to submit the matter to a neutral arbitrator, and settled on Landis, who agreed to take the case in June 1921. By this time, Landis was Commissioner of Baseball, and still a federal judge. In September, Landis issued his report, cutting wages by an average of 12.5%. To improve productivity, he also struck restrictions on machinery which saved labor, established a standardized overtime rate, and resolved jurisdictional conflicts between unions. The labor organizations were not completely satisfied, but Landis's reforms were adopted in many places across the country and were credited with reviving the building industry.
Criticism of Landis having both the judicial and baseball positions began almost as soon as his baseball appointment was announced in November 1920. On February 2, 1921, lame duck Congressman Benjamin F. Welty (Democrat-Ohio) offered a resolution calling for Landis's impeachment. On February 11, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer opined that there was no legal impediment to Landis holding both jobs. On February 14, the House Judiciary Committee voted 24–1 to investigate Landis. Reed Landis later stated, "[n]one of the other congressmen wanted Father impeached but they did want him to come down and defend himself because they knew what a show it would be."
Although Welty's departure from office on March 4, 1921, began a lull in criticism of Landis, in April, the judge made a controversial decision in the case of Francis J. Carey, a 19-year-old bank teller, who had pleaded guilty to embezzling $96,500. Carey, the sole support of his widowed mother and unmarried sisters, gained Landis's sympathy. He accused the bank of underpaying Carey, and sent the youth home with his mother. Two members of the Senate objected to Landis's actions, and the New York Post compared Carey with Les Misérables's Jean Valjean, noting "[b]etween a loaf of bread [Valjean was incarcerated for stealing one] and $96,500 there is a difference." A bill barring outside employment by federal judges had been introduced by Landis's foes, but had expired with the end of the congressional session in March; his opponents tried again in July, and the bill failed in the Senate on a tie vote. On September 1, 1921, the American Bar Association, a trade group of lawyers, passed a resolution of censure against Landis.
By the end of 1921, the controversy was dying down, and Landis felt that he could resign without looking pressured. On February 18, 1922, he announced his resignation as judge effective March 1, stating, "There are not enough hours in the day for all these activities". In his final case, he fined two theatre owners for evading the federal amusement tax. One owner had refused to make restitution before sentencing; he was fined $5,000. The owner who had tried to make his shortfall good was fined one cent.
By 1919, the influence of gamblers on baseball had been a problem for several years. Historian Paul Gardner wrote,
Baseball had for some time been living uneasily in the knowledge that bribes were being offered by gamblers, and that some players were accepting them. The players knew it was going on, and the owners knew it was going on. But more important, the players knew that the owners knew—and they knew the owners were doing nothing about it for fear of a scandal that might damage organized baseball. Under such conditions it quite obviously did not pay to be honest.
The 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds was much anticipated, as the nation attempted to return to normalcy in the postwar period. Baseball had seen a surge of popularity during the 1919 season, which set several attendance records. The powerful White Sox, with their superstar batter "Shoeless Joe" Jackson and star pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude "Lefty" Williams, were believed likely to defeat the less-well-regarded Reds. To the surprise of many, the Reds defeated the White Sox, five games to three (during 1919–21, the World Series was a best-of-nine affair).
Rumors that the series was fixed began to circulate after gambling odds against the Reds winning dropped sharply before the series began, and gained more credibility after the White Sox lost four of the first five games. Cincinnati lost the next two games, and speculation began that the Reds were losing on purpose to extend the series and increase gate revenues. However, Cincinnati won Game Eight, 10–5, to end the series, as Williams lost his third game (Cicotte lost the other two). After the series, according to Gene Carney, who wrote a book about the scandal, "there was more than the usual complaining from those who had bet big on the Sox and lost".
The issue of the 1919 Series came to the public eye again in September 1920, when, after allegations that a game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies on August 31 had been fixed, a grand jury was empaneled in state court in Chicago to investigate baseball gambling. Additional news came from Philadelphia, where gambler Billy Maharg stated that he had worked with former boxer Abe Attell and New York gambler Arnold Rothstein to get the White Sox to throw the 1919 Series. Cicotte and Jackson were called before the grand jury, where they gave statements incriminating themselves and six teammates: Williams, first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, center fielder Happy Felsch and reserve infielder Fred McMullin. Williams and Felsch were also called before the grand jury and incriminated themselves and their teammates. Through late September, the 1920 American League season had been one of the most exciting on record, with the White Sox, Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees dueling for the league lead. By September 28, the Yankees were close to elimination, but the White Sox and Indians were within percentage points of each other. On that day, however, the eight players, seven of whom were still on the White Sox, were indicted. They were immediately suspended by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. The Indians were able to pull ahead and win the pennant, taking the American League championship by two games over Chicago.
Baseball had been governed by a three-man National Commission, consisting of American League President Ban Johnson, National League President John Heydler and Cincinnati Reds owner Garry Herrmann. In January 1920, Herrmann left office at the request of other club owners, leaving the Commission effectively deadlocked between Johnson and Heydler. A number of club owners, disliking one or both league presidents, preferred a single commissioner to rule over the game, but were willing to see the National Commission continue if Herrmann was replaced by someone who would provide strong leadership. Landis's name was mentioned in the press for this role, and the influential baseball newspaper The Sporting News sought his appointment.
Another proposal, known as the "Lasker Plan" after Albert Lasker, a shareholder in the Chicago Cubs who had proposed it, was for a three-man commission to govern the game, drawn from outside baseball. On September 30, 1920, with the Black Sox scandal exposed, National League President Heydler began to advocate for the Lasker Plan, and by the following day, four major league teams had supported him. Among the names discussed in the press for membership on the new commission were Landis, former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, former President William Howard Taft, and General John J. Pershing.
The start of the 1920 World Series on October 5 distracted the public from baseball's woes for a time, but discussions continued behind the scenes. By mid-October, 11 of the 16 team owners (all eight from the National League and the owners of the American League Yankees, White Sox and Boston Red Sox) were demanding the end of the National Commission and the appointment of a three-man commission whose members would have no financial interest in baseball. Heydler stated his views on baseball's requirements:
We want a man as chairman who will rule with an iron hand ... Baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever. Therefore, it is our object to appoint a big man to lead the new commission.
On November 8, the owners of the eight National League and three American League teams which supported the Lasker Plan met and unanimously selected Landis as head of the proposed commission. The American League clubs that supported the plan threatened to move to the National League, away from Johnson, who opposed it. Johnson had hoped that the minor leagues would support his position; when they did not, he and the "Loyal Five" teams agreed to the Lasker Plan. In the discussions among the owners that followed, they decided that Landis would be the only commissioner–no associate members would be elected. On November 12, the team owners came to Landis's courtroom to approach him. Landis was trying a bribery case; when he heard noise in the back of the courtroom from the owners, he gaveled them to silence. He made them wait 45 minutes while he completed his docket, then met with them in his chambers.
The judge heard out the owners; after expressing initial reluctance, he took the job for seven years at a salary of $50,000, on condition he could remain on the federal bench. During Landis's time serving as both judge and commissioner, he allowed a $7,500 reduction in his commissioner salary, to reflect his pay as judge. The appointment of Landis was met with acclaim in the press. A tentative agreement was signed by the parties a month later—an agreement which itemized Landis's powers over baseball, and which was drafted by the judge. The owners were still reeling from the perception that baseball was crooked, and accepted the agreement virtually without dissent. Under the terms of the contract, Landis could not be dismissed by the team owners, have his pay reduced, or even be criticized by them in public. He also had nearly unlimited authority over every person employed in the major or minor leagues, from owners to batboys, including the ability to ban people from the leagues for life. The owners waived any recourse to the courts to contest Landis's will. Humorist Will Rogers stated, "[D]on't kid yourself that that old judicial bird isn't going to make those baseball birds walk the chalkline". Player and manager Leo Durocher later stated, "The legend has been spread that the owners hired the Judge off the federal bench. Don't you believe it. They got him right out of Dickens."
On January 30, 1921, Landis, speaking at an Illinois church, warned:
Now that I am in baseball, just watch the game I play. If I catch any crook in baseball, the rest of his life is going to be a pretty hot one. I'll go to any means and to anything possible to see that he gets a real penalty for his offense.
The criminal case against the Black Sox defendants suffered unexpected setbacks, with evidence vanishing, including some of the incriminating statements made to the grand jury. The prosecution was forced to dismiss the original indictments, and bring new charges against seven of the ballplayers (McMullin was not charged again). Frustrated by the delays, Landis placed all eight on an "ineligible list", banning them from major and minor league baseball. Comiskey supported Landis by giving the seven who remained under contract to the White Sox their unconditional release. Public sentiment was heavily against the ballplayers, and when Jackson, Williams, Felsch, and Weaver played in a semi-pro game, The Sporting News mocked the 3,000 attendees, "Just Like Nuts Go to See a Murderer".
The criminal trial of the Black Sox indictees began in early July 1921. Despite what Robert C. Cottrell, in his book on the scandal, terms "the mysterious loss of evidence", the prosecution was determined to pursue the case, demanding five-year prison terms for the ballplayers for defrauding the public by throwing the series. On August 2, 1921, the jury returned not guilty verdicts against all defendants, leading to happy pandemonium in the courtroom, joined by the courtroom bailiffs, with even the trial judge, Hugo Friend, looking visibly pleased. The players and jury retired to an Italian restaurant and partied well into the night.
The jubilation proved short-lived. On August 3, Landis issued a statement:
Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball. Of course, I don't know that any of these men will apply for reinstatement, but if they do, the above are at least a few of the rules that will be enforced. Just keep in mind that, regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.
According to ESPN columnist Rob Neyer, "with that single decision, Landis might have done more for the sport than anyone else, ever. Certainly, Landis never did anything more important." According to Carney, "The public amputation of the eight Sox was seen as the only acceptable cure." Over the years of Landis's commissionership, a number of the players applied for reinstatement to the game, notably Jackson and Weaver. Jackson, raised in rural South Carolina and with limited education, was said to have been drawn unwillingly into the conspiracy, while Weaver, though admitting his presence at the meetings, stated that he took no money. Both men stated that their play on the field, and their batting percentages during the series (.375 for Jackson, .324 for Weaver) indicated that they did not help to throw the series. None was ever reinstated, with Landis telling a group of Weaver supporters that his presence at the meetings with the gamblers was sufficient to bar him. Even today, long after the deaths of all three men, efforts are periodically made to reinstate Jackson (which would make him eligible for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame) and Weaver (deemed by some the least culpable of the eight). In the 1990s, a petition drive to reinstate Jackson drew 60,000 signatures. He has been treated sympathetically in movies such as Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, and Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Feller expressed their support for Jackson's induction into the Hall. Landis's expulsion of the eight men remains in force.
Landis felt that the Black Sox scandal had been initiated by people involved in horse racing, and stated that "by God, as long as I have anything to do with this game, they'll never get another hold on it." In 1921, his first season as commissioner, New York Giants owner Charles Stoneham and manager John McGraw purchased Oriental Park Racetrack in Havana, Cuba. Landis gave Stoneham and McGraw an ultimatum—they could not be involved in both baseball and horse racing. They quickly put the track back on the market.
Even before the Black Sox scandal had been resolved, Landis acted to clean up other gambling cases. Eugene Paulette, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, had been with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1919, and had met with gamblers. It is uncertain if any games were fixed, but Paulette had written a letter naming two other Cardinals who might be open to throwing games. The letter had fallen into the hands of Phillies President William F. Baker, who had taken no action until Landis's appointment, then turned the letter over to him. Paulette met with Landis once, denying any wrongdoing, then refused further meetings. Landis placed him on the ineligible list in March 1921. In November 1921, Landis banned former St. Louis Browns player Joe Gedeon, who had been released by the Browns after admitting to sitting in on meetings with gamblers who were trying to raise the money to bribe the Black Sox. When a minor league official asked if he was eligible, Landis settled the matter by placing Gedeon on the ineligible list.
Two other player gambling affairs marked Landis's early years as commissioner. In 1922, Giants pitcher Phil Douglas, embittered at McGraw for disciplining him for heavy drinking, wrote a letter to Cardinals outfielder Leslie Mann, suggesting that he would take a bribe to ensure the Giants did not win the pennant. Although Mann had been a friend, the outfielder neither smoked nor drank and had long been associated with the YMCA movement; according to baseball historian Lee Allen, Douglas might as well have sent the letter to Landis himself. Mann immediately turned over the letter to his manager, Branch Rickey, who ordered Mann to contact Landis at once. The Giants placed Douglas on the ineligible list, an action backed by Landis after meeting with the pitcher. On September 27, 1924, Giants outfielder Jimmy O'Connell offered Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand $500 if Sand didn't "bear down too hard against us today". Sand was initially inclined to let the matter pass, but recalling the fate of Weaver and other Black Sox players, told his manager, Art Fletcher. Fletcher met with Heydler, who contacted Landis. O'Connell did not deny the bribe attempt, and was placed on the ineligible list.
In total, Landis banned eighteen players from the game. Landis biographer Pietrusza details the effect of Landis's stand against gambling:
Before 1920 if one player approached another player to throw a contest, there was a very good chance he would not be informed upon. Now, there was an excellent chance he would be turned in. No honest player wanted to meet the same fate as Buck Weaver ... Without the forbidding example of Buck Weaver to haunt them, it is unlikely Mann and Sand would have snitched on their fellow players. After Landis' unforgiving treatment of the popular and basically honest Weaver they dared not to. And once prospectively crooked players knew that honest players would no longer shield them, the scandals stopped.
At the time of Landis's appointment as commissioner, it was common for professional baseball players to supplement their pay by participating in postseason "barnstorming" tours, playing on teams which would visit smaller cities and towns to play games for which admission would be charged. Since 1911, however, players on the two World Series teams had been barred from barnstorming. The rule had been leniently enforced—in 1916, several members of the champion Red Sox, including pitcher George Herman "Babe" Ruth had barnstormed and had been fined a token $100 each by the National Commission.
Ruth, who after the 1919 season had been sold to the Yankees, and who by then had mostly abandoned his pitching role for the outfield, was the focus of considerable fan interest as he broke batting records in 1920 and 1921, some by huge margins. Ruth's major league record 29 home runs with the Red Sox in 1919 fell to his own efforts in 1920, when he hit 54. He then proceeded to hit 59 in 1921, leading the Yankees to their first pennant. Eight major league teams failed to hit as many home runs in 1921 as Ruth hit by himself. The Yankees lost the 1921 World Series to the Giants (Ruth was injured and missed several games) and after the series, the outfielder proposed to capitalize on fan interest by leading a team of barnstormers, including Yankees teammate Bob Meusel, in violation of the rule. According to Cottrell,
[T]he two men clashed who helped the national pastime overcome the Black Sox scandal, one through his seemingly iron will, the other thanks to his magical bat. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Babe Ruth battled over the right of a ballplayer from a pennant-winning squad to barnstorm in the off-season. Also involved was the commissioner's continued determination to display, as he had through his banishment of the Black Sox, that he had established the boundaries for organized baseball. These boundaries, Landis intended to demonstrate, applied even to the sport's most popular and greatest star. Significant too, only Babe Ruth now contended with Commissioner Landis for the title of baseball's most important figure.
Ruth had asked Yankees general manager Ed Barrow for permission to barnstorm. Barrow had no objection but warned Ruth he must obtain Landis's consent. Landis biographer Spink, who was at the time the editor of The Sporting News, stated, "I can say that Ruth knew exactly what he was doing when he defied Landis in October, 1921. He was willing to back his own popularity and well-known drawing powers against the Judge." Ruth, to the commissioner's irritation, did not contact Landis until October 15, one day before the first exhibition. When the two spoke by telephone, Landis ordered Ruth to attend a meeting with him; Ruth refused, stating that he had to leave for Buffalo for the first game. Landis angrily refused consent for Ruth to barnstorm, and after slamming down the receiver, is recorded as saying, "Who the hell does that big ape think he is? That blankety-blank! If he goes on that trip it will be one of the sorriest things he has ever done." By one account, Yankees co-owner Colonel Tillinghast Huston attempted to dissuade Ruth as he departed, only to be told by the ballplayer, "Aw, tell the old guy to jump in a lake."
The tour also featured fellow Yankees Bob Meusel and Bill Piercy (who had been called up late in the season and was ineligible for the World Series) as well as Tom Sheehan, who had been sent to the minor leagues before the end of the season. Two other Yankees, Carl Mays and Wally Schang, had been scheduled to join the tour, but given Landis's position, according to Spink, "wisely decided to pass it up". Spink describes the tour as "a fiasco." On Landis's orders, it was barred from all major and minor league ballparks. In addition, it was plagued by poor weather, and was called off in late October. In early December, Landis suspended Ruth, Piercy, and Meusel until May 20, 1922. Yankee management was relieved; they had feared Landis would suspend Ruth for the season or even longer. Both the Yankees and Ruth repeatedly asked Landis for the players' early reinstatement, which was refused, and when Landis visited the Yankees during spring training in New Orleans, he lectured Ruth for two hours on obeying authority. "He sure can talk", noted Ruth.
When Ruth returned on May 20, he batted 0-for-4, and was booed by the crowd at the Polo Grounds. According to Pietrusza, "Always a politician, there was one boss Landis did fear: public opinion. He had no guarantee at the start of the Ruth controversy that the public and press would back him as he assumed unprecedented powers over baseball. Now, he knew they would."
At the start of Landis's commissionership, the minor league teams were for the most part autonomous of the major leagues; in fact the minor leagues independently chose to accept Landis's rule. To ensure players did not become mired in the minor leagues without a chance to earn their way out, major league teams were able to draft players who played two consecutive years with the same minor league team. Several minor leagues were not subject to the draft; Landis fought for the inclusion of these leagues, feeling that the non-draft leagues could prevent players from advancing as they became more skilled. By 1924, he had succeeded, as the International League, the final holdout, accepted the draft.
By the mid-1920s, major league clubs were beginning to develop "farm systems", that is, minor league teams owned or controlled by them, at which they could develop young prospects without the risk of the players being acquired by major league rivals. The pioneer in this development was Branch Rickey, who then ran the St. Louis Cardinals. As the 1921 National Agreement among the major and minor leagues which implemented Landis's hiring lifted a ban on major league teams owning minor league ones, Landis was limited in his avenues of attack on Rickey's schemes. Developing talent at little cost thanks to Rickey, the Cardinals dominated the National League, winning nine league titles in the years from 1926 to 1946.
Soon after Landis's appointment, he surprised the major league owners by requiring that they disclose their minor league interests. Landis fought against the practice of "covering up", using transfers between two teams controlled by the same major league team to make players ineligible for the draft. His first formal act as commissioner was to declare infielder Phil Todt a free agent, dissolving his contract with the St. Louis Browns (at the time run by Rickey, who soon thereafter moved across town to run the Cardinals); in 1928, he ruled future Hall of Famer Chuck Klein a free agent as he held the Cardinals had tried to cover Klein up by having him play in a league where they owned two affiliates. The following year, he freed Detroit Tigers prospect and future Hall of Famer Rick Ferrell, who attracted a significant signing bonus from the Browns. In 1936, Landis found that teenage pitching prospect Bob Feller's signing by minor league club Fargo-Moorhead had been a charade; the young pitcher was for all intents and purposes property of the Cleveland Indians. However, Feller indicated that he wanted to play for Cleveland and Landis issued a ruling which required the Indians to pay damages to minor league clubs, but allowed them to retain Feller, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Indians.
Landis's attempts to crack down on "covering up" provoked the only time he was ever sued by one of his owners. After the 1930 season, minor leaguer Fred Bennett, convinced he was being covered up by the Browns, petitioned Landis for his release. Landis ruled that the Browns could either keep Bennett on their roster for the entire 1931 season, trade him, or release him. Instead, Browns owner Phil Ball brought suit against Landis in his old court in Chicago. Federal Judge Walter Lindley ruled for Landis, noting that the agreements and rules were intended to "endow the Commissioner with all the attributes of a benevolent but absolute despot and all the disciplinary powers of the proverbial pater familias". Ball intended to appeal, but after a meeting between team owners and Landis in which the commissioner reminded owners of their agreement not to sue, decided to drop the case.
Landis had hoped that the large Cardinal farm system would become economically unfeasible; when it proved successful for the Cardinals, he had tolerated it for several years and was in a poor position to abolish it. In 1938, however, finding that the Cardinals effectively controlled multiple teams in the same league (a practice disliked by Landis), he freed 70 players from their farm system. As few of the players were likely prospects for the major leagues, Landis's actions generated headlines, but had little effect on the Cardinals organization, and the development of the modern farm system, whereby each major league club has several minor league teams which it uses to develop talent, proceeded apace. Rob Neyer describes Landis's effort as "a noble effort in a good cause, but it was also doomed to fail."
One of the most controversial aspects of Landis's commissionership is the question of race. From 1884, black ballplayers were informally banned from organized baseball. No black ballplayer played in organized baseball during Landis's commissionership; Rickey (then running the Brooklyn Dodgers) broke the color line by signing Jackie Robinson to play for the minor league Montreal Royals in 1946, after Landis's death. Robinson became the first African-American in the major leagues since the 19th century, playing with the Dodgers beginning in 1947.
According to contemporary newspaper columns, at the time of his appointment as commissioner, Landis was considered a liberal on race questions; two Chicago African-American newspapers defended him against the 1921 efforts to impeach him from his judgeship. However, a number of baseball authors have ascribed racism to Landis, who they say actively perpetuated baseball's color line. James Bankes, in The Pittsburgh Crawfords, tracing the history of that Negro league team, states that Landis, whom the author suggests was a Southerner (Landis was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana), made "little effort to disguise his racial prejudice during 25 years in office" and "remained a steadfast foe of integration". Negro league historian John Holway incorrectly termed Landis "the hard-bitten Carolinian [sic] Kennesaw [sic] Mountain Landis". In a 2000 article in Smithsonian magazine, writer Bruce Watson states that Landis "upheld baseball's unwritten ban on black players and did nothing to push owners toward integration". A number of authors say that Landis banned major league play against black teams for fear the white teams would lose, though they ascribe various dates for this action, and the Dodgers are known to have played black teams in and around their Havana spring training base as late as 1942.
Landis's documented actions on race are inconsistent. In 1938, Yankee Jake Powell was interviewed by a radio station, and when asked what he did in the offseason, made comments that were interpreted as meaning he worked as a police officer and beat up African Americans. Landis suspended Powell for ten days. In June 1942, the Negro league Kansas City Monarchs played several games against the white "Dizzy Dean All-Stars" at major league ballparks, attracting large crowds. After three games, all won by the Monarchs, Landis ordered a fourth canceled, on the ground that the games were outdrawing major league contests. On one occasion, Landis intervened in Negro league affairs, though he had no jurisdiction to do so. The Crawfords lost a game to a white semi-pro team when their star catcher, Josh Gibson dropped a pop fly, and Gibson was accused of throwing the game at the behest of gamblers. Landis summoned the black catcher to his office, interviewed him, and announced that Gibson was cleared of wrongdoing.
In July 1942, Dodger manager Leo Durocher charged that there was a "grapevine understanding" keeping blacks out of baseball. He was summoned to Landis's Chicago office, and after emerging from a meeting with the commissioner, alleged that he had been misquoted. Landis then addressed the press, and stated,
Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been in the 21 years I have served. There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation and never has been to my knowledge. If Durocher, or if any other manager, or all of them, want to sign one, or twenty-five Negro players, it is all right with me. That is the business of the managers and the club owners. The business of the commissioner is to interpret the rules of baseball, and to enforce them.
In his 1961 memoir, Veeck as in Wreck, longtime baseball executive and owner Bill Veeck told of his plan, in 1942, to buy the Phillies and stock the team with Negro league stars. Veeck wrote that he told Landis, who reacted with shock, and soon moved to block the purchase. In his book, Veeck placed some of the blame on National League President Ford Frick, but later reserved blame exclusively for Landis, whom he accused of racism, stating in a subsequent interview, "[a]fter all, a man who is named Kenesaw Mountain was not born and raised in the state of Maine." However, when Veeck was asked for proof of his allegations against Landis, he stated, "I have no proof of that. I can only surmise." According to baseball historian David Jordan, "Veeck, nothing if not a storyteller, seems to have added these embellishments, sticking in some guys in black hats, simply to juice up his tale."
In November 1943, Landis agreed after some persuasion that black sportswriter Sam Lacy should make a case for integration of organized baseball before the owners' annual meeting. Instead of Lacy attending the meeting, actor Paul Robeson did. Robeson, though a noted black actor and advocate of civil rights, was a controversial figure for his affiliation with the Communist Party. The owners heard Robeson out, but at Landis's suggestion, did not ask him any questions or begin any discussion with him.
Neyer noted that "Landis has been blamed for delaying the integration of the major leagues, but the truth is that the owners didn't want black players in the majors any more than Landis did. And it's not likely that, even if Landis hadn't died in 1944, he could have prevented Branch Rickey from bringing Jackie Robinson to the National League in 1947." The Baseball Writers' Association of America after Landis's death in 1944 renamed its Most Valuable Player Awards after Landis, but removed his name in 2020 with a vote of 89 percent of voting members in favor. The president of the association said Landis had "notably failed to integrate the game during his tenure".
C.C. Johnson Spink, son of Landis biographer J.G. Taylor Spink and his successor as editor of The Sporting News, noted in the introduction to the reissue of his father's biography of Landis,
K.M. Landis was quite human and not infallible. If, for example, he did drag his feet at erasing baseball's color line, he was grievously wrong, but then so were many others of his post-Civil War generation.
Landis took full jurisdiction over the World Series, as a contest between representatives of the two major leagues. Landis was blamed when the umpires called a game on account of darkness with the score tied during the 1922 World Series, even though there was still light. Landis decided that such decisions in future would be made by himself, moved forward the starting time of World Series games in future years, and announced that proceeds from the tied game would be donated to charity. In the 1932 World Series, Landis ordered that tickets for Game One at Yankee Stadium only be sold as part of strips, forcing fans to purchase tickets for all Yankee home games during that Series. Bad weather and the poor economy resulted in a half-filled stadium, and Landis allowed individual game sales for Game Two. During the 1933 World Series, he instituted a rule that only he could throw a player out of a World Series game, a rule which followed the ejection of Washington Senator Heinie Manush by umpire Charley Moran. The following year, with the visiting Cardinals ahead of the Detroit Tigers, 9–0 in Game Seven, he removed Cardinal Joe Medwick from the game for his own safety when Medwick, the left fielder, was pelted with fruit by Tiger fans after Medwick had been involved in a fight with one of the Tigers. Spink notes that Landis would most likely not have done so were the game within reach of the Tigers. In the 1938 World Series, umpire Moran was hit by a wild throw and suffered facial injuries. He was able to continue, but the incident caused Landis to order that World Series games and All-Star Games be played with six umpires.
The All-Star Game began in 1933; Landis had been a strong supporter of the proposal for such a contest, and after the first game remarked, "That's a grand show, and it should be continued." He never missed an All-Star Game in his lifetime; his final public appearance was at the 1944 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh.
In 1928, National League ball clubs proposed an innovation whereby each team's pitcher, usually the weakest hitter in the lineup, would not bat, but be replaced for the purposes of batting and base-running by a tenth player. There were expectations that at the interleague meetings that year, the National League teams would vote for it, and the American League teams against it, leaving Landis to cast the deciding vote. The proposal was withdrawn, and Landis did not disclose how he would have voted on this early version of the "designated hitter" rule.
Landis disliked the innovation of "night baseball", played in the evening with the aid of artificial light, and sought to discourage it. Despite this, he attended the first successful minor league night game, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1930. When major league night baseball began in the late 1930s, Landis got the owners to restrict the number of such games. During World War II, many restrictions on night baseball were reduced, with the Washington Senators permitted to play all their home games (except those on Sundays and holidays) at night.
With the entry of the United States into World War II in late 1941, Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, inquiring as to the wartime status of baseball. The President responded, urging Landis to keep baseball open, foreseeing that even those fully engaged in war work would benefit from inexpensive diversions such as attending baseball games. Many major leaguers enlisted or were drafted; even so Landis repeatedly stated, "We'll play as long as we can put nine men on the field." Although many of the teams practiced at their normal spring training sites in 1942, beginning the following year they were required to train near their home cities or in the Northeast. Landis was as virulently opposed to the Axis Powers as he had been towards the Kaiser, writing that peace would not be possible until "about fifteen thousand little Hitler, Himmlers and Hirohitos" were killed.
Landis retained a firm hold on baseball despite his advancing years and, in 1943, banned Phillies owner William D. Cox from baseball for betting on his own team. In 1927, Landis's stance regarding gambling had been codified in the rules of baseball: "Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor had a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible." Cox was required to sell his stake in the Phillies.
In early October 1944, Landis checked into St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago, where his wife Winifred had been hospitalized, with a severe cold. While in the hospital, he had a heart attack, causing him to miss the World Series for the first time in his commissionership. He remained fully alert, and as usual signed the World Series share checks to players. His contract was due to expire in January 1946; on November 17, 1944, baseball's owners voted him another seven-year term. However, he died on November 25. His longtime assistant, Leslie O'Connor, wept as he read the announcement for the press. Landis is buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.
Two weeks after his death, Landis was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame by a special committee vote. American League President Will Harridge said of Landis, "He was a wonderful man. His great qualities and downright simplicity impressed themselves deeply on all who knew him." Pietrusza suggests that the legend on Landis's Hall of Fame plaque is his true legacy: "His integrity and leadership established baseball in the esteem, respect, and affection of the American people." Pietrusza notes that Landis was hired by the baseball owners to clean up the sport, and "no one could deny Kenesaw Mountain Landis had accomplished what he had been hired to do". According to his first biographer, Spink:
[Landis] may have been arbitrary, self-willed and even unfair, but he 'called 'em as he saw 'em' and he turned over to his successor and the future a game cleansed of the nasty spots which followed World War I. Kenesaw Mountain Landis put the fear of God into weak characters who might otherwise have been inclined to violate their trust. And for that, I, as a lifelong lover of baseball, am eternally grateful.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kenesaw Mountain Landis (/ˈkɛnɪsɔː ˈmaʊntɪn ˈlændɪs/; November 20, 1866 – November 25, 1944) was an American jurist who served as a United States federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death. He is remembered for his handling of the Black Sox Scandal, in which he expelled eight members of the Chicago White Sox from organized baseball for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series and repeatedly refused their reinstatement requests. His iron rule over baseball in the near quarter-century of his commissionership are generally credited with restoring public confidence in the game.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Landis was born in Millville, Ohio. Raised in Indiana, he became a lawyer, and then personal secretary to Walter Q. Gresham, the new United States Secretary of State, in 1893. He returned to private practice after Gresham died in office.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Landis to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 1905. Landis received national attention in 1907 when he fined Standard Oil of Indiana more than $29 million (approximately $800 million in 2021) for violating federal laws forbidding rebates on railroad freight tariffs. While Landis's action was reversed on appeal, he was seen as a judge determined to rein in big business. During and after World War I, Landis presided over several high-profile trials of draft resisters and others whom he saw as opposing the war effort. He imposed heavy sentences on those who were convicted, although some of the convictions were reversed on appeal, and other sentences were commuted.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1920, Landis was a leading candidate when American League and National League team owners, embarrassed by the Black Sox scandal and other instances of players throwing games, sought someone to rule over baseball. Landis was given full power to act in the sport's best interest, and used that power extensively over the next quarter century. Landis was widely praised for cleaning up the game, although some of his decisions in the Black Sox matter remain controversial: supporters of \"Shoeless Joe\" Jackson and Buck Weaver contend that he was overly harsh with those players. Others blame Landis for, in their view, delaying the racial integration of baseball. Landis was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by a special vote shortly after he died in 1944.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kenesaw Mountain Landis was born in Millville, Ohio, the sixth child and fourth son of Abraham Hoch Landis, a physician, and Mary Kumler Landis, on November 20, 1866. The Landises descended from Swiss Mennonites. Abraham Landis had been wounded fighting in the U.S. Army at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, and when his parents proved unable to agree on a name for the new baby, Mary Landis proposed that they call him Kenesaw Mountain. At the time, both spellings of \"Kenesaw\" were used, but later \"Kennesaw Mountain\" became the accepted spelling of the battle site.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Abraham Landis worked in Millville as a country physician. When Kenesaw was eight, the elder Landis moved his family to Delphi, Indiana, and subsequently to Logansport, Indiana, where the doctor purchased and ran several local farms—his war injury had caused him to scale back his medical practice. Two of Kenesaw's four brothers, Charles Beary Landis and Frederick Landis, became members of Congress.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "As \"Kenny\", as he was sometimes known, grew, he did an increasing share of the farm work, later stating, \"I did my share—and it was a substantial share—in taking care of the 13 acres ... I do not remember that I particularly liked to get up at 3:30 in the morning.\" Kenesaw began his off-farm career at age ten as a news delivery boy. He left school at 15 after an unsuccessful attempt to master algebra. He worked at the local general store and then as errand boy with the Vandalia Railroad. Landis applied for a job as a brakeman, but was laughingly dismissed as too small. He then worked for the Logansport Journal, and taught himself shorthand reporting, becoming in 1883 official court reporter for the Cass County Circuit Court. Landis later wrote, \"I may not have been much of a judge, nor baseball official, but I do pride myself on having been a real shorthand reporter.\" He served in that capacity until 1886. In his spare time, he became a prize-winning bicycle racer and played on and managed a baseball team. Offered a professional contract as a ballplayer, he turned it down, stating that he preferred to play for the love of the game.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1886, Landis first ventured into Republican Party politics, supporting a friend, Charles F. Griffin, for Indiana Secretary of State. Griffin won, and Landis was rewarded with a civil service job in the Indiana Department of State. While employed there, he applied to be an attorney. At that time, in Indiana, an applicant needed only to prove that he was 21 and of good moral character, and Landis was admitted. Landis opened a practice in Marion, Indiana, but attracted few clients in his year of work there. Realizing that an uneducated lawyer was unlikely to build a lucrative practice, Landis enrolled at Cincinnati's YMCA Law School (now part of Northern Kentucky University) in 1889. Landis transferred to Union Law School (part of Northwestern University) the following year, and in 1891, he took his law degree from Union and was admitted to the Illinois Bar. He began a practice in Chicago, served as an assistant instructor at Union and with fellow attorney Clarence Darrow helped found the nonpartisan Chicago Civic Centre Club, devoted to municipal reform. Landis practiced with college friend Frank O. Lowden; the future commissioner and his law partner went into debt to impress potential clients, buying a law library secondhand.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In March 1893, President Grover Cleveland appointed federal judge Walter Q. Gresham as his Secretary of State, and Gresham hired Landis as his personal secretary. Gresham had a long career as a political appointee in the latter part of the 19th century; though he lost his only two bids for elective office, he served in three Cabinet positions and was twice a dark horse candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Although Gresham was a Republican, he had supported Cleveland (a Democrat) in the 1892 election because of his intense dislike for the Republican nominee, President Benjamin Harrison. Kenesaw Landis had appeared before Judge Gresham in court. According to Landis biographer J. G. Taylor Spink, Gresham thought Landis \"had something on the ball\" and believed that Landis's shorthand skills would be of use.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Washington, Landis worked hard to protect Gresham's interests in the State Department, making friends with many members of the press. He was less popular among many of the Department's senior career officials, who saw him as brash. When word leaked concerning President Cleveland's Hawaiian policy, the President was convinced Landis was the source of the information and demanded his dismissal. Gresham defended Landis, stating that Cleveland would have to fire both of them, and the President relented, later finding out that he was mistaken in accusing Landis. President Cleveland grew to like Landis, and when Gresham died in 1895, offered Landis the post of United States Ambassador to Venezuela. Landis declined the diplomatic post, preferring to return to Chicago to begin a law practice and to marry Winifred Reed, daughter of the Ottawa, Illinois postmaster. The two married July 25, 1895; they had two surviving children, a boy, Reed, and a girl, Susanne—a third child, Winifred, died almost immediately after being born.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Landis built a corporate law practice in Chicago; with the practice doing well, he deeply involved himself in Republican Party politics. He built a close association with his friend Lowden and served as his campaign manager for governor of Illinois in 1904. Lowden was defeated, but would later serve two terms in the office and be a major contender for the 1920 Republican presidential nomination. A seat on the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois was vacant; President Theodore Roosevelt offered it to Lowden, who declined it and recommended Landis. Other recommendations from Illinois politicians followed, and Roosevelt nominated Landis for the seat. According to Spink, President Roosevelt wanted \"a tough judge and a man sympathetic with his viewpoint in that important court\"; Lowden and Landis were, like Roosevelt, on the progressive left of the Republican Party. On March 18, 1905, Roosevelt transmitted the nomination to the Senate, which confirmed Landis the same afternoon, without any committee hearing; he received his commission the same day.",
"title": "Early life and pre-judicial career (1866–1905)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Landis's courtroom, room 627 in the Chicago Federal Building, was ornate and featured two murals: one of King John conceding Magna Carta, the other of Moses about to smash the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The mahogany and marble chamber was, according to Landis biographer David Pietrusza, \"just the spot for Landis's sense of the theatrical. In it he would hold court for nearly the next decade and a half.\" According to Spink, \"It wasn't long before Chicago writers discovered they had a 'character' on the bench.\" A. L. Sloan of the Chicago Herald-American, a friend of Landis, recalled:",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Judge was always headline news. He was a great showman, theatrical in appearance, with his sharp jaw and shock of white hair, and people always crowded into his courtroom, knowing there would be something going on. There were few dull moments.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "If Judge Landis was suspicious of an attorney's line of questioning, he would wrinkle his nose, and once told a witness, \"Now let's stop fooling around and tell exactly what did happen, without reciting your life's history.\" When an elderly defendant told him that he would not be able to live to complete a five-year sentence, Landis scowled at him and asked, \"Well, you can try, can't you?\" When a young man stood before him for sentencing after admitting to stealing jewels from a parcel, the defendant's wife stood near him, infant daughter in her arms, and Landis mused what to do about the situation. After a dramatic pause, Landis ordered the young man to take his wife and daughter and go home with them, expressing his unwillingness to have the girl be the daughter of a convict. According to sportswriter Ed Fitzgerald in SPORT magazine, \"[w]omen wept unashamed and the entire courtroom burst into spontaneous, prolonged applause.\"",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Landis had been a lawyer with a corporate practice; upon his elevation to the bench, corporate litigants expected him to favor them. According to a 1907 magazine article about Landis, \"Corporations smiled pleasantly at the thought of a corporation lawyer being on the bench. They smile no more.\" In an early case, Landis fined the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company the maximum $4,000 for illegally importing workers, even though his wife's brother-in-law served on the corporate board. In another decision, Landis struck down a challenge to the Interstate Commerce Commission's (ICC) jurisdiction over rebating, a practice banned by the Elkins Act of 1903 in which railroads and favored customers agreed that the customers would pay less than the posted tariff, which by law was to be the same for all shippers. Landis's decision allowed the ICC to take action against railroads which gave rebates.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "By the first decade of the 20th century, a number of business entities had formed trusts, which dominated their industries. Trusts often sought to purchase or otherwise neutralize their competitors, allowing the conglomerates to raise prices to high levels. In 1890, Congress had passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, but it was not until the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901–09) that serious efforts were made to break up or control the trusts. The dominant force in the oil industry was Standard Oil, controlled by John D. Rockefeller. Modern-day ExxonMobil, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, Sohio, Amoco and Continental Oil all trace their ancestry to various parts of Standard Oil.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In March 1906, Commissioner of Corporations James Rudolph Garfield submitted a report to President Roosevelt, alleging large-scale rebating in Standard Oil shipments. Federal prosecutors in several states and territories sought indictments against components of the Standard Oil Trust. On June 28, 1906, Standard Oil of Indiana was indicted on 6,428 counts of violation of the Elkins Act for accepting rebates on shipments on the Chicago & Alton Railroad. The case was assigned to Landis.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Trial on the 1,903 counts that survived pretrial motions began on March 4, 1907. The fact that rebates had been given was not contested; what was at issue was whether Standard Oil knew the railroad's posted rates, and if it had a duty to enquire if it did not. Landis charged the jury that it \"was the duty of the defendant diligently in good faith to get from the Chicago & Alton ... the lawful rate\". The jury found Standard Oil guilty on all 1,903 counts.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The maximum fine that Landis could impose was $29,240,000. To aid the judge in determining the sentence, Landis issued a subpoena for Rockefeller to testify as to Standard Oil's assets. The tycoon had often evaded subpoenas, not having testified in court since 1888. Deputy United States Marshals visited Rockefeller's several homes, as well as the estates of his friends, in the hope of finding him. After several days, Rockefeller was found at his lawyer's estate in northwestern Massachusetts and was served with the subpoena. The tycoon duly came to Landis's Chicago courtroom, making his way through a mob anxious to see the proceedings. Rockefeller's actual testimony, proffered after the judge made him wait through several cases and witnesses, proved to be anticlimactic, as he professed almost no knowledge of Standard Oil's corporate structure or assets.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On August 3, 1907, Landis pronounced sentence. He fined Standard Oil the maximum penalty, $29,240,000, the largest fine imposed on a corporation to that date. The corporation quickly appealed; in the meantime, Landis was lionized as a hero. According to Pietrusza, \"much of the nation could hardly believe a federal judge had finally cracked down on a trust—and cracked down hard \". President Roosevelt, when he heard the sentence, reportedly stated, \"That's bully.\" Rockefeller was playing golf in Cleveland when he was brought a telegram containing the news. Rockefeller calmly informed his golfing partners of the amount, and proceeded to shoot a personal record score, later stating, \"Judge Landis will be dead a long time before this fine is paid.\" He proved correct; the verdict and sentence were reversed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on July 22, 1908. In January 1909, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, and in a new trial before another judge (Landis recused himself), Standard Oil was acquitted.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A lifelong baseball fan, Landis often slipped away from the courthouse for a White Sox or Cubs game. In 1914, the two existing major leagues were challenged by a new league, the Federal League. In 1915, the upstart league brought suit against the existing leagues and owners under the Sherman Act and the case was assigned to Landis. Baseball owners feared that the reserve clause, which forced players to sign new contracts only with their former team, and the 10-day clause, which allowed teams (but not players) to terminate player contracts on ten days notice, would be struck down by Landis.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Landis held hearings in late January 1915, and newspapers expected a quick decision, certainly before spring training began in March. During the hearings, Landis admonished the parties, \"Both sides must understand that any blows at the thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution\". When the National League's chief counsel, future Senator George Wharton Pepper referred to the activities of baseball players on the field as \"labor\", Landis interrupted him: \"As a result of 30 years of observation, I am shocked because you call playing baseball 'labor.' \" Landis reserved judgment, and the parties waited for his ruling. Spring training passed, as did the entire regular season and the World Series. In December 1915, still with no word from Landis, the parties reached a settlement, and the Federal League disbanded. Landis made no public statement as to the reasons for his failure to rule, though he told close friends that he had been certain the parties would reach a settlement sooner or later. Most observers thought that Landis waited because he did not want to rule against the two established leagues and their contracts.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1916, Landis presided over the \"Ryan Baby\" or \"Baby Iraene\" case. The recent widow of a prominent Chicago banker, Anna Dollie Ledgerwood Matters, had brought a baby girl home from a visit to Canada and claimed that the child was her late husband's posthumous heir. Matters had left an estate of $250,000. However, a shop girl from Ontario, Margaret Ryan, claimed the baby was hers, and brought a writ of habeas corpus in Landis's court. Ryan stated that she had given birth to the girl in an Ottawa hospital, but had been told her baby had died. In the era before blood and DNA testing, Landis relied on witness testimony and awarded the child to Ryan. The case brought comparisons between Landis and King Solomon, who had judged a similar case. Landis was reversed by the Supreme Court, which held he had no jurisdiction in the matter. A Canadian court later awarded the child to Ryan.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Although Landis was an autocrat in the courtroom, he was less so at home. In a 1916 interview, he stated,",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Every member of this family does exactly what he or she wants to do. Each one is his or her supreme court. Everything for the common good of the family is decided according to the wishes of the whole family. Each one knows what is right and each one can do whatever he thinks is best. It is purely democratic.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In early 1917, Landis considered leaving the bench and returning to private practice—though he greatly enjoyed being a judge, the salary of $7,500 was considerably lower than what he could make as an attorney. The entry of the United States into World War I in April ended Landis's determination to resign; a firm supporter of the war effort, he felt he could best serve the country by remaining on the bench. Despite this decision and his age, fifty, Landis wrote to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, asking him to take him into the service and send him to France, where the war was raging. Baker urged Landis to make speeches in support of the war instead, which he did. The judge's son, Reed, had already served briefly in the Illinois National Guard; during the war he became a pilot, and eventually an ace.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Landis's disdain for draft dodgers and other opponents of the war was evident in July 1917, when he presided over the trials of some 120 men, mostly foreign-born Socialists, who had resisted the draft and rioted in Rockford, Illinois. According to Pietrusza, Landis \"was frequently brutal in his remarks\" to the defendants, interrogating them on their beliefs and actions. Landis tried the case in Rockford, and found all guilty, sentencing all but three to a year and a day in jail, the maximum sentence. The prisoners were ordered to register for the draft after serving their sentences—except 37, whom he ordered deported.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On September 5, 1917, federal officers raided the national headquarters, in Chicago, of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, sometimes \"Wobblies\"), as well as 48 of the union's halls across the nation. The union had opposed the war and urged members and others to refuse conscription into the armed forces. On September 28, 166 IWW leaders, including union head Big Bill Haywood were indicted in the Northern District of Illinois; their cases were assigned to Landis. Some 40 of the indicted men could not be found; a few others had charges dismissed against them. Ultimately, Landis presided over a trial against 113 defendants, the largest federal criminal trial to that point.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The trial began on April 1, 1918. Landis quickly dismissed charges against a dozen defendants. Jury selection occupied a month. Journalist John Reed attended the trial, and wrote of his impressions of Landis:",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Small on the huge bench sits a wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment-like skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead ... Upon this man has devolved the historic role of trying the Social Revolution. He is doing it like a gentleman. In many ways a most unusual trial. When the judge enters the court-room after recess, no one rises—he himself has abolished the pompous formality. He sits without robes, in an ordinary business suit, and often leaves the bench to come down and perch on the step of the jury box. By his personal orders, spittoons are placed by the prisoners' seats ... and as for the prisoners themselves, they are permitted to take off their coats, move around, read newspapers. It takes some human understanding for a Judge to fly in the face of judicial ritual as much as that.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Haywood biographer Melvyn Dubofsky wrote that Landis \"exercised judicial objectivity and restraint for five long months\". Baseball historian Harold Seymour stated that \"[o]n the whole, Landis conducted the trial with restraint, despite his reputation as a foe of all radical groups.\" Landis dismissed charges against an elderly defendant who was in obvious pain as he testified, and allowed the release of a number of prisoners on bail or on their own recognizances.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On August 17, 1918, following the closing argument for the prosecution (the defendants waived argument), Landis instructed the jury. The lead defense counsel objected to the wording of the jury charge several times, but Haywood believed it to have been fair. After 65 minutes, the jury returned with guilty verdicts for all of the remaining accused, much to their shock; they had believed that Landis's charge pointed towards their acquittal. When the defendants returned to court on August 29, Landis listened with patience to the defendants' final pleas. For the sentencing, according to Richard Cahan in his history of Chicago's district court, \"mild-mannered Landis returned a changed man\". Although two defendants received only ten days in jail, all others received at least a year and a day, and Haywood and fourteen others received twenty years. A number of defendants, including Haywood, obtained bail during the appeal; even before Haywood's appeals were exhausted, he jumped bail and took ship for the Soviet Union. The labor leader hung a portrait of Landis in his Moscow apartment, and when Haywood died in 1928, he was interred near John Reed (who had died of illness in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution) in the Kremlin Wall—they remain the only Americans so honored. President Calvin Coolidge commuted the sentences of the remaining incarcerated defendants in 1923, much to the disgust of Landis, who issued an angry statement. After leaving his judgeship, Landis referred to the defendants in the Haywood case as \"scum\", \"filth\", and \"slimy rats\".",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Landis hoped that the Kaiser, Wilhelm II would be captured and tried in his court; he wanted to indict the Kaiser for the murder of a Chicagoan who lost his life on the RMS Lusitania in 1915. The State Department notified Landis that extradition treaties did not permit the rendition of the Kaiser, who fled into exile in the Netherlands as the war concluded. Nevertheless, in a speech, Landis demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm, his six sons, and 5,000 German military leaders \"be lined up against a wall and shot down in justice to the world and to Germany\".",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Even with the armistice in November 1918, the war-related trials continued. The Socialist Party of America, like the IWW, had opposed the war, and had also been raided by federal authorities. Seven Socialist Party leaders, including Victor Berger, who was elected to Congress in November 1918, were indicted for alleged anti-war activities. The defendants were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it illegal \"to utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language\" about the armed forces, the flag, the Constitution, or democracy. The defendants, who were mostly of German birth or descent, moved for a change of venue away from Landis's courtroom, alleging that Landis had stated on November 1, 1918, that \"[i]f anybody has said anything about the Germans that is worse than I have said, I would like to hear it so I could use it myself.\" Landis, however, examined the transcript of the trial in which the statement was supposedly made, failed to find it, declared the affidavit in support of the motion \"perjurious\", and denied the motion. While the jury was being selected, Berger was indicted on additional espionage charges for supposedly violating the law during an earlier, unsuccessful political campaign. At the conclusion of the case, Landis took an hour to dramatically charge the jury, emphasizing the secretive nature of conspiracies and pointing at the jury box as he noted, \"the country was then at war\". At one point, Landis leapt out of his seat, twirled his chair around, then sat on its arm. Later in his charge, he lay prone upon the bench. The jury took less than a day to convict Congressman-elect Berger and his four remaining codefendants. Landis sentenced each defendant to twenty years in federal prison. Landis denied the defendants bail pending appeal, but they quickly obtained it from an appellate court judge. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rule on the case itself, sending it on to the Supreme Court, which on January 31, 1921, overturned the convictions and sentences by a 6–3 vote, holding that Landis should have stepped aside once he was satisfied that the affidavit was legally sufficient, leaving it for another judge to decide whether it was actually true. Landis refused to comment on the Supreme Court's decision, which ordered a new trial. In 1922, the charges against the defendants were dropped by the government.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The postwar period saw considerable deflation; the shortage of labor and materials during the war had led to much higher wages and prices, and in the postwar economic readjustment, wages were cut heavily. In Chicago, employers in the building trades attempted a 20% wage cut; when this was rejected by the unions, a lockout followed. Both sides agreed to submit the matter to a neutral arbitrator, and settled on Landis, who agreed to take the case in June 1921. By this time, Landis was Commissioner of Baseball, and still a federal judge. In September, Landis issued his report, cutting wages by an average of 12.5%. To improve productivity, he also struck restrictions on machinery which saved labor, established a standardized overtime rate, and resolved jurisdictional conflicts between unions. The labor organizations were not completely satisfied, but Landis's reforms were adopted in many places across the country and were credited with reviving the building industry.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Criticism of Landis having both the judicial and baseball positions began almost as soon as his baseball appointment was announced in November 1920. On February 2, 1921, lame duck Congressman Benjamin F. Welty (Democrat-Ohio) offered a resolution calling for Landis's impeachment. On February 11, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer opined that there was no legal impediment to Landis holding both jobs. On February 14, the House Judiciary Committee voted 24–1 to investigate Landis. Reed Landis later stated, \"[n]one of the other congressmen wanted Father impeached but they did want him to come down and defend himself because they knew what a show it would be.\"",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Although Welty's departure from office on March 4, 1921, began a lull in criticism of Landis, in April, the judge made a controversial decision in the case of Francis J. Carey, a 19-year-old bank teller, who had pleaded guilty to embezzling $96,500. Carey, the sole support of his widowed mother and unmarried sisters, gained Landis's sympathy. He accused the bank of underpaying Carey, and sent the youth home with his mother. Two members of the Senate objected to Landis's actions, and the New York Post compared Carey with Les Misérables's Jean Valjean, noting \"[b]etween a loaf of bread [Valjean was incarcerated for stealing one] and $96,500 there is a difference.\" A bill barring outside employment by federal judges had been introduced by Landis's foes, but had expired with the end of the congressional session in March; his opponents tried again in July, and the bill failed in the Senate on a tie vote. On September 1, 1921, the American Bar Association, a trade group of lawyers, passed a resolution of censure against Landis.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "By the end of 1921, the controversy was dying down, and Landis felt that he could resign without looking pressured. On February 18, 1922, he announced his resignation as judge effective March 1, stating, \"There are not enough hours in the day for all these activities\". In his final case, he fined two theatre owners for evading the federal amusement tax. One owner had refused to make restitution before sentencing; he was fined $5,000. The owner who had tried to make his shortfall good was fined one cent.",
"title": "Judge (1905–1922)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "By 1919, the influence of gamblers on baseball had been a problem for several years. Historian Paul Gardner wrote,",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Baseball had for some time been living uneasily in the knowledge that bribes were being offered by gamblers, and that some players were accepting them. The players knew it was going on, and the owners knew it was going on. But more important, the players knew that the owners knew—and they knew the owners were doing nothing about it for fear of a scandal that might damage organized baseball. Under such conditions it quite obviously did not pay to be honest.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds was much anticipated, as the nation attempted to return to normalcy in the postwar period. Baseball had seen a surge of popularity during the 1919 season, which set several attendance records. The powerful White Sox, with their superstar batter \"Shoeless Joe\" Jackson and star pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude \"Lefty\" Williams, were believed likely to defeat the less-well-regarded Reds. To the surprise of many, the Reds defeated the White Sox, five games to three (during 1919–21, the World Series was a best-of-nine affair).",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Rumors that the series was fixed began to circulate after gambling odds against the Reds winning dropped sharply before the series began, and gained more credibility after the White Sox lost four of the first five games. Cincinnati lost the next two games, and speculation began that the Reds were losing on purpose to extend the series and increase gate revenues. However, Cincinnati won Game Eight, 10–5, to end the series, as Williams lost his third game (Cicotte lost the other two). After the series, according to Gene Carney, who wrote a book about the scandal, \"there was more than the usual complaining from those who had bet big on the Sox and lost\".",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The issue of the 1919 Series came to the public eye again in September 1920, when, after allegations that a game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies on August 31 had been fixed, a grand jury was empaneled in state court in Chicago to investigate baseball gambling. Additional news came from Philadelphia, where gambler Billy Maharg stated that he had worked with former boxer Abe Attell and New York gambler Arnold Rothstein to get the White Sox to throw the 1919 Series. Cicotte and Jackson were called before the grand jury, where they gave statements incriminating themselves and six teammates: Williams, first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver, center fielder Happy Felsch and reserve infielder Fred McMullin. Williams and Felsch were also called before the grand jury and incriminated themselves and their teammates. Through late September, the 1920 American League season had been one of the most exciting on record, with the White Sox, Cleveland Indians and New York Yankees dueling for the league lead. By September 28, the Yankees were close to elimination, but the White Sox and Indians were within percentage points of each other. On that day, however, the eight players, seven of whom were still on the White Sox, were indicted. They were immediately suspended by White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. The Indians were able to pull ahead and win the pennant, taking the American League championship by two games over Chicago.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Baseball had been governed by a three-man National Commission, consisting of American League President Ban Johnson, National League President John Heydler and Cincinnati Reds owner Garry Herrmann. In January 1920, Herrmann left office at the request of other club owners, leaving the Commission effectively deadlocked between Johnson and Heydler. A number of club owners, disliking one or both league presidents, preferred a single commissioner to rule over the game, but were willing to see the National Commission continue if Herrmann was replaced by someone who would provide strong leadership. Landis's name was mentioned in the press for this role, and the influential baseball newspaper The Sporting News sought his appointment.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Another proposal, known as the \"Lasker Plan\" after Albert Lasker, a shareholder in the Chicago Cubs who had proposed it, was for a three-man commission to govern the game, drawn from outside baseball. On September 30, 1920, with the Black Sox scandal exposed, National League President Heydler began to advocate for the Lasker Plan, and by the following day, four major league teams had supported him. Among the names discussed in the press for membership on the new commission were Landis, former Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, former President William Howard Taft, and General John J. Pershing.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The start of the 1920 World Series on October 5 distracted the public from baseball's woes for a time, but discussions continued behind the scenes. By mid-October, 11 of the 16 team owners (all eight from the National League and the owners of the American League Yankees, White Sox and Boston Red Sox) were demanding the end of the National Commission and the appointment of a three-man commission whose members would have no financial interest in baseball. Heydler stated his views on baseball's requirements:",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "We want a man as chairman who will rule with an iron hand ... Baseball has lacked a hand like that for years. It needs it now worse than ever. Therefore, it is our object to appoint a big man to lead the new commission.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "On November 8, the owners of the eight National League and three American League teams which supported the Lasker Plan met and unanimously selected Landis as head of the proposed commission. The American League clubs that supported the plan threatened to move to the National League, away from Johnson, who opposed it. Johnson had hoped that the minor leagues would support his position; when they did not, he and the \"Loyal Five\" teams agreed to the Lasker Plan. In the discussions among the owners that followed, they decided that Landis would be the only commissioner–no associate members would be elected. On November 12, the team owners came to Landis's courtroom to approach him. Landis was trying a bribery case; when he heard noise in the back of the courtroom from the owners, he gaveled them to silence. He made them wait 45 minutes while he completed his docket, then met with them in his chambers.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The judge heard out the owners; after expressing initial reluctance, he took the job for seven years at a salary of $50,000, on condition he could remain on the federal bench. During Landis's time serving as both judge and commissioner, he allowed a $7,500 reduction in his commissioner salary, to reflect his pay as judge. The appointment of Landis was met with acclaim in the press. A tentative agreement was signed by the parties a month later—an agreement which itemized Landis's powers over baseball, and which was drafted by the judge. The owners were still reeling from the perception that baseball was crooked, and accepted the agreement virtually without dissent. Under the terms of the contract, Landis could not be dismissed by the team owners, have his pay reduced, or even be criticized by them in public. He also had nearly unlimited authority over every person employed in the major or minor leagues, from owners to batboys, including the ability to ban people from the leagues for life. The owners waived any recourse to the courts to contest Landis's will. Humorist Will Rogers stated, \"[D]on't kid yourself that that old judicial bird isn't going to make those baseball birds walk the chalkline\". Player and manager Leo Durocher later stated, \"The legend has been spread that the owners hired the Judge off the federal bench. Don't you believe it. They got him right out of Dickens.\"",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "On January 30, 1921, Landis, speaking at an Illinois church, warned:",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Now that I am in baseball, just watch the game I play. If I catch any crook in baseball, the rest of his life is going to be a pretty hot one. I'll go to any means and to anything possible to see that he gets a real penalty for his offense.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The criminal case against the Black Sox defendants suffered unexpected setbacks, with evidence vanishing, including some of the incriminating statements made to the grand jury. The prosecution was forced to dismiss the original indictments, and bring new charges against seven of the ballplayers (McMullin was not charged again). Frustrated by the delays, Landis placed all eight on an \"ineligible list\", banning them from major and minor league baseball. Comiskey supported Landis by giving the seven who remained under contract to the White Sox their unconditional release. Public sentiment was heavily against the ballplayers, and when Jackson, Williams, Felsch, and Weaver played in a semi-pro game, The Sporting News mocked the 3,000 attendees, \"Just Like Nuts Go to See a Murderer\".",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The criminal trial of the Black Sox indictees began in early July 1921. Despite what Robert C. Cottrell, in his book on the scandal, terms \"the mysterious loss of evidence\", the prosecution was determined to pursue the case, demanding five-year prison terms for the ballplayers for defrauding the public by throwing the series. On August 2, 1921, the jury returned not guilty verdicts against all defendants, leading to happy pandemonium in the courtroom, joined by the courtroom bailiffs, with even the trial judge, Hugo Friend, looking visibly pleased. The players and jury retired to an Italian restaurant and partied well into the night.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The jubilation proved short-lived. On August 3, Landis issued a statement:",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing ball games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball. Of course, I don't know that any of these men will apply for reinstatement, but if they do, the above are at least a few of the rules that will be enforced. Just keep in mind that, regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside and outside the game.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "According to ESPN columnist Rob Neyer, \"with that single decision, Landis might have done more for the sport than anyone else, ever. Certainly, Landis never did anything more important.\" According to Carney, \"The public amputation of the eight Sox was seen as the only acceptable cure.\" Over the years of Landis's commissionership, a number of the players applied for reinstatement to the game, notably Jackson and Weaver. Jackson, raised in rural South Carolina and with limited education, was said to have been drawn unwillingly into the conspiracy, while Weaver, though admitting his presence at the meetings, stated that he took no money. Both men stated that their play on the field, and their batting percentages during the series (.375 for Jackson, .324 for Weaver) indicated that they did not help to throw the series. None was ever reinstated, with Landis telling a group of Weaver supporters that his presence at the meetings with the gamblers was sufficient to bar him. Even today, long after the deaths of all three men, efforts are periodically made to reinstate Jackson (which would make him eligible for election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame) and Weaver (deemed by some the least culpable of the eight). In the 1990s, a petition drive to reinstate Jackson drew 60,000 signatures. He has been treated sympathetically in movies such as Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams, and Hall of Famers Ted Williams and Bob Feller expressed their support for Jackson's induction into the Hall. Landis's expulsion of the eight men remains in force.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Landis felt that the Black Sox scandal had been initiated by people involved in horse racing, and stated that \"by God, as long as I have anything to do with this game, they'll never get another hold on it.\" In 1921, his first season as commissioner, New York Giants owner Charles Stoneham and manager John McGraw purchased Oriental Park Racetrack in Havana, Cuba. Landis gave Stoneham and McGraw an ultimatum—they could not be involved in both baseball and horse racing. They quickly put the track back on the market.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Even before the Black Sox scandal had been resolved, Landis acted to clean up other gambling cases. Eugene Paulette, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies, had been with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1919, and had met with gamblers. It is uncertain if any games were fixed, but Paulette had written a letter naming two other Cardinals who might be open to throwing games. The letter had fallen into the hands of Phillies President William F. Baker, who had taken no action until Landis's appointment, then turned the letter over to him. Paulette met with Landis once, denying any wrongdoing, then refused further meetings. Landis placed him on the ineligible list in March 1921. In November 1921, Landis banned former St. Louis Browns player Joe Gedeon, who had been released by the Browns after admitting to sitting in on meetings with gamblers who were trying to raise the money to bribe the Black Sox. When a minor league official asked if he was eligible, Landis settled the matter by placing Gedeon on the ineligible list.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Two other player gambling affairs marked Landis's early years as commissioner. In 1922, Giants pitcher Phil Douglas, embittered at McGraw for disciplining him for heavy drinking, wrote a letter to Cardinals outfielder Leslie Mann, suggesting that he would take a bribe to ensure the Giants did not win the pennant. Although Mann had been a friend, the outfielder neither smoked nor drank and had long been associated with the YMCA movement; according to baseball historian Lee Allen, Douglas might as well have sent the letter to Landis himself. Mann immediately turned over the letter to his manager, Branch Rickey, who ordered Mann to contact Landis at once. The Giants placed Douglas on the ineligible list, an action backed by Landis after meeting with the pitcher. On September 27, 1924, Giants outfielder Jimmy O'Connell offered Phillies shortstop Heinie Sand $500 if Sand didn't \"bear down too hard against us today\". Sand was initially inclined to let the matter pass, but recalling the fate of Weaver and other Black Sox players, told his manager, Art Fletcher. Fletcher met with Heydler, who contacted Landis. O'Connell did not deny the bribe attempt, and was placed on the ineligible list.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In total, Landis banned eighteen players from the game. Landis biographer Pietrusza details the effect of Landis's stand against gambling:",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Before 1920 if one player approached another player to throw a contest, there was a very good chance he would not be informed upon. Now, there was an excellent chance he would be turned in. No honest player wanted to meet the same fate as Buck Weaver ... Without the forbidding example of Buck Weaver to haunt them, it is unlikely Mann and Sand would have snitched on their fellow players. After Landis' unforgiving treatment of the popular and basically honest Weaver they dared not to. And once prospectively crooked players knew that honest players would no longer shield them, the scandals stopped.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "At the time of Landis's appointment as commissioner, it was common for professional baseball players to supplement their pay by participating in postseason \"barnstorming\" tours, playing on teams which would visit smaller cities and towns to play games for which admission would be charged. Since 1911, however, players on the two World Series teams had been barred from barnstorming. The rule had been leniently enforced—in 1916, several members of the champion Red Sox, including pitcher George Herman \"Babe\" Ruth had barnstormed and had been fined a token $100 each by the National Commission.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Ruth, who after the 1919 season had been sold to the Yankees, and who by then had mostly abandoned his pitching role for the outfield, was the focus of considerable fan interest as he broke batting records in 1920 and 1921, some by huge margins. Ruth's major league record 29 home runs with the Red Sox in 1919 fell to his own efforts in 1920, when he hit 54. He then proceeded to hit 59 in 1921, leading the Yankees to their first pennant. Eight major league teams failed to hit as many home runs in 1921 as Ruth hit by himself. The Yankees lost the 1921 World Series to the Giants (Ruth was injured and missed several games) and after the series, the outfielder proposed to capitalize on fan interest by leading a team of barnstormers, including Yankees teammate Bob Meusel, in violation of the rule. According to Cottrell,",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "[T]he two men clashed who helped the national pastime overcome the Black Sox scandal, one through his seemingly iron will, the other thanks to his magical bat. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Babe Ruth battled over the right of a ballplayer from a pennant-winning squad to barnstorm in the off-season. Also involved was the commissioner's continued determination to display, as he had through his banishment of the Black Sox, that he had established the boundaries for organized baseball. These boundaries, Landis intended to demonstrate, applied even to the sport's most popular and greatest star. Significant too, only Babe Ruth now contended with Commissioner Landis for the title of baseball's most important figure.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Ruth had asked Yankees general manager Ed Barrow for permission to barnstorm. Barrow had no objection but warned Ruth he must obtain Landis's consent. Landis biographer Spink, who was at the time the editor of The Sporting News, stated, \"I can say that Ruth knew exactly what he was doing when he defied Landis in October, 1921. He was willing to back his own popularity and well-known drawing powers against the Judge.\" Ruth, to the commissioner's irritation, did not contact Landis until October 15, one day before the first exhibition. When the two spoke by telephone, Landis ordered Ruth to attend a meeting with him; Ruth refused, stating that he had to leave for Buffalo for the first game. Landis angrily refused consent for Ruth to barnstorm, and after slamming down the receiver, is recorded as saying, \"Who the hell does that big ape think he is? That blankety-blank! If he goes on that trip it will be one of the sorriest things he has ever done.\" By one account, Yankees co-owner Colonel Tillinghast Huston attempted to dissuade Ruth as he departed, only to be told by the ballplayer, \"Aw, tell the old guy to jump in a lake.\"",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The tour also featured fellow Yankees Bob Meusel and Bill Piercy (who had been called up late in the season and was ineligible for the World Series) as well as Tom Sheehan, who had been sent to the minor leagues before the end of the season. Two other Yankees, Carl Mays and Wally Schang, had been scheduled to join the tour, but given Landis's position, according to Spink, \"wisely decided to pass it up\". Spink describes the tour as \"a fiasco.\" On Landis's orders, it was barred from all major and minor league ballparks. In addition, it was plagued by poor weather, and was called off in late October. In early December, Landis suspended Ruth, Piercy, and Meusel until May 20, 1922. Yankee management was relieved; they had feared Landis would suspend Ruth for the season or even longer. Both the Yankees and Ruth repeatedly asked Landis for the players' early reinstatement, which was refused, and when Landis visited the Yankees during spring training in New Orleans, he lectured Ruth for two hours on obeying authority. \"He sure can talk\", noted Ruth.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "When Ruth returned on May 20, he batted 0-for-4, and was booed by the crowd at the Polo Grounds. According to Pietrusza, \"Always a politician, there was one boss Landis did fear: public opinion. He had no guarantee at the start of the Ruth controversy that the public and press would back him as he assumed unprecedented powers over baseball. Now, he knew they would.\"",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "At the start of Landis's commissionership, the minor league teams were for the most part autonomous of the major leagues; in fact the minor leagues independently chose to accept Landis's rule. To ensure players did not become mired in the minor leagues without a chance to earn their way out, major league teams were able to draft players who played two consecutive years with the same minor league team. Several minor leagues were not subject to the draft; Landis fought for the inclusion of these leagues, feeling that the non-draft leagues could prevent players from advancing as they became more skilled. By 1924, he had succeeded, as the International League, the final holdout, accepted the draft.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "By the mid-1920s, major league clubs were beginning to develop \"farm systems\", that is, minor league teams owned or controlled by them, at which they could develop young prospects without the risk of the players being acquired by major league rivals. The pioneer in this development was Branch Rickey, who then ran the St. Louis Cardinals. As the 1921 National Agreement among the major and minor leagues which implemented Landis's hiring lifted a ban on major league teams owning minor league ones, Landis was limited in his avenues of attack on Rickey's schemes. Developing talent at little cost thanks to Rickey, the Cardinals dominated the National League, winning nine league titles in the years from 1926 to 1946.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Soon after Landis's appointment, he surprised the major league owners by requiring that they disclose their minor league interests. Landis fought against the practice of \"covering up\", using transfers between two teams controlled by the same major league team to make players ineligible for the draft. His first formal act as commissioner was to declare infielder Phil Todt a free agent, dissolving his contract with the St. Louis Browns (at the time run by Rickey, who soon thereafter moved across town to run the Cardinals); in 1928, he ruled future Hall of Famer Chuck Klein a free agent as he held the Cardinals had tried to cover Klein up by having him play in a league where they owned two affiliates. The following year, he freed Detroit Tigers prospect and future Hall of Famer Rick Ferrell, who attracted a significant signing bonus from the Browns. In 1936, Landis found that teenage pitching prospect Bob Feller's signing by minor league club Fargo-Moorhead had been a charade; the young pitcher was for all intents and purposes property of the Cleveland Indians. However, Feller indicated that he wanted to play for Cleveland and Landis issued a ruling which required the Indians to pay damages to minor league clubs, but allowed them to retain Feller, who went on to a Hall of Fame career with the Indians.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Landis's attempts to crack down on \"covering up\" provoked the only time he was ever sued by one of his owners. After the 1930 season, minor leaguer Fred Bennett, convinced he was being covered up by the Browns, petitioned Landis for his release. Landis ruled that the Browns could either keep Bennett on their roster for the entire 1931 season, trade him, or release him. Instead, Browns owner Phil Ball brought suit against Landis in his old court in Chicago. Federal Judge Walter Lindley ruled for Landis, noting that the agreements and rules were intended to \"endow the Commissioner with all the attributes of a benevolent but absolute despot and all the disciplinary powers of the proverbial pater familias\". Ball intended to appeal, but after a meeting between team owners and Landis in which the commissioner reminded owners of their agreement not to sue, decided to drop the case.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Landis had hoped that the large Cardinal farm system would become economically unfeasible; when it proved successful for the Cardinals, he had tolerated it for several years and was in a poor position to abolish it. In 1938, however, finding that the Cardinals effectively controlled multiple teams in the same league (a practice disliked by Landis), he freed 70 players from their farm system. As few of the players were likely prospects for the major leagues, Landis's actions generated headlines, but had little effect on the Cardinals organization, and the development of the modern farm system, whereby each major league club has several minor league teams which it uses to develop talent, proceeded apace. Rob Neyer describes Landis's effort as \"a noble effort in a good cause, but it was also doomed to fail.\"",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "One of the most controversial aspects of Landis's commissionership is the question of race. From 1884, black ballplayers were informally banned from organized baseball. No black ballplayer played in organized baseball during Landis's commissionership; Rickey (then running the Brooklyn Dodgers) broke the color line by signing Jackie Robinson to play for the minor league Montreal Royals in 1946, after Landis's death. Robinson became the first African-American in the major leagues since the 19th century, playing with the Dodgers beginning in 1947.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "According to contemporary newspaper columns, at the time of his appointment as commissioner, Landis was considered a liberal on race questions; two Chicago African-American newspapers defended him against the 1921 efforts to impeach him from his judgeship. However, a number of baseball authors have ascribed racism to Landis, who they say actively perpetuated baseball's color line. James Bankes, in The Pittsburgh Crawfords, tracing the history of that Negro league team, states that Landis, whom the author suggests was a Southerner (Landis was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana), made \"little effort to disguise his racial prejudice during 25 years in office\" and \"remained a steadfast foe of integration\". Negro league historian John Holway incorrectly termed Landis \"the hard-bitten Carolinian [sic] Kennesaw [sic] Mountain Landis\". In a 2000 article in Smithsonian magazine, writer Bruce Watson states that Landis \"upheld baseball's unwritten ban on black players and did nothing to push owners toward integration\". A number of authors say that Landis banned major league play against black teams for fear the white teams would lose, though they ascribe various dates for this action, and the Dodgers are known to have played black teams in and around their Havana spring training base as late as 1942.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Landis's documented actions on race are inconsistent. In 1938, Yankee Jake Powell was interviewed by a radio station, and when asked what he did in the offseason, made comments that were interpreted as meaning he worked as a police officer and beat up African Americans. Landis suspended Powell for ten days. In June 1942, the Negro league Kansas City Monarchs played several games against the white \"Dizzy Dean All-Stars\" at major league ballparks, attracting large crowds. After three games, all won by the Monarchs, Landis ordered a fourth canceled, on the ground that the games were outdrawing major league contests. On one occasion, Landis intervened in Negro league affairs, though he had no jurisdiction to do so. The Crawfords lost a game to a white semi-pro team when their star catcher, Josh Gibson dropped a pop fly, and Gibson was accused of throwing the game at the behest of gamblers. Landis summoned the black catcher to his office, interviewed him, and announced that Gibson was cleared of wrongdoing.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In July 1942, Dodger manager Leo Durocher charged that there was a \"grapevine understanding\" keeping blacks out of baseball. He was summoned to Landis's Chicago office, and after emerging from a meeting with the commissioner, alleged that he had been misquoted. Landis then addressed the press, and stated,",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and never have been in the 21 years I have served. There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation and never has been to my knowledge. If Durocher, or if any other manager, or all of them, want to sign one, or twenty-five Negro players, it is all right with me. That is the business of the managers and the club owners. The business of the commissioner is to interpret the rules of baseball, and to enforce them.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In his 1961 memoir, Veeck as in Wreck, longtime baseball executive and owner Bill Veeck told of his plan, in 1942, to buy the Phillies and stock the team with Negro league stars. Veeck wrote that he told Landis, who reacted with shock, and soon moved to block the purchase. In his book, Veeck placed some of the blame on National League President Ford Frick, but later reserved blame exclusively for Landis, whom he accused of racism, stating in a subsequent interview, \"[a]fter all, a man who is named Kenesaw Mountain was not born and raised in the state of Maine.\" However, when Veeck was asked for proof of his allegations against Landis, he stated, \"I have no proof of that. I can only surmise.\" According to baseball historian David Jordan, \"Veeck, nothing if not a storyteller, seems to have added these embellishments, sticking in some guys in black hats, simply to juice up his tale.\"",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In November 1943, Landis agreed after some persuasion that black sportswriter Sam Lacy should make a case for integration of organized baseball before the owners' annual meeting. Instead of Lacy attending the meeting, actor Paul Robeson did. Robeson, though a noted black actor and advocate of civil rights, was a controversial figure for his affiliation with the Communist Party. The owners heard Robeson out, but at Landis's suggestion, did not ask him any questions or begin any discussion with him.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Neyer noted that \"Landis has been blamed for delaying the integration of the major leagues, but the truth is that the owners didn't want black players in the majors any more than Landis did. And it's not likely that, even if Landis hadn't died in 1944, he could have prevented Branch Rickey from bringing Jackie Robinson to the National League in 1947.\" The Baseball Writers' Association of America after Landis's death in 1944 renamed its Most Valuable Player Awards after Landis, but removed his name in 2020 with a vote of 89 percent of voting members in favor. The president of the association said Landis had \"notably failed to integrate the game during his tenure\".",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "C.C. Johnson Spink, son of Landis biographer J.G. Taylor Spink and his successor as editor of The Sporting News, noted in the introduction to the reissue of his father's biography of Landis,",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "K.M. Landis was quite human and not infallible. If, for example, he did drag his feet at erasing baseball's color line, he was grievously wrong, but then so were many others of his post-Civil War generation.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Landis took full jurisdiction over the World Series, as a contest between representatives of the two major leagues. Landis was blamed when the umpires called a game on account of darkness with the score tied during the 1922 World Series, even though there was still light. Landis decided that such decisions in future would be made by himself, moved forward the starting time of World Series games in future years, and announced that proceeds from the tied game would be donated to charity. In the 1932 World Series, Landis ordered that tickets for Game One at Yankee Stadium only be sold as part of strips, forcing fans to purchase tickets for all Yankee home games during that Series. Bad weather and the poor economy resulted in a half-filled stadium, and Landis allowed individual game sales for Game Two. During the 1933 World Series, he instituted a rule that only he could throw a player out of a World Series game, a rule which followed the ejection of Washington Senator Heinie Manush by umpire Charley Moran. The following year, with the visiting Cardinals ahead of the Detroit Tigers, 9–0 in Game Seven, he removed Cardinal Joe Medwick from the game for his own safety when Medwick, the left fielder, was pelted with fruit by Tiger fans after Medwick had been involved in a fight with one of the Tigers. Spink notes that Landis would most likely not have done so were the game within reach of the Tigers. In the 1938 World Series, umpire Moran was hit by a wild throw and suffered facial injuries. He was able to continue, but the incident caused Landis to order that World Series games and All-Star Games be played with six umpires.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The All-Star Game began in 1933; Landis had been a strong supporter of the proposal for such a contest, and after the first game remarked, \"That's a grand show, and it should be continued.\" He never missed an All-Star Game in his lifetime; his final public appearance was at the 1944 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In 1928, National League ball clubs proposed an innovation whereby each team's pitcher, usually the weakest hitter in the lineup, would not bat, but be replaced for the purposes of batting and base-running by a tenth player. There were expectations that at the interleague meetings that year, the National League teams would vote for it, and the American League teams against it, leaving Landis to cast the deciding vote. The proposal was withdrawn, and Landis did not disclose how he would have voted on this early version of the \"designated hitter\" rule.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Landis disliked the innovation of \"night baseball\", played in the evening with the aid of artificial light, and sought to discourage it. Despite this, he attended the first successful minor league night game, in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1930. When major league night baseball began in the late 1930s, Landis got the owners to restrict the number of such games. During World War II, many restrictions on night baseball were reduced, with the Washington Senators permitted to play all their home games (except those on Sundays and holidays) at night.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "With the entry of the United States into World War II in late 1941, Landis wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, inquiring as to the wartime status of baseball. The President responded, urging Landis to keep baseball open, foreseeing that even those fully engaged in war work would benefit from inexpensive diversions such as attending baseball games. Many major leaguers enlisted or were drafted; even so Landis repeatedly stated, \"We'll play as long as we can put nine men on the field.\" Although many of the teams practiced at their normal spring training sites in 1942, beginning the following year they were required to train near their home cities or in the Northeast. Landis was as virulently opposed to the Axis Powers as he had been towards the Kaiser, writing that peace would not be possible until \"about fifteen thousand little Hitler, Himmlers and Hirohitos\" were killed.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Landis retained a firm hold on baseball despite his advancing years and, in 1943, banned Phillies owner William D. Cox from baseball for betting on his own team. In 1927, Landis's stance regarding gambling had been codified in the rules of baseball: \"Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor had a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.\" Cox was required to sell his stake in the Phillies.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In early October 1944, Landis checked into St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago, where his wife Winifred had been hospitalized, with a severe cold. While in the hospital, he had a heart attack, causing him to miss the World Series for the first time in his commissionership. He remained fully alert, and as usual signed the World Series share checks to players. His contract was due to expire in January 1946; on November 17, 1944, baseball's owners voted him another seven-year term. However, he died on November 25. His longtime assistant, Leslie O'Connor, wept as he read the announcement for the press. Landis is buried at Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Two weeks after his death, Landis was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame by a special committee vote. American League President Will Harridge said of Landis, \"He was a wonderful man. His great qualities and downright simplicity impressed themselves deeply on all who knew him.\" Pietrusza suggests that the legend on Landis's Hall of Fame plaque is his true legacy: \"His integrity and leadership established baseball in the esteem, respect, and affection of the American people.\" Pietrusza notes that Landis was hired by the baseball owners to clean up the sport, and \"no one could deny Kenesaw Mountain Landis had accomplished what he had been hired to do\". According to his first biographer, Spink:",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "[Landis] may have been arbitrary, self-willed and even unfair, but he 'called 'em as he saw 'em' and he turned over to his successor and the future a game cleansed of the nasty spots which followed World War I. Kenesaw Mountain Landis put the fear of God into weak characters who might otherwise have been inclined to violate their trust. And for that, I, as a lifelong lover of baseball, am eternally grateful.",
"title": "Baseball Commissioner (1920–1944)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kenesaw Mountain Landis was an American jurist who served as a United States federal judge from 1905 to 1922 and the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death. He is remembered for his handling of the Black Sox Scandal, in which he expelled eight members of the Chicago White Sox from organized baseball for conspiring to lose the 1919 World Series and repeatedly refused their reinstatement requests. His iron rule over baseball in the near quarter-century of his commissionership are generally credited with restoring public confidence in the game. Landis was born in Millville, Ohio. Raised in Indiana, he became a lawyer, and then personal secretary to Walter Q. Gresham, the new United States Secretary of State, in 1893. He returned to private practice after Gresham died in office. President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Landis to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 1905. Landis received national attention in 1907 when he fined Standard Oil of Indiana more than $29 million for violating federal laws forbidding rebates on railroad freight tariffs. While Landis's action was reversed on appeal, he was seen as a judge determined to rein in big business. During and after World War I, Landis presided over several high-profile trials of draft resisters and others whom he saw as opposing the war effort. He imposed heavy sentences on those who were convicted, although some of the convictions were reversed on appeal, and other sentences were commuted. In 1920, Landis was a leading candidate when American League and National League team owners, embarrassed by the Black Sox scandal and other instances of players throwing games, sought someone to rule over baseball. Landis was given full power to act in the sport's best interest, and used that power extensively over the next quarter century. Landis was widely praised for cleaning up the game, although some of his decisions in the Black Sox matter remain controversial: supporters of "Shoeless Joe" Jackson and Buck Weaver contend that he was overly harsh with those players. Others blame Landis for, in their view, delaying the racial integration of baseball. Landis was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame by a special vote shortly after he died in 1944.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenesaw_Mountain_Landis
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16,814 |
Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron
|
In geometry, a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron is any of four regular star polyhedra.
They may be obtained by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron and icosahedron, and differ from these in having regular pentagrammic faces or vertex figures. They can all be seen as three-dimensional analogues of the pentagram in one way or another.
The great icosahedron edge length is 7 + 3 5 2 {\displaystyle {\frac {7+3{\sqrt {5}}}{2}}} times the original icosahedron edge length. The small stellated dodecahedron, great dodecahedron, and great stellated dodecahedron edge lengths are respectively 2 + 5 = ϕ 3 , 3 + 5 2 = ϕ 2 , 11 + 5 5 2 = ϕ 5 {\displaystyle 2+{\sqrt {5}}=\phi ^{3},{\frac {3+{\sqrt {5}}}{2}}=\phi ^{2},{\frac {11+5{\sqrt {5}}}{2}}=\phi ^{5}} times the original dodecahedron edge length.
These figures have pentagrams (star pentagons) as faces or vertex figures. The small and great stellated dodecahedron have nonconvex regular pentagram faces. The great dodecahedron and great icosahedron have convex polygonal faces, but pentagrammic vertex figures.
In all cases, two faces can intersect along a line that is not an edge of either face, so that part of each face passes through the interior of the figure. Such lines of intersection are not part of the polyhedral structure and are sometimes called false edges. Likewise where three such lines intersect at a point that is not a corner of any face, these points are false vertices. The images below show spheres at the true vertices, and blue rods along the true edges.
For example, the small stellated dodecahedron has 12 pentagram faces with the central pentagonal part hidden inside the solid. The visible parts of each face comprise five isosceles triangles which touch at five points around the pentagon. We could treat these triangles as 60 separate faces to obtain a new, irregular polyhedron which looks outwardly identical. Each edge would now be divided into three shorter edges (of two different kinds), and the 20 false vertices would become true ones, so that we have a total of 32 vertices (again of two kinds). The hidden inner pentagons are no longer part of the polyhedral surface, and can disappear. Now Euler's formula holds: 60 − 90 + 32 = 2. However, this polyhedron is no longer the one described by the Schläfli symbol {5/2, 5}, and so can not be a Kepler–Poinsot solid even though it still looks like one from outside.
A Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron covers its circumscribed sphere more than once, with the centers of faces acting as winding points in the figures which have pentagrammic faces, and the vertices in the others. Because of this, they are not necessarily topologically equivalent to the sphere as Platonic solids are, and in particular the Euler relation
does not always hold. Schläfli held that all polyhedra must have χ = 2, and he rejected the small stellated dodecahedron and great dodecahedron as proper polyhedra. This view was never widely held.
A modified form of Euler's formula, using density (D) of the vertex figures ( d v {\displaystyle d_{v}} ) and faces ( d f {\displaystyle d_{f}} ) was given by Arthur Cayley, and holds both for convex polyhedra (where the correction factors are all 1), and the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra:
The Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra exist in dual pairs. Duals have the same Petrie polygon, or more precisely, Petrie polygons with the same two dimensional projection.
The following images show the two dual compounds with the same edge radius. They also show that the Petrie polygons are skew. Two relationships described in the article below are also easily seen in the images: That the violet edges are the same, and that the green faces lie in the same planes.
John Conway defines the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra as greatenings and stellations of the convex solids. In his naming convention the small stellated dodecahedron is just the stellated dodecahedron.
Stellation changes pentagonal faces into pentagrams. (In this sense stellation is a unique operation, and not to be confused with the more general stellation described below.)
Greatening maintains the type of faces, shifting and resizing them into parallel planes.
The great icosahedron is one of the stellations of the icosahedron. (See The Fifty-Nine Icosahedra) The three others are all the stellations of the dodecahedron.
The great stellated dodecahedron is a faceting of the dodecahedron. The three others are facetings of the icosahedron.
If the intersections are treated as new edges and vertices, the figures obtained will not be regular, but they can still be considered stellations.
(See also List of Wenninger polyhedron models)
The great stellated dodecahedron shares its vertices with the dodecahedron. The other three Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra share theirs with the icosahedron. The skeletons of the solids sharing vertices are topologically equivalent.
The small and great stellated dodecahedron can be seen as a regular and a great dodecahedron with their edges and faces extended until they intersect. The pentagon faces of these cores are the invisible parts of the star polyhedra's pentagram faces. For the small stellated dodecahedron the hull is φ {\displaystyle \varphi } times bigger than the core, and for the great it is φ + 1 = φ 2 {\displaystyle \varphi +1=\varphi ^{2}} times bigger. (See Golden ratio) (The midradius is a common measure to compare the size of different polyhedra.)
Traditionally the two star polyhedra have been defined as augmentations (or cumulations), i.e. as dodecahedron and icosahedron with pyramids added to their faces.
Kepler calls the small stellation an augmented dodecahedron (then nicknaming it hedgehog).
In his view the great stellation is related to the icosahedron as the small one is to the dodecahedron.
These naïve definitions are still used. E.g. MathWorld states that the two star polyhedra can be constructed by adding pyramids to the faces of the Platonic solids.
This is just a help to visualize the shape of these solids, and not actually a claim that the edge intersections (false vertices) are vertices. If they were, the two star polyhedra would be topologically equivalent to the pentakis dodecahedron and the triakis icosahedron.
All Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra have full icosahedral symmetry, just like their convex hulls.
The great icosahedron and its dual resemble the icosahedron and its dual in that they have faces and vertices on the 3-fold (yellow) and 5-fold (red) symmetry axes. In the great dodecahedron and its dual all faces and vertices are on 5-fold symmetry axes (so there are no yellow elements in these images).
The following table shows the solids in pairs of duals. In the top row they are shown with pyritohedral symmetry, in the bottom row with icosahedral symmetry (to which the mentioned colors refer).
The table below shows orthographic projections from the 5-fold (red), 3-fold (yellow) and 2-fold (blue) symmetry axes.
Most, if not all, of the Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra were known of in some form or other before Kepler. A small stellated dodecahedron appears in a marble tarsia (inlay panel) on the floor of St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy. It dates from the 15th century and is sometimes attributed to Paolo Uccello.
In his Perspectiva corporum regularium (Perspectives of the regular solids), a book of woodcuts published in 1568, Wenzel Jamnitzer depicts the great stellated dodecahedron and a great dodecahedron (both shown below). There is also a truncated version of the small stellated dodecahedron. It is clear from the general arrangement of the book that he regarded only the five Platonic solids as regular.
The small and great stellated dodecahedra, sometimes called the Kepler polyhedra, were first recognized as regular by Johannes Kepler around 1619. He obtained them by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron, for the first time treating it as a surface rather than a solid. He noticed that by extending the edges or faces of the convex dodecahedron until they met again, he could obtain star pentagons. Further, he recognized that these star pentagons are also regular. In this way he constructed the two stellated dodecahedra. Each has the central convex region of each face "hidden" within the interior, with only the triangular arms visible. Kepler's final step was to recognize that these polyhedra fit the definition of regularity, even though they were not convex, as the traditional Platonic solids were.
In 1809, Louis Poinsot rediscovered Kepler's figures, by assembling star pentagons around each vertex. He also assembled convex polygons around star vertices to discover two more regular stars, the great icosahedron and great dodecahedron. Some people call these two the Poinsot polyhedra. Poinsot did not know if he had discovered all the regular star polyhedra.
Three years later, Augustin Cauchy proved the list complete by stellating the Platonic solids, and almost half a century after that, in 1858, Bertrand provided a more elegant proof by faceting them.
The following year, Arthur Cayley gave the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra the names by which they are generally known today.
A hundred years later, John Conway developed a systematic terminology for stellations in up to four dimensions. Within this scheme the small stellated dodecahedron is just the stellated dodecahedron.
Regular star polyhedra first appear in Renaissance art. A small stellated dodecahedron is depicted in a marble tarsia on the floor of St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy, dating from ca. 1430 and sometimes attributed to Paulo Ucello.
In the 20th century, artist M. C. Escher's interest in geometric forms often led to works based on or including regular solids; Gravitation is based on a small stellated dodecahedron.
A dissection of the great dodecahedron was used for the 1980s puzzle Alexander's Star.
Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand's sculpture The Kepler Star is displayed near Oslo Airport, Gardermoen. The star spans 14 meters, and consists of an icosahedron and a dodecahedron inside a great stellated dodecahedron.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In geometry, a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron is any of four regular star polyhedra.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "They may be obtained by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron and icosahedron, and differ from these in having regular pentagrammic faces or vertex figures. They can all be seen as three-dimensional analogues of the pentagram in one way or another.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The great icosahedron edge length is 7 + 3 5 2 {\\displaystyle {\\frac {7+3{\\sqrt {5}}}{2}}} times the original icosahedron edge length. The small stellated dodecahedron, great dodecahedron, and great stellated dodecahedron edge lengths are respectively 2 + 5 = ϕ 3 , 3 + 5 2 = ϕ 2 , 11 + 5 5 2 = ϕ 5 {\\displaystyle 2+{\\sqrt {5}}=\\phi ^{3},{\\frac {3+{\\sqrt {5}}}{2}}=\\phi ^{2},{\\frac {11+5{\\sqrt {5}}}{2}}=\\phi ^{5}} times the original dodecahedron edge length.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "These figures have pentagrams (star pentagons) as faces or vertex figures. The small and great stellated dodecahedron have nonconvex regular pentagram faces. The great dodecahedron and great icosahedron have convex polygonal faces, but pentagrammic vertex figures.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In all cases, two faces can intersect along a line that is not an edge of either face, so that part of each face passes through the interior of the figure. Such lines of intersection are not part of the polyhedral structure and are sometimes called false edges. Likewise where three such lines intersect at a point that is not a corner of any face, these points are false vertices. The images below show spheres at the true vertices, and blue rods along the true edges.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "For example, the small stellated dodecahedron has 12 pentagram faces with the central pentagonal part hidden inside the solid. The visible parts of each face comprise five isosceles triangles which touch at five points around the pentagon. We could treat these triangles as 60 separate faces to obtain a new, irregular polyhedron which looks outwardly identical. Each edge would now be divided into three shorter edges (of two different kinds), and the 20 false vertices would become true ones, so that we have a total of 32 vertices (again of two kinds). The hidden inner pentagons are no longer part of the polyhedral surface, and can disappear. Now Euler's formula holds: 60 − 90 + 32 = 2. However, this polyhedron is no longer the one described by the Schläfli symbol {5/2, 5}, and so can not be a Kepler–Poinsot solid even though it still looks like one from outside.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron covers its circumscribed sphere more than once, with the centers of faces acting as winding points in the figures which have pentagrammic faces, and the vertices in the others. Because of this, they are not necessarily topologically equivalent to the sphere as Platonic solids are, and in particular the Euler relation",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "does not always hold. Schläfli held that all polyhedra must have χ = 2, and he rejected the small stellated dodecahedron and great dodecahedron as proper polyhedra. This view was never widely held.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A modified form of Euler's formula, using density (D) of the vertex figures ( d v {\\displaystyle d_{v}} ) and faces ( d f {\\displaystyle d_{f}} ) was given by Arthur Cayley, and holds both for convex polyhedra (where the correction factors are all 1), and the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra exist in dual pairs. Duals have the same Petrie polygon, or more precisely, Petrie polygons with the same two dimensional projection.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The following images show the two dual compounds with the same edge radius. They also show that the Petrie polygons are skew. Two relationships described in the article below are also easily seen in the images: That the violet edges are the same, and that the green faces lie in the same planes.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "John Conway defines the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra as greatenings and stellations of the convex solids. In his naming convention the small stellated dodecahedron is just the stellated dodecahedron.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Stellation changes pentagonal faces into pentagrams. (In this sense stellation is a unique operation, and not to be confused with the more general stellation described below.)",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Greatening maintains the type of faces, shifting and resizing them into parallel planes.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The great icosahedron is one of the stellations of the icosahedron. (See The Fifty-Nine Icosahedra) The three others are all the stellations of the dodecahedron.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The great stellated dodecahedron is a faceting of the dodecahedron. The three others are facetings of the icosahedron.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "If the intersections are treated as new edges and vertices, the figures obtained will not be regular, but they can still be considered stellations.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "(See also List of Wenninger polyhedron models)",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The great stellated dodecahedron shares its vertices with the dodecahedron. The other three Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra share theirs with the icosahedron. The skeletons of the solids sharing vertices are topologically equivalent.",
"title": "Relationships among the regular polyhedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The small and great stellated dodecahedron can be seen as a regular and a great dodecahedron with their edges and faces extended until they intersect. The pentagon faces of these cores are the invisible parts of the star polyhedra's pentagram faces. For the small stellated dodecahedron the hull is φ {\\displaystyle \\varphi } times bigger than the core, and for the great it is φ + 1 = φ 2 {\\displaystyle \\varphi +1=\\varphi ^{2}} times bigger. (See Golden ratio) (The midradius is a common measure to compare the size of different polyhedra.)",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Traditionally the two star polyhedra have been defined as augmentations (or cumulations), i.e. as dodecahedron and icosahedron with pyramids added to their faces.",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kepler calls the small stellation an augmented dodecahedron (then nicknaming it hedgehog).",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In his view the great stellation is related to the icosahedron as the small one is to the dodecahedron.",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "These naïve definitions are still used. E.g. MathWorld states that the two star polyhedra can be constructed by adding pyramids to the faces of the Platonic solids.",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "This is just a help to visualize the shape of these solids, and not actually a claim that the edge intersections (false vertices) are vertices. If they were, the two star polyhedra would be topologically equivalent to the pentakis dodecahedron and the triakis icosahedron.",
"title": "The stellated dodecahedra"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "All Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra have full icosahedral symmetry, just like their convex hulls.",
"title": "Symmetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The great icosahedron and its dual resemble the icosahedron and its dual in that they have faces and vertices on the 3-fold (yellow) and 5-fold (red) symmetry axes. In the great dodecahedron and its dual all faces and vertices are on 5-fold symmetry axes (so there are no yellow elements in these images).",
"title": "Symmetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The following table shows the solids in pairs of duals. In the top row they are shown with pyritohedral symmetry, in the bottom row with icosahedral symmetry (to which the mentioned colors refer).",
"title": "Symmetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The table below shows orthographic projections from the 5-fold (red), 3-fold (yellow) and 2-fold (blue) symmetry axes.",
"title": "Symmetry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Most, if not all, of the Kepler-Poinsot polyhedra were known of in some form or other before Kepler. A small stellated dodecahedron appears in a marble tarsia (inlay panel) on the floor of St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy. It dates from the 15th century and is sometimes attributed to Paolo Uccello.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In his Perspectiva corporum regularium (Perspectives of the regular solids), a book of woodcuts published in 1568, Wenzel Jamnitzer depicts the great stellated dodecahedron and a great dodecahedron (both shown below). There is also a truncated version of the small stellated dodecahedron. It is clear from the general arrangement of the book that he regarded only the five Platonic solids as regular.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The small and great stellated dodecahedra, sometimes called the Kepler polyhedra, were first recognized as regular by Johannes Kepler around 1619. He obtained them by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron, for the first time treating it as a surface rather than a solid. He noticed that by extending the edges or faces of the convex dodecahedron until they met again, he could obtain star pentagons. Further, he recognized that these star pentagons are also regular. In this way he constructed the two stellated dodecahedra. Each has the central convex region of each face \"hidden\" within the interior, with only the triangular arms visible. Kepler's final step was to recognize that these polyhedra fit the definition of regularity, even though they were not convex, as the traditional Platonic solids were.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 1809, Louis Poinsot rediscovered Kepler's figures, by assembling star pentagons around each vertex. He also assembled convex polygons around star vertices to discover two more regular stars, the great icosahedron and great dodecahedron. Some people call these two the Poinsot polyhedra. Poinsot did not know if he had discovered all the regular star polyhedra.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Three years later, Augustin Cauchy proved the list complete by stellating the Platonic solids, and almost half a century after that, in 1858, Bertrand provided a more elegant proof by faceting them.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The following year, Arthur Cayley gave the Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra the names by which they are generally known today.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "A hundred years later, John Conway developed a systematic terminology for stellations in up to four dimensions. Within this scheme the small stellated dodecahedron is just the stellated dodecahedron.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Regular star polyhedra first appear in Renaissance art. A small stellated dodecahedron is depicted in a marble tarsia on the floor of St. Mark's Basilica, Venice, Italy, dating from ca. 1430 and sometimes attributed to Paulo Ucello.",
"title": "Regular star polyhedra in art and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the 20th century, artist M. C. Escher's interest in geometric forms often led to works based on or including regular solids; Gravitation is based on a small stellated dodecahedron.",
"title": "Regular star polyhedra in art and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A dissection of the great dodecahedron was used for the 1980s puzzle Alexander's Star.",
"title": "Regular star polyhedra in art and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand's sculpture The Kepler Star is displayed near Oslo Airport, Gardermoen. The star spans 14 meters, and consists of an icosahedron and a dodecahedron inside a great stellated dodecahedron.",
"title": "Regular star polyhedra in art and culture"
}
] |
In geometry, a Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron is any of four regular star polyhedra. They may be obtained by stellating the regular convex dodecahedron and icosahedron, and differ from these in having regular pentagrammic faces or vertex figures. They can all be seen as three-dimensional analogues of the pentagram in one way or another.
|
2001-10-08T23:37:07Z
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2023-09-29T22:20:05Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%E2%80%93Poinsot_polyhedron
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Kraków
|
Kraków (Polish: [ˈkrakuf] ), Cracow in English, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, economic, cultural and artistic life. Cited as one of Europe's most beautiful cities, its Old Town with Wawel Royal Castle was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, one of the world's first sites granted the status.
The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland's second-most-important city. It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was reported by Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a 10th-century merchant from Córdoba, as a busy trading centre of Central Europe in 985. With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic centre. As of 2023, the city has a population of 804,237, with approximately 8 million additional people living within a 100 km (62 mi) radius of its main square.
After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, the newly defined Distrikt Krakau (Kraków District) became the capital of Germany's General Government. The Jewish population of the city was forced into a walled zone known as the Kraków Ghetto, from where they were sent to Nazi extermination camps such as the nearby Auschwitz, and Nazi concentration camps like Płaszów. However, the city was spared from destruction and major bombing.
In 1978, Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elevated to the papacy as Pope John Paul II—the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. Also that year, UNESCO approved Kraków's entire Old Town and historic centre and the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine as Poland's first World Heritage Sites. Kraków is classified as a global city with the ranking of "high sufficiency" by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Its extensive cultural heritage across the epochs of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture includes Wawel Cathedral and Wawel Royal Castle on the banks of the Vistula, St. Mary's Basilica, Saints Peter and Paul Church and the largest medieval market square in Europe, Rynek Główny. Kraków is home to Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest universities in the world and traditionally Poland's most reputable institution of higher learning. The city also hosts a number of institutions of national significance such as the National Museum, Kraków Opera, Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, National Stary Theatre and the Jagiellonian Library. The city is served by John Paul II International Airport, the country's second busiest airport and the most important international airport for the inhabitants of south-eastern Poland.
In 2000, Kraków was named European Capital of Culture. In 2013, Kraków was officially approved as a UNESCO City of Literature. The city hosted World Youth Day in 2016 and the European Games in 2023.
The name of Kraków is traditionally derived from Krakus (Krak, Grakch), the legendary founder of Kraków and a ruler of the tribe of Vistulans. In Polish, Kraków is an archaic possessive form of Krak and essentially means "Krak's (town)". The true origin of the name is highly disputed among historians, with many theories in existence and no unanimous consensus. The first recorded mention of Prince Krakus (then written as Grakch) dates back to 1190, although the town existed as early as the seventh century, when it was inhabited by the tribe of Vistulans. It is possible that the name of the city is derived from the word kruk, meaning 'crow' or 'raven'.
The city's full official name is Stołeczne Królewskie Miasto Kraków, which can be translated as "Royal Capital City of Kraków". In English, a person born or living in Kraków is a Cracovian (Polish: krakowianin or krakus). Until the 1990s the English version of the name was often written as Cracow, but now the most widespread modern English version is Krakow.
Kraków's early history begins with evidence of a Stone Age settlement on the present site of the Wawel Hill. A legend attributes Kraków's founding to the mythical ruler Krakus, who built it above a cave occupied by a dragon, Smok Wawelski. The first written record of the city's name dates back to 965, when Kraków was described as a notable commercial centre controlled first by Moravia (876–879), but captured by a Bohemian duke Boleslaus I in 955. The first acclaimed ruler of Poland, Mieszko I, took Kraków from the Bohemians and incorporated it into the holdings of the Piast dynasty towards the end of his reign.
In 1038, Kraków became the seat of the Polish government. By the end of the tenth century, the city was a leading centre of trade. Brick buildings were constructed, including the Royal Wawel Castle with St. Felix and Adaukt Rotunda, Romanesque churches such as St. Andrew's Church, a cathedral, and a basilica. The city was sacked and burned during the Mongol invasion of 1241. It was rebuilt practically identically, based on new location act and incorporated in 1257 by the high duke Bolesław V the Chaste who following the example of Wrocław, introduced city rights modelled on the Magdeburg law allowing for tax benefits and new trade privileges for the citizens. In 1259, the city was again ravaged by the Mongols. A third attack in 1287 was repelled thanks in part to the newly built fortifications.
In 1335, King Casimir III the Great (Polish: Kazimierz) declared the two western suburbs to be a new city named after him, Kazimierz (Latin: Casimiria). The defensive walls were erected around the central section of Kazimierz in 1362, and a plot was set aside for the Augustinian order next to Skałka. The city rose to prominence in 1364, when Casimir founded the University of Kraków, the second oldest university in central Europe after the Charles University in Prague. Casimir also began work on a campus for the academy in Kazimierz, but he died in 1370 and the campus was never completed.
The city continued to grow under the joint Lithuanian-Polish Jagiellon dynasty. As the capital of the Kingdom of Poland and a member of the Hanseatic League, the city attracted many craftsmen from abroad, businesses, and guilds as science and the arts began to flourish. The royal chancery and the university ensured a first flourishing of Polish literary culture in the city.
The 15th and 16th centuries were known as Poland's Złoty Wiek or Golden Age. Many works of Polish Renaissance art and architecture were created, including ancient synagogues in Kraków's Jewish quarter located in the north-eastern part of Kazimierz, such as the Old Synagogue. During the reign of Casimir IV, various artists came to work and live in Kraków, and Johann Haller established a printing press in the city after Kasper Straube had printed the Calendarium Cracoviense, the first work printed in Poland, in 1473.
In 1520, the most famous church bell in Poland, named Zygmunt after Sigismund I of Poland, was cast by Hans Behem. At that time, Hans Dürer, a younger brother of artist and thinker Albrecht Dürer, was Sigismund's court painter. Hans von Kulmbach made altarpieces for several churches. In 1553, the Kazimierz district council gave the Jewish Qahal (council of a Jewish self-governing community) a licence for the right to build their own interior walls across the western section of the already existing defensive walls. The walls were expanded again in 1608 due to the growth of the community and influx of Jews from Bohemia. In 1572, King Sigismund II, the last of the Jagiellons, died childless. The Polish throne passed to Henry III of France and then to other foreign-based rulers in rapid succession, causing a decline in the city's importance. Furthermore, in 1596, Sigismund III of the House of Vasa moved the administrative capital of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from Kraków to Warsaw. The city was destabilised by pillaging in the 1650s during the Swedish invasion, especially during the 1655 siege. Later in 1707, the city underwent an outbreak of bubonic plague that left 20,000 of the city's residents dead.
Already weakened during the 18th century, by the mid-1790s the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had twice been partitioned by its neighbors: Russia, the Habsburg empire and Prussia. In 1791, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II changed the status of Kazimierz as a separate city and made it into a district of Kraków. The richer Jewish families began to move out. However, because of the injunction against travel on the Sabbath, most Jewish families stayed relatively close to the historic synagogues. In 1794, Tadeusz Kościuszko initiated an unsuccessful insurrection in the town's Main Square which, in spite of his victorious Battle of Racławice against a numerically superior Russian army, resulted in the third and final partition of Poland.
In 1802, German became the town's official language. Of the members appointed by the Habsburgs to the municipal council only half were Polish. From 1796 to 1809, the population of the city rose from 22.000 to 26.000 with an increasing percentage of nobles and officials. In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte captured former Polish territories from Austria and made the town part of the Duchy of Warsaw. During the time of the Duchy of Warsaw, requirements to upkeep the Polish army followed by tours of Austrian, Polish and Russian troops, plus Russian occupation and a flood in the year 1813 all added up to the adverse development of the city with a high debt burden on public finances and many workshops and trading houses needing to close their activities. Following Napoleon's defeat, the 1815 Congress of Vienna restored the pre-war boundaries but also created the partially independent Free City of Kraków. An insurrection in 1846 failed, resulting in the city being annexed by Austria under the name the Grand Duchy of Kraków (Polish: Wielkie Księstwo Krakowskie, German: Großherzogtum Krakau).
This Republic of Kraków (1815–1846) included the towns of Chrzanow, Trzebinia and Nowa Gora and 224 villages. Outside the city, mining and metallurgy started developing. The population of Cracow itself grew in this time from 23.000 to 43.000, the one in the Republic from 88.000 to 103.000. The population of the city had an increasing number of catholic clergy, officials and intelligentsia with which the rich townspeople sympathised. They were opposed to the conservative landed aristocracy who also were drawn more and more to the city real estates even though their income still mainly came from their agricultural possessions in the Republic, the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia. The percentage of the Jewish population in the city also increased in this time from 20.8% to 30.4%. A free trade zone led to positive economic development. But because of the unstable political situation and insecurity about the future, not much of the accumulated wealth was invested. Through the increase of taxes, customs and regulations, prices soared and the city fell into a recession. From 1844 to 1850 the population was diminished by over 4.000 inhabitants.
In 1866, Austria granted a degree of autonomy to Galicia after its own defeat in the Austro-Prussian War. Politically freer Kraków became a Polish national symbol and a centre of culture and art, known frequently as the "Polish Athens" (Polskie Ateny). Many leading Polish artists of the period resided in Kraków, among them the seminal painter Jan Matejko, laid to rest at Rakowicki Cemetery, and the founder of modern Polish drama, Stanisław Wyspiański. Fin de siècle Kraków evolved into a modern metropolis; running water and electric streetcars were introduced in 1901, and between 1910 and 1915, Kraków and its surrounding suburban communities were gradually combined into a single administrative unit called Greater Kraków (Wielki Kraków).
At the outbreak of World War I on 3 August 1914, Józef Piłsudski formed a small cadre military unit, the First Cadre Company—the predecessor of the Polish Legions—which set out from Kraków to fight for the liberation of Poland. The city was briefly besieged by Russian troops in November 1914. Austrian rule in Kraków ended in 1918 when the Polish Liquidation Committee assumed power.
Following the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, Kraków resumed its role as a major Polish academic and cultural centre, with the establishment of new universities such as the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, including a number of new and essential vocational schools. The city became an important cultural centre for Polish Jews, including both Zionist and Bundist groups. Kraków was also an influential centre of Jewish spiritual life, with all its manifestations of religious observance - from Orthodox to Hasidic and Reform Judaism - flourishing side by side.
Following the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, the city of Kraków became part of the General Government, a separate administrative region of the Third Reich. On 26 October 1939, the Nazi régime set up Distrikt Krakau, one of a total of four districts within the General Government. On the same day, the city of Kraków also became the capital of the administration. The General Government was ruled by Governor-General Hans Frank, who was based in the city's Wawel Castle. The Nazis envisioned turning Kraków into a completely Germanised city; after removal of all the Jews and Poles, renaming of locations and streets into the German language, and sponsorship of propaganda trying to portray it as a historically German city. On 28 November 1939 Hans Frank set up Judenräte ('Jewish Councils') to be run by Jewish citizens for the purpose of carrying out orders for the Nazis. These orders included the registration of all Jewish people living in each area, the collection of taxes, and the formation of forced-labour groups. The Polish Home Army maintained a parallel underground administrative system.
On the eve of World War II some 56,000 Jews resided in Krakow, almost one-quarter of a total population of about 250,000. By November 1939, the Jewish population of Krakow had grown to approximately 70,000. According to German statistics from 1940, over 200,000 Jews lived within the entire Kraków District, comprising more than 5 percent of the total population in the district. These statistics, however, probably underestimate the situation.
In November 1939, during an operation known as "Sonderaktion Krakau", the Germans arrested more than 180 university professors and academics and sent them to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, though the survivors were later released on the request of prominent Italians.
Before the formation of ghettos, which began in the Distrikt in December 1939, Jews were encouraged to flee the city. For those who remained the German authorities decided in March 1941 to allocate a then suburban neighborhood, Podgórze District, to become Kraków's ghetto - there many Jews would die of illness or starvation. Initially, most ghettos were open and Jews were allowed to enter and exit freely. However, with time ghettos were generally closed and security became tighter. From autumn 1941, the SS developed the policy of Extermination through labour, which further worsened the already bleak conditions for Jews. The ghetto inhabitants were later murdered or sent to German Extermination camps, including Bełżec and Auschwitz, and to Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. The largest deportations within the Distrikt occurred from June to September 1942. More specifically, the Kraków ghetto deportation occurred in the first week of June 1942, and in March 1943 the ghetto was definitely liquidated.
Roman Polanski, the film director, survived the Kraków ghetto. Oskar Schindler selected employees from the ghetto to work in his enamelware factory Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik (Emalia for short), saving them from the camps. Similarly, many men capable of physical labor were saved from the deportations to extermination camps and instead sent to labor camps across the General Government. By September 1943, the last of the Jews from the Kraków ghetto had been deported. Although looted by occupational authorities, Kraków remained relatively undamaged at the end of World War II, with most of the city's historical and architectural legacy spared. Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev entered the city on 18 January 1945, and began arresting Poles loyal to the Polish government-in-exile or those who had served in the Home Army.
After the war, under the Polish People's Republic (officially declared in 1952), the intellectual and academic community of Kraków came under complete political control. The universities were soon deprived of printing rights and autonomy. The Stalinist government of Poland ordered the construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly created suburb of Nowa Huta. The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city into an industrial centre. The new working-class population, drawn by the industrialization of Kraków, contributed to rapid growth.
In an effort that spanned two decades, Karol Wojtyła, cardinal archbishop of Kraków from 1964 to 1978, successfully lobbied for permission to build the first churches in the newly-industrial suburbs. In 1978 the Catholic Church elevated Wojtyła to the papacy as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. In the same year, UNESCO, following the application of local authorities, placed Kraków Old Town on the first-ever list of World Heritage Sites.
Kraków lies in the southern part of Poland, on the Vistula River, 219 m (719 ft) above sea level; 230 km (143 mi) west from the border with Ukraine. The city is located on the border between different physiographic regions: Polish Uplands (Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in the north-western parts of the city and Małopolska Upland in the north-eastern parts of the city), Sandomierz Basin (eastern parts of the city) and Carpathians (Western Beskidian Foothills in the southern parts of the city).
There are five nature reserves in Kraków, with a combined area of ca. 48.6 hectares (120 acres). Due to their ecological value, these areas are legally protected. The western part of the city, along its northern and north-western side, borders an area of international significance known as the Jurassic Bielany-Tyniec refuge. The main motives for the protection of this area include plant and animal wildlife and the area's geomorphological features and landscape. Another part of the city is located within the ecological 'corridor' of the Vistula River valley. This corridor is also assessed as being of international significance as part of the Pan-European ecological network. The city centre is situated on the left (northern) bank of the river.
Officially, Kraków has a temperate oceanic climate, denoted by Köppen classification as Cfb, best defined as a semicontinental climate. In older reference periods it was classified as a warm summer continental climate (Dfb). By classification of Wincenty Okołowicz, it has a warm temperate climate in the centre of continental Europe with the "fusion" of different features.
Due to its geographic location, the city may be under marine influence, sometimes Arctic influence, but without direct influence, giving the city variable meteorological conditions over short spaces of time.
Being towards Eastern Europe and a relatively considerable distance from the sea, Krakow has significant temperature differences according to the progress of different air masses, having four defined seasons of the year. Average temperatures in summer range from 18.6 to 20.4 °C (65 to 69 °F) and in winter from −0.6 to 0.8 °C (31 to 33 °F). The average annual temperature is 10.0 °C (50 °F). In summer temperatures often exceed 25 °C (77 °F), even reaching 30 °C (86 °F), while in winter temperatures drop to −5 °C (23 °F) at night and about 0 °C (32 °F) during the day. During very cold nights the temperature can drop to −15 °C (5 °F). The city lies near the Tatra Mountains, there are often occurrences of halny blowing (a foehn wind), causing temperatures to rise rapidly, and even in winter reach up to 20 °C (68 °F).
In relation to Warsaw, temperatures are very similar for most of the year, except that in the colder months southern Poland has a larger daily temperature range, more moderate winds, generally more rainy days and with greater chances of clear skies on average, especially in winter. The higher sun angle also allows for a longer growing season. In addition, for older data there was less sun than the capital of the country, about 30 minutes daily per year, but both have small differences in relative humidity and the direction of the winds is northeast.
The climate table below presents weather data from 2000 to 2012, although the official Köppen reference period was from 1981 to 2010 (therefore not being technically a climatological normal). According to ongoing measurements, the temperature has increased during these years as compared with the last series. This increase averages about 0.6 °C (1.1 °F) over all months. Warming is most pronounced during the winter months, with an increase of more than 1.0 °C (1.8 °F) in January.
Developed over many centuries, Kraków provides a showcase setting for many historic styles of architecture. As the city expanded, so too did the architectural achievements of its builders. It is for this reason that the variations in style and urban planning are so easily recognisable.
Built from its earliest nucleus outward, and having escaped much of the destruction endured by Poland during the 20th-century wars, Kraków's many architectural monuments can typically be seen in historical order by walking from the city centre out, towards its later districts. Kraków is one of the few medieval towns in Poland that does not have a historic Ratusz town hall in its Main Square, because it has not survived the Partitions of Poland.
Kraków's historic centre, which includes the Old Town, Kazimierz and the Wawel Castle, was included as the first of its kind on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1978. The Stare Miasto is the most prominent example of an old town in the country. For many centuries Kraków was the royal capital of Poland, until Sigismund III Vasa relocated the court to Warsaw in 1596. The whole district is bisected by the Royal Road, the coronation route traversed by the Kings of Poland. The Route begins at St. Florian's Church outside the northern flank of the old city-walls in the medieval suburb of Kleparz; passes the Barbican of Kraków (Barbakan) built in 1499, and enters Stare Miasto through the Florian Gate. It leads down Floriańska Street through the Main Square, and up Grodzka to Wawel, the former seat of Polish royalty, overlooking the Vistula river. Old Town attracts visitors from all over the World. Kraków historic centre is one of the 13 places in Poland that are included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The architectural design of the district had survived all cataclysms of the past and retained its original form coming from the medieval times.
In addition to the old town, the city's district of Kazimierz is particularly notable for its many renaissance buildings and picturesque streets, as well as the historic Jewish quarter located in the north-eastern part of Kazimierz. Kazimierz was founded in the 14th century to the south-east of the city centre and soon became a wealthy, well-populated area where construction of imposing properties became commonplace. Perhaps the most important feature of medieval Kazimierz was the only major, permanent bridge (Pons Regalis) across the northern arm of the Vistula. This natural barrier used to separate Kazimierz from the Old Town for several centuries, while the bridge connected Kraków to the Wieliczka Salt Mine and the lucrative Hungarian trade route. The last structure at this location (at the end of modern Stradom Street) was dismantled in 1880 when the northern arm of the river was filled in with earth and rock, and subsequently built over.
By the 1930s, Kraków had 120 officially registered synagogues and prayer houses that spanned across the old city. Much of Jewish intellectual life had moved to new centres like Podgórze. This, in turn, led to the redevelopment and renovation of much of Kazimierz and the development of new districts in Kraków. Most historic buildings in central Kazimierz today are preserved in their original form. Some old buildings, however, were not repaired after the devastation brought by the Second World War, and have remained empty. Most recent efforts at restoring the historic neighborhoods gained new impetus around 1993. Kazimierz is now a well-visited area, seeing a booming growth in Jewish-themed restaurants, bars, bookstores and souvenir shops.
As the city of Kraków began to expand further under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new architectural styles also developed. Key buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries in Kraków include the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, the directorate of the Polish State Railways as well as the original complex of Kraków Główny railway station and the city's Academy of Economics. It was also at around that time that Kraków's first radial boulevards began to appear, with the city undergoing a large-scale program aimed at transforming the ancient Polish capital into a sophisticated regional centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. New representative government buildings and multi-story tenement houses were built at around that time. Much of the urban-planning beyond the walls of the Old Town was done by Polish architects and engineers trained in Vienna. Some major projects of the era include the development of the Jagiellonian University's new premises and the building of the Collegium Novum just west of the Old Town. The imperial style planning of the city's further development continued until the return of Poland's independence, following the First World War. Early modernist style in Kraków is represented by such masterpieces as the Palace of Art by Franciszek Mączyński and the 'House under the Globe'. Secession style architecture, which had arrived in Kraków from Vienna, became popular towards the end of the Partitions.
With Poland's regained independence came the major change in the fortunes of Kraków—now the second most important city of a sovereign nation. The state began to make new plans for the city development and commissioned a number of representative buildings. The predominant style for new projects was modernism with various interpretations of the art-deco style. Important buildings constructed in the style of Polish modernism include the Feniks 'LOT' building on Basztowa Street, the Feniks department store on the Main Square and the Municipal Savings Bank on Szczepański Square. The Józef Piłsudski house is also of note as a particularly good example of interwar architecture in the city.
After the Second World War, new government turned toward Soviet influence and the Stalinist monumentalism. The doctrine of Socialist realism in Poland, as in other countries of the People's Republics, was enforced from 1949 to 1956. It involved all domains of art, but its most spectacular achievements were made in the field of urban design. The guidelines for this new trend were spelled-out in a 1949 resolution of the National Council of Party Architects. Architecture was to become a weapon in establishing the new social order by the communists. The ideological impact of urban design was valued more than aesthetics. It aimed at expressing persistence and power. This form of architecture was implemented in the new industrial district of Nowa Huta with apartment blocks constructed according to a Stalinist blueprint, with repetitious courtyards and wide, tree-lined avenues.
Since the style of the Renaissance was generally regarded as the most revered in old Polish architecture, it was also used for augmenting Poland's Socialist national format. However, in the course of incorporating the principles of Socialist realism, there were quite a few deviations introduced by the communists. One of these was to more closely reflect Soviet architecture, which resulted in the majority of works blending into one another. From 1953, critical opinions in the Party were increasingly frequent, and the doctrine was given up in 1956 marking the end of Stalinism. The soc-realist centre of Nowa Huta is considered to be a meritorious monument of the times. This period in postwar architecture was followed by the mass-construction of large Panel System apartment blocks, most of which were built outside the city centre and thus do not encroach upon the beauty of the old or new towns. Some examples of the new style (e.g., Hotel Cracovia) recently listed as heritage monuments were built during the latter half of the 20th century in Kraków.
After the Revolutions of 1989 and the birth of the Third Republic in the latter half of the 20th century, a number of new architectural projects were completed, including the construction of large business parks and commercial facilities such as the Galeria Krakowska, or infrastructure investments like the Kraków Fast Tram. A good example of this would be the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology designed by Arata Isozaki, the 2007-built Pawilon Wyspiański 2000, which is used as a multi-purpose information and exhibition space, or the Małopolski Garden of Arts (Małopolski Ogród Sztuki), a multi-purpose exhibition and theatre complex located in the historic Old Town.
There are about 40 parks in Kraków including dozens of gardens and forests. Several, like the Planty Park, Botanical Garden, Zoological Garden, Royal Garden, Park Krakowski, Jordan Park and Błonia Park are located in the centre of the city; with Zakrzówek, Lasek Wolski forest, Strzelecki Park and Park Lotników (among others) in the surrounding districts. Parks cover about 318.5 hectares (787 acres), 1.2 sq mi) of the city.
The Planty Park is the best-known park in Kraków. It was established between 1822 and 1830 in place of the old city walls, forming a green belt around the Old Town. It consists of a chain of smaller gardens designed in various styles and adorned with monuments. The park has an area of 21 hectares (52 acres) and a length of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi), forming a scenic walkway popular with Cracovians.
The Jordan Park founded in 1889 by Henryk Jordan, was the first public park of its kind in Europe. The park built on the banks of the Rudawa river was equipped with running and exercise tracks, playgrounds, the swimming pool, amphitheatre, pavilions, and a pond for boat rowing and water bicycles. It is located on the grounds of a larger Kraków's Błonia Park. The less prominent Park Krakowski was founded in 1885 by Stanisław Rehman but has since been greatly reduced in size because of rapid real estate development. It was a popular destination point with many Cracovians at the end of the 19th century.
There are five nature reserves in Kraków with a total area of 48.6 hectares (120 acres). Smaller green zones constitute parts of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland Jurassic Landscape Parks' Board, which deals with the protection areas of the Polish Jura. Under its jurisdiction are: the Bielany-Tyniec Landscape Park (Park Bielańsko-Tyniecki), Tenczynek Landscape Park (Park Tencziński) and Kraków Valleys Landscape Park (Park Krajobrazowy Dolinki Krakowskie), with their watersheds. All natural reserves of the Polish Jura Chain are part of the CORINE biotopes programme due to their unique flora, fauna, geomorphology and landscape. The western part of Kraków constitutes the so-called Obszar Krakowski ecological network, including the ecological corridor of the Vistula river. The southern slopes of limestone hills provide conditions for the development of thermophilous vegetation, grasslands and scrubs.
The city is spaced along an extended latitudinal transect of the Vistula River Valley with a network of tributaries including its right tributary Wilga, and left: Rudawa, Białucha, Dłubnia and Sanka. The rivers and their valleys along with bodies of water are some of the most interesting natural wonders of Kraków.
Kraków and its environment, surrounded by mountains, suffer from Europe's dirtiest air pollution because of smog, caused by burning coal for heating, especially in winter.
The Kraków City Council has 43 elected members, one of whom is the mayor, or President of Kraków, elected every four years. The election of the City Council and of the local head of government, which takes place at the same time, is based on legislation introduced on 20 June 2002. The President of Kraków, re-elected for his fourth term in 2014, is Jacek Majchrowski. Several members of the Polish national Parliament (Sejm) are elected from the Kraków constituency. The city's official symbols include a coat of arms, a flag, a seal, and a banner.
The responsibilities of Kraków's president include drafting and implementing resolutions, enacting city bylaws, managing the city budget, employing city administrators, and preparing against floods and natural disasters. The president fulfills his duties with the help of the City Council, city managers and city inspectors. In the 1990s, the city government was reorganised to better differentiate between its political agenda and administrative functions. As a result, the Office of Public Information was created to handle inquiries and foster communication between city departments and citizens at large.
In 2000, the city government introduced a new long-term program called "Safer City" in cooperation with the Police, Traffic, Social Services, Fire, Public Safety, and the Youth Departments. Subsequently, the number of criminal offences dropped by 3 percent between 2000 and 2001, and the rate of detection increased by 1.4 percent to a total of 30.2 percent in the same period. The city is receiving help in carrying out the program from all educational institutions and the local media, including TV, radio and the press.
Kraków is divided into 18 administrative districts (dzielnica) or boroughs, each with a degree of autonomy within its own municipal government. Prior to March 1991, the city had been divided into four quarters which still give a sense of identity to Kraków – the towns of Podgórze, Nowa Huta, and Krowodrza which were amalgamated into the city of Kraków as it expanded, and the ancient town centre of Kraków itself.
The oldest neighborhoods of Kraków were incorporated into the city before the late-18th century. They include the Old Town (Stare Miasto), once contained within the city defensive walls and now encircled by the Planty park; the Wawel District, which is the site of the Royal Castle and the cathedral; Stradom and Kazimierz with its historic Jewish quarter, the latter originally divided into Christian and Jewish quarters; as well as the ancient town of Kleparz.
Major districts added in the 19th and 20th centuries include Podgórze, which until 1915, was a separate town on the southern bank of the Vistula, and Nowa Huta, east of the city centre, built after World War II.
Among the most notable historic districts of the city are: Wawel Hill, home to Wawel Castle and Wawel Cathedral, where many historic Polish kings are buried; the medieval Old Town, with its Main Market Square (200 metres (660 ft) square); dozens of old churches and museums; the 14th-century buildings of the Jagiellonian University; and Kazimierz, the historical centre of Kraków's Jewish social and religious life.
The Old Town district of Kraków is home to about 6,000 historic sites and more than 2,000,000 works of art. Its rich variety of heritage architecture includes Romanesque (e.g., St. Andrew's Church, Kraków), Renaissance, Baroque and Gothic buildings. Kraków's palaces, churches, theatres and mansions display a great variety of color, architectural details, stained glass, paintings, sculptures, and furnishings.
In the Market Square stands the Gothic St. Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki). It was rebuilt in the 14th-century and features the famous wooden altar (Altarpiece of Veit Stoss), the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world, carved by Veit Stoss. From the church's main tower a trumpet call (hejnał mariacki), is sounded every hour. The melody, which used to announce the opening and closing of city gates, ends unexpectedly in midstream. According to legend, the tune was played during the 13th-century Tatar invasion by a guard warning citizens against the attack. He was shot by an archer of the invading Tatar forces whilst playing, the bugle call breaking off at the moment he died. The story was recounted in a book published in 1928 called The Trumpeter of Krakow, by Eric P. Kelly, which won a Newbery Award.
The current divisions were introduced by the Kraków City Hall on 19 April 1995. Districts were assigned Roman numerals as well as the name: Stare Miasto (I), Grzegórzki (II), Prądnik Czerwony (III), Prądnik Biały (IV), Łobzów (V), Bronowice (VI), Zwierzyniec (VII), Dębniki (VIII), Łagiewniki-Borek Fałęcki (IX), Swoszowice (X), Podgórze Duchackie (XI), Bieżanów-Prokocim (XII), Podgórze (XIII), Czyżyny (XIV), Mistrzejowice (XV), Bieńczyce (XVI), Wzgórza Krzesławickie (XVII), and Nowa Huta (XVIII).
Map of districts of the City of Kraków
Interactive map. For more information, click on district number.
Kraków is one of Poland's most important economic centres and the economic hub of the Lesser Poland (Małopolska) region. Since the fall of communism, the private sector has been growing steadily. There are about 50 large multinational companies in the city, including Google, Uber, IBM, Shell, UBS, HSBC, Motorola, Aptiv, MAN, General Electric, ABB, Aon, Akamai, Cisco, Hitachi, Altria, Capgemini, and Sabre Holdings, along with other British, German and Scandinavian-based firms. The city is also the global headquarters for Comarch, an enterprise software house. Kraków is the second most-visited city in Poland (after Warsaw). According to the World Investment Report 2011 by the UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Kraków is also the most emergent city location for investment in global BPO projects (Business Process Outsourcing) in the world.
In 2011, the city budget, which is presented by the Mayor of Kraków on 15 November annually, has a projected revenue of 3,500,000,000 złoty. The primary sources of revenue were as follows: 14% from the municipal taxation on real estate properties and the use of amenities, 30% in transfers from the national budget, and 34% in state subsidies. Projected expenditures, totaling 3,520,000,000 złoty, included 21% in city development costs and 79% in city maintenance costs. Of the maintenance costs, as much as 39% were spent on education and childcare. The City of Kraków's development costs included; 41% toward construction of roads, transport, and communication (combined), and 25% for the city's infrastructure and environment. The city has a high bond credit rating, and some 60% of the population is under the age of 45.
Unity Tower was completed in 2020 after almost 30 years, creating a new business and residential centre. It is the tallest building in the city.
Krakow has a long history of entrepreneurship, perhaps best reflected in the fact the most important square in the city is called the Main Market Square (Rynek Główny).
Since the early 2000s a startup community has emerged in Krakow, In the early days the Krakow: Europe's Silicon Valley web page was the on line hub of the community. Most important now is the OMGKRK foundation and its Facebook group which has over 6200 members and acted as a community notice board for the startup community.
Jan Thurzo, a Hungarian entrepreneur and mining engineer who was from 1477 an Alderman and later Mayor of Kraków. He established the Fugger–Thurzo company with Jakob Fugger. Fugger monopolised copper mining and trade in the Holy Roman Empire around 1500 and has been described as the richest man who has ever lived.
Michal Hornstein, born in Krakow, and a graduate of a Krakow Business School, escaped from a Nazi death camp transport. He moved to Montreal in 1951 where he founded Federal Construction Ltd., a real estate company focussing on apartments and shopping centres. He was recognised as a major philanthropist in Montreal and supported the arts, education and medicine, for example with this Gift of Old Masters to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Helena Rubinstein, born in Kraków, established the Helena Rubenstein inc. cosmetics company which was sold to Colgate Palmolive in 1973 for $142.3 million in stock and cash, and was said to be one of the world's richest women.
Janusz Filipiak established the successful IT company Comarch in 1993 which in 2018 employed 5500 people, and sponsors the Cracovia football team.
Piotr Wilam [pl] established the Pascal Publishing House, the internet portal Onet.pl and seed capital fund Innovation Nest.
Rafał Brzoska is the founder and CEO of InPost, which went public in January 2021 raising $3 billion.
Michał Borkowski founded Brainly in 2009, one of the world's leading peer to peer homework support networks with 300 million users.
Kraków is one of the co-location centres of Knowledge and Innovation Community (Sustainable Energy) of The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).
InnoEnergy is an integrated alliance of reputable organisations from the education, research and industry sectors. It was created based on long standing links of cooperation as well as the principles of excellence. The partners have jointly developed a strategy to tackle the weaknesses of the European innovation landscape in the field of sustainable energy.
Public transport is based on a fairly dense network of tram and bus routes operated by a municipal company, supplemented by a number of private minibus operators. Local trains connect some of the suburbs. The bulk of the city's historic area has been turned into a pedestrian zone with rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages; however, the trams run within a three-block radius. The historic means of transportation in the city can be examined at the Museum of Municipal Engineering in the Kazimierz district, with many old trams, cars and buses.
Railway connections are available to most Polish cities, e.g. Katowice, Częstochowa, Szczecin, Gdynia and Warsaw. International destinations include Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Lviv, Kyiv, and Odesa (June–September). The main railway station is located just outside the Old Town District and is well-served by public transport.
Kraków's airport, officially named Kraków John Paul II International Airport (IATA: KRK), is located 11 km (7 mi) west of the city. Direct trains cover the route between Kraków Główny train station and the airport in 20 minutes. Kraków Airport served around 5,800,000 passengers in 2017. Also, the Katowice International Airport is located 80 kilometres (50 miles) or about 75 minutes from Kraków.
In Autumn 2016 Poland's oldest Bicycle-sharing system was modernized and now offers 1,500 bikes at 169 stations under the name of Wavelo (pl), which is owned by BikeU of the French multinational company Egis.
Kraków had a recorded population of 774,839 in 2019. Selected demographic indicators are presented in a table (below), compiled on the basis of only the population living in Kraków permanently. The larger metropolitan area of the city encompasses a territory in which (in 2010) 1,393,893 inhabitants live.
Already in the Middle Ages, the population of Kraków consisting of numerous ethnic groups, began to grow rapidly. It doubled between 1100 and 1300 from 5,000 to 10,000, and in 1400 counted 14,000 inhabitants. By 1550, the population of metropolitan Kraków was 18,000; although it decreased to 15,000 in the next fifty years due to calamity. By the early 17th century the Kraków population had reached 28,000 inhabitants.
In the historical 1931 census preceding World War II, 78.1% of Cracovians declared Polish as their primary language, with Yiddish or Hebrew at 20.9%, Ukrainian 0.4%, German 0.3%, and Russian 0.1%. The ravages of history have greatly reduced the percentage of ethnic minorities living in Kraków.
In the last two decades, Kraków has seen a large growth of immigrant population. In the 2002 census, only 0.25% of respondents living in the city declared a non-Polish nationality primarily Ukrainian and Russian. As of 2019, it was estimated that foreigners accounted for as much as 10% of the city's population, with Ukrainians being the most numerous group (between 11,000 and 50,000).
The metropolitan city of Kraków is known as the city of churches. The abundance of landmark, historic temples along with the plenitude of monasteries and convents earned the city a countrywide reputation as the "Northern Rome" in the past. The churches of Kraków comprise over 120 places of worship (2007) of which over 65 were built in the 20th century. More are still being added. In addition to Roman Catholicism, other denominations present include Jehovah's Witnesses, Mariavite Church, Polish Catholic Church, Polish Orthodox Church, Protestantism and Latter-Day Saints.
As of 2017, weekly Mass attendance in the Archdiocese of Krakow was 49.9 percent, above the national Polish average of 38.3 percent.
Kraków contains also an outstanding collection of monuments of Jewish sacred architecture unmatched anywhere in Poland. Kraków was an influential centre of Jewish spiritual life before the outbreak of World War II, with all its manifestations of religious observance from Orthodox to Hasidic and Reform flourishing side by side. There were at least 90 synagogues in Kraków active before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, serving its burgeoning Jewish community of 60,000–80,000 (out of the city's total population of 237,000), established since the early 12th century.
Most synagogues of Kraków were ruined during World War II by the Nazis who despoiled them of all ceremonial objects, and used them as storehouses for ammunition, firefighting equipment, as general storage facilities and stables. The post-Holocaust Jewish population of the city had dwindled to about 5,900 before the end of the 1940s. Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah (emigration to Israel) without visas or exit permits upon the conclusion of World War II. By contrast, Stalin forcibly kept Russian Jews in the Soviet Union, as agreed to in the Yalta Conference. In recent time, thanks to efforts of the local Jewish and Polish organisations including foreign financial aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, many synagogues underwent major restorations and serve religious and tourist purposes.
Kraków is a major centre of education. Twenty-four institutions of higher education offer courses in the city, with more than 200,000 students. Jagiellonian University, the oldest university in Poland and ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement as the second-best university in the country, was founded in 1364 as Studium Generale and renamed in 1817 to commemorate the royal Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland and Lithuania. Its principal academic asset is the Jagiellonian Library, with more than 4 million volumes, including a large collection of medieval manuscripts like Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and the Balthasar Behem Codex. With 42,325 students (2005) and 3,605 academic staff, the Jagiellonian University is also one of the leading research centres in Poland. Famous historical figures connected with the university include Saint John Cantius, Jan Długosz, Nicolaus Copernicus, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Jan Kochanowski, King John III Sobieski, Pope John Paul II and Nobel laureates Ivo Andrić and Wisława Szymborska.
AGH University of Science and Technology, established in 1919, is the largest technical university in Poland, with more than 15 faculties and student enrollment exceeding 30,000. It was ranked by the Polish edition of Newsweek as the best technical university in the country in 2004. During its 80-year history, more than 73,000 students graduated from AGH with master's or bachelor's degrees. Some 3,600 persons were granted the degree of Doctor of Science, and about 900 obtained the qualification of Habilitated Doctor.
Other institutions of higher learning include Academy of Music in Kraków first conceived as conservatory in 1888, one of the oldest and most prestigious conservatories in Central Europe and a major concert venue; Kraków University of Economics, established in 1925; Pedagogical University, in operation since 1946; Agricultural University of Kraków, offering courses since 1890 (initially as a part of Jagiellonian University); Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest Fine Arts Academy in Poland, founded by the Polish painter Jan Matejko; Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts; The Pontifical Academy of Theology; AGH University of Science and Technology and Krakow University of Technology, which has more than 37,000 graduates.
Scientific societies and their branches in Kraków conduct scientific and educational work in local and countrywide scale. The Academy of Learning, Krakow Scientific Society, Association of Law Students' Library of the Jagiellonian University, Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists, Polish Geological Society, Polish Theological Society in Kraków, Polish Section of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Polish Society for Synchrotron Radiation all have their main seats in Kraków.
Kraków was named the official European Capital of Culture for the year 2000 by the European Union. It is a major attraction for both local and international tourists, attracting nearly 13 million visitors a year. Major landmarks include the Main Market Square with St. Mary's Basilica and the Sukiennice Cloth Hall, the Wawel Castle, the National Art Museum, the Zygmunt Bell at the Wawel Cathedral, and the medieval St. Florian's Gate with the Barbican along the Royal Coronation Route. Kraków has 28 museums and public art galleries. Among them is the Czartoryski Museum featuring works by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt as well as the EUROPEUM - European Culture Centre and the Archaeological Museum of Kraków whose collection highlights include the Zbruch Idol and the Bronocice Pot.
Kraków's 28 museums are separated into the national and municipal museums; the city also has a number of art collections and public art galleries. The National Museum, established in 1879, as well as the National Art Collection on Wawel Hill, are all accessible to the general public.
The National Art Collection is located at the Wawel, the former residence of three dynasties of Polish monarchs. Royal Chambers feature art, period furniture, Polish and European paintings, collectibles, and a major collection of 16th-century monumental Flemish tapestries. Wawel Treasury and Armoury features Polish royal memorabilia, jewels, applied art, and 15th- to 18th-century arms. The Wawel Eastern Collection features Turkish tents and military accessories. The National Museum holds the largest body of artworks in the country with collections consisting of several hundred thousand items kept in big part in the Main Building at Ul. 3 Maja, although there are eleven other separate divisions of the museum in the city, one of the most popular being The Gallery of the 19th Century Polish Art in Sukiennice with the collection of some of the best known paintings and sculptures of the Young Poland movement. The latest division called Europeum with Brueghel among a hundred Western European paintings was inaugurated in 2013.
Other notable museums in Kraków include the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology (at M. Konopnickiej 26), Stanisław Wyspiański Museum (at 11 Szczepanska St), Jan Matejko Manor House in Krzesławice, – a museum devoted to the master painter and his life, Emeryk Hutten Czapski Museum, and Józef Mehoffer Manor.
The Rynek Underground museum, under the main square, showcases Kraków's over 1,000-year history though its streets, activities and artifacts. The construction of the museum was preceded by extensive excavations which started in 2005 and, as more and more was found, continued eventually until 2010.
Krakil - Museum of illusions is a space where illusions meet scientific inventions and the arts: physics and optics are displayed together with artworks and classical riddles.
The Polish Aviation Museum, considered the world's eighth best aviation museum by CNN, features over 200 aircraft including a Sopwith Camel among other First World War biplanes; a comprehensive display of aero engines; and a complete collection of airplane types developed by Poland after 1945. Activities of smaller museums around Kraków and in the Lesser Poland region are promoted and supported by the Małopolska Institute of Culture; the Institute organises annual Małopolska Heritage Days. The Lenin Museum was open from 1954 to 1989.
The city has several famous theatres, including the Narodowy Stary Teatr (the National Old Theatre), the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, the Bagatela Theatre, the Ludowy Theatre, and the Groteska Theatre of Puppetry, as well as the Opera Krakowska and Kraków Operetta. The city's principal concert hall and the home of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra is the Kraków Philharmonic (Filharmonia Krakowska) built in 1931.
Kraków hosts many annual and biannual artistic events, some of international significance such as the Misteria Paschalia (Baroque music), Sacrum-Profanum (contemporary music), the Krakow Screen Festival (popular music), the Festival of Polish Music (classical music), Dedications (theatre), the Kraków Film Festival (one of Europe's oldest short films events), Etiuda&Anima International Film Festival (the oldest international art-film event in Poland), Biennial of Graphic Arts, and the Jewish Culture Festival. Kraków was the residence of two Polish Nobel laureates in literature, Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz; a third Nobel laureate, the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric, lived and studied in Kraków. Other former longtime residents include internationally renowned Polish film directors Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, both of whom are Academy Award winners.
Opera Krakowska one of the leading national opera companies, stages 200 performances each year including ballet, operettas and musicals. It has, in its main repertoire, the greatest world and Polish opera classics. The Opera moved into its first permanent House in the autumn of 2008. It is in charge also of the Summer Festival of Opera and Operetta.
Kraków is home to two major Polish festivals of early music presenting forgotten Baroque oratorios and operas: Opera Rara, and Misteria Paschalia. Meanwhile, Capella Cracoviensis runs the Music in Old Krakow International Festival.
Academy of Music in Kraków, founded in 1888, is known worldwide as the alma mater of the contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and it is also the only one in Poland to have two winners of the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw among its alumni. The academy organises concerts of its students and guests throughout the whole year.
Music organisations and venues include: Kraków Philharmonic, Sinfonietta Cracovia (a.k.a. the Orchestra of the Royal City of Kraków), the Polish Radio Choir of Kraków, Organum Academic Choir, the Mixed Mariański Choir (Mieszany Chór Mariański), Kraków Academic Choir of the Jagiellonian University, the Kraków Chamber Choir, Amar Corde String Quartet, Consortium Iagellonicum Baroque Orchestra of the Jagiellonian University, Brass Band of T. Sendzimir Steelworks, and Camerata Chamber Orchestra of Radio Kraków.
According to official statistics, in 2019 Kraków was visited by over 14 million tourists including 3.3 million foreign travellers. The visitors spent over 7.5 billion zlotys (ca. €1.7 billion) in the city (without travel costs and pre-booked accommodation). Most foreign tourists came from Germany (14.2%), United Kingdom (13.9%), Italy (11.5%), France (11.2%), Spain (10.4%) and Ukraine (5.4%). The Kraków tour-guide from the Lesser Poland Visitors Bureau indicated that not all statistics are recorded due to the considerable number of those who come, staying in readily available private rooms paid for by cash, especially from Eastern Europe.
The main reasons for visiting the city are: its historical monuments, recreation as well as relatives and friends (placing third in the ranking), religion and business. There are 120 quality hotels in Kraków (usually about half full) offering 15,485 overnight accommodations. The average stay last for about 4 to 7 nights. The survey conducted among the travelers showed that they enjoyed the city's friendliness most, with 90% of Polish tourists and 87% foreigners stating that they would recommend visiting it. Notable points of interest outside the city include the Wieliczka salt mine, the Tatra Mountains 100 km (62 mi) to the south, the historic city of Częstochowa (north-west), the well-preserved former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and Ojcowski National Park, which includes the Renaissance Castle at Pieskowa Skała. Kraków has been awarded a number of top international rankings such as the 1st place in the Top city-break destinations 2014 survey conducted by the British consumer association Which?.
Kraków was the host city of the 2014 FIVB Men's Volleyball World Championship and 2016 European Men's Handball Championship. It has also been selected as the European City of Sport for 2014.
Football is one of the most popular sports in the city. The two teams with the largest following are thirteen-time Polish champion Wisła Kraków, and five-time champion Cracovia, both founded in 1906 as the oldest still existing in Poland. They have been involved in the most intense rivalry in the country and one of the most intense in all of Europe, known as the Holy War (Święta Wojna). Other football clubs include Hutnik Kraków, Wawel Kraków, Wieczysta Kraków and one-time Polish champion Garbarnia Kraków. There is also the first-league rugby club Juvenia Kraków. Kraków has a number of additional, equally valued sports teams including twelve-time Polish ice hockey champions Cracovia and the twenty-time women's basketball champions Wisła Kraków.
The Cracovia Marathon, with thousands of participants from two dozen countries annually, has been held in the city since 2002. Poland's first F1 racing driver Robert Kubica was born and brought up in Kraków, as was former WWE tag team champion Ivan Putski, and Top 10 ranked women's tennis player Agnieszka Radwańska.
The construction of a new Tauron Arena Kraków began in May 2010; for concerts, indoor athletics, hockey, basketball, futsal and other events. The facility area has 61,434 m, with maximum area of the arena court of 4 546 m. The average capacity is 18,000 for concerts, and 15,000 for sport events, with maximum number of spectators being 22,000. The Arena boasts Poland's largest LED media façade, with a total surface of 5,200 m of LED strip lighting, wrapping around the stadium, and one of Europe's largest LED screens, measuring over 540 m.
Kraków was bidding to host the 2022 Winter Olympics with Jasná but the bid was rejected by a majority (69.72%) of the vote in a referendum on 16 May 2014. The referendum was organised after a wave of criticism from citizens who believed that the Olympics would not promote the city. The organizing committee of "Krakow 2022" spent almost $40,000 to pay for a citizen-approved logo, but many citizens considered this a waste of public money. The committee was rumoured to have fraudulently used several million zlotys for unknown expenses.
In May 2019, the Polish Olympic Committee announced Kraków as host of the Polish bid for the 2023 European Games, On 22 June 2019, The European Olympic Committees at the General Assembly in Minsk, Belarus announced that Kraków will host the 2023 edition.
Kraków is referred to by various names in different languages. An old English name for the city is Cracow; though it has become less common in recent decades, some sources still use it. The city is known in Czech, Slovak and Serbian as Krakov, in Hungarian as Krakkó, in Lithuanian as Krokuva, in Finnish as Krakova, in German and Dutch as Krakau, in Latin, Spanish and Italian as Cracovia, in French as Cracovie, in Portuguese as Cracóvia and in Russian as Краков. Ukrainian and Yiddish languages refer to it as Krakiv (Краків) and Kroke (קראָקע) respectively.
Kraków is twinned, or maintains close relations, with 36 cities around the world:
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kraków (Polish: [ˈkrakuf] ), Cracow in English, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, economic, cultural and artistic life. Cited as one of Europe's most beautiful cities, its Old Town with Wawel Royal Castle was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, one of the world's first sites granted the status.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland's second-most-important city. It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was reported by Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a 10th-century merchant from Córdoba, as a busy trading centre of Central Europe in 985. With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic centre. As of 2023, the city has a population of 804,237, with approximately 8 million additional people living within a 100 km (62 mi) radius of its main square.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, the newly defined Distrikt Krakau (Kraków District) became the capital of Germany's General Government. The Jewish population of the city was forced into a walled zone known as the Kraków Ghetto, from where they were sent to Nazi extermination camps such as the nearby Auschwitz, and Nazi concentration camps like Płaszów. However, the city was spared from destruction and major bombing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1978, Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elevated to the papacy as Pope John Paul II—the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. Also that year, UNESCO approved Kraków's entire Old Town and historic centre and the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine as Poland's first World Heritage Sites. Kraków is classified as a global city with the ranking of \"high sufficiency\" by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Its extensive cultural heritage across the epochs of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture includes Wawel Cathedral and Wawel Royal Castle on the banks of the Vistula, St. Mary's Basilica, Saints Peter and Paul Church and the largest medieval market square in Europe, Rynek Główny. Kraków is home to Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest universities in the world and traditionally Poland's most reputable institution of higher learning. The city also hosts a number of institutions of national significance such as the National Museum, Kraków Opera, Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, National Stary Theatre and the Jagiellonian Library. The city is served by John Paul II International Airport, the country's second busiest airport and the most important international airport for the inhabitants of south-eastern Poland.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 2000, Kraków was named European Capital of Culture. In 2013, Kraków was officially approved as a UNESCO City of Literature. The city hosted World Youth Day in 2016 and the European Games in 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The name of Kraków is traditionally derived from Krakus (Krak, Grakch), the legendary founder of Kraków and a ruler of the tribe of Vistulans. In Polish, Kraków is an archaic possessive form of Krak and essentially means \"Krak's (town)\". The true origin of the name is highly disputed among historians, with many theories in existence and no unanimous consensus. The first recorded mention of Prince Krakus (then written as Grakch) dates back to 1190, although the town existed as early as the seventh century, when it was inhabited by the tribe of Vistulans. It is possible that the name of the city is derived from the word kruk, meaning 'crow' or 'raven'.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The city's full official name is Stołeczne Królewskie Miasto Kraków, which can be translated as \"Royal Capital City of Kraków\". In English, a person born or living in Kraków is a Cracovian (Polish: krakowianin or krakus). Until the 1990s the English version of the name was often written as Cracow, but now the most widespread modern English version is Krakow.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Kraków's early history begins with evidence of a Stone Age settlement on the present site of the Wawel Hill. A legend attributes Kraków's founding to the mythical ruler Krakus, who built it above a cave occupied by a dragon, Smok Wawelski. The first written record of the city's name dates back to 965, when Kraków was described as a notable commercial centre controlled first by Moravia (876–879), but captured by a Bohemian duke Boleslaus I in 955. The first acclaimed ruler of Poland, Mieszko I, took Kraków from the Bohemians and incorporated it into the holdings of the Piast dynasty towards the end of his reign.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1038, Kraków became the seat of the Polish government. By the end of the tenth century, the city was a leading centre of trade. Brick buildings were constructed, including the Royal Wawel Castle with St. Felix and Adaukt Rotunda, Romanesque churches such as St. Andrew's Church, a cathedral, and a basilica. The city was sacked and burned during the Mongol invasion of 1241. It was rebuilt practically identically, based on new location act and incorporated in 1257 by the high duke Bolesław V the Chaste who following the example of Wrocław, introduced city rights modelled on the Magdeburg law allowing for tax benefits and new trade privileges for the citizens. In 1259, the city was again ravaged by the Mongols. A third attack in 1287 was repelled thanks in part to the newly built fortifications.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1335, King Casimir III the Great (Polish: Kazimierz) declared the two western suburbs to be a new city named after him, Kazimierz (Latin: Casimiria). The defensive walls were erected around the central section of Kazimierz in 1362, and a plot was set aside for the Augustinian order next to Skałka. The city rose to prominence in 1364, when Casimir founded the University of Kraków, the second oldest university in central Europe after the Charles University in Prague. Casimir also began work on a campus for the academy in Kazimierz, but he died in 1370 and the campus was never completed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The city continued to grow under the joint Lithuanian-Polish Jagiellon dynasty. As the capital of the Kingdom of Poland and a member of the Hanseatic League, the city attracted many craftsmen from abroad, businesses, and guilds as science and the arts began to flourish. The royal chancery and the university ensured a first flourishing of Polish literary culture in the city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The 15th and 16th centuries were known as Poland's Złoty Wiek or Golden Age. Many works of Polish Renaissance art and architecture were created, including ancient synagogues in Kraków's Jewish quarter located in the north-eastern part of Kazimierz, such as the Old Synagogue. During the reign of Casimir IV, various artists came to work and live in Kraków, and Johann Haller established a printing press in the city after Kasper Straube had printed the Calendarium Cracoviense, the first work printed in Poland, in 1473.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1520, the most famous church bell in Poland, named Zygmunt after Sigismund I of Poland, was cast by Hans Behem. At that time, Hans Dürer, a younger brother of artist and thinker Albrecht Dürer, was Sigismund's court painter. Hans von Kulmbach made altarpieces for several churches. In 1553, the Kazimierz district council gave the Jewish Qahal (council of a Jewish self-governing community) a licence for the right to build their own interior walls across the western section of the already existing defensive walls. The walls were expanded again in 1608 due to the growth of the community and influx of Jews from Bohemia. In 1572, King Sigismund II, the last of the Jagiellons, died childless. The Polish throne passed to Henry III of France and then to other foreign-based rulers in rapid succession, causing a decline in the city's importance. Furthermore, in 1596, Sigismund III of the House of Vasa moved the administrative capital of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from Kraków to Warsaw. The city was destabilised by pillaging in the 1650s during the Swedish invasion, especially during the 1655 siege. Later in 1707, the city underwent an outbreak of bubonic plague that left 20,000 of the city's residents dead.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Already weakened during the 18th century, by the mid-1790s the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had twice been partitioned by its neighbors: Russia, the Habsburg empire and Prussia. In 1791, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II changed the status of Kazimierz as a separate city and made it into a district of Kraków. The richer Jewish families began to move out. However, because of the injunction against travel on the Sabbath, most Jewish families stayed relatively close to the historic synagogues. In 1794, Tadeusz Kościuszko initiated an unsuccessful insurrection in the town's Main Square which, in spite of his victorious Battle of Racławice against a numerically superior Russian army, resulted in the third and final partition of Poland.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1802, German became the town's official language. Of the members appointed by the Habsburgs to the municipal council only half were Polish. From 1796 to 1809, the population of the city rose from 22.000 to 26.000 with an increasing percentage of nobles and officials. In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte captured former Polish territories from Austria and made the town part of the Duchy of Warsaw. During the time of the Duchy of Warsaw, requirements to upkeep the Polish army followed by tours of Austrian, Polish and Russian troops, plus Russian occupation and a flood in the year 1813 all added up to the adverse development of the city with a high debt burden on public finances and many workshops and trading houses needing to close their activities. Following Napoleon's defeat, the 1815 Congress of Vienna restored the pre-war boundaries but also created the partially independent Free City of Kraków. An insurrection in 1846 failed, resulting in the city being annexed by Austria under the name the Grand Duchy of Kraków (Polish: Wielkie Księstwo Krakowskie, German: Großherzogtum Krakau).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "This Republic of Kraków (1815–1846) included the towns of Chrzanow, Trzebinia and Nowa Gora and 224 villages. Outside the city, mining and metallurgy started developing. The population of Cracow itself grew in this time from 23.000 to 43.000, the one in the Republic from 88.000 to 103.000. The population of the city had an increasing number of catholic clergy, officials and intelligentsia with which the rich townspeople sympathised. They were opposed to the conservative landed aristocracy who also were drawn more and more to the city real estates even though their income still mainly came from their agricultural possessions in the Republic, the Kingdom of Poland and Galicia. The percentage of the Jewish population in the city also increased in this time from 20.8% to 30.4%. A free trade zone led to positive economic development. But because of the unstable political situation and insecurity about the future, not much of the accumulated wealth was invested. Through the increase of taxes, customs and regulations, prices soared and the city fell into a recession. From 1844 to 1850 the population was diminished by over 4.000 inhabitants.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1866, Austria granted a degree of autonomy to Galicia after its own defeat in the Austro-Prussian War. Politically freer Kraków became a Polish national symbol and a centre of culture and art, known frequently as the \"Polish Athens\" (Polskie Ateny). Many leading Polish artists of the period resided in Kraków, among them the seminal painter Jan Matejko, laid to rest at Rakowicki Cemetery, and the founder of modern Polish drama, Stanisław Wyspiański. Fin de siècle Kraków evolved into a modern metropolis; running water and electric streetcars were introduced in 1901, and between 1910 and 1915, Kraków and its surrounding suburban communities were gradually combined into a single administrative unit called Greater Kraków (Wielki Kraków).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "At the outbreak of World War I on 3 August 1914, Józef Piłsudski formed a small cadre military unit, the First Cadre Company—the predecessor of the Polish Legions—which set out from Kraków to fight for the liberation of Poland. The city was briefly besieged by Russian troops in November 1914. Austrian rule in Kraków ended in 1918 when the Polish Liquidation Committee assumed power.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Following the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918, Kraków resumed its role as a major Polish academic and cultural centre, with the establishment of new universities such as the AGH University of Science and Technology and the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, including a number of new and essential vocational schools. The city became an important cultural centre for Polish Jews, including both Zionist and Bundist groups. Kraków was also an influential centre of Jewish spiritual life, with all its manifestations of religious observance - from Orthodox to Hasidic and Reform Judaism - flourishing side by side.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Following the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany in September 1939, the city of Kraków became part of the General Government, a separate administrative region of the Third Reich. On 26 October 1939, the Nazi régime set up Distrikt Krakau, one of a total of four districts within the General Government. On the same day, the city of Kraków also became the capital of the administration. The General Government was ruled by Governor-General Hans Frank, who was based in the city's Wawel Castle. The Nazis envisioned turning Kraków into a completely Germanised city; after removal of all the Jews and Poles, renaming of locations and streets into the German language, and sponsorship of propaganda trying to portray it as a historically German city. On 28 November 1939 Hans Frank set up Judenräte ('Jewish Councils') to be run by Jewish citizens for the purpose of carrying out orders for the Nazis. These orders included the registration of all Jewish people living in each area, the collection of taxes, and the formation of forced-labour groups. The Polish Home Army maintained a parallel underground administrative system.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On the eve of World War II some 56,000 Jews resided in Krakow, almost one-quarter of a total population of about 250,000. By November 1939, the Jewish population of Krakow had grown to approximately 70,000. According to German statistics from 1940, over 200,000 Jews lived within the entire Kraków District, comprising more than 5 percent of the total population in the district. These statistics, however, probably underestimate the situation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In November 1939, during an operation known as \"Sonderaktion Krakau\", the Germans arrested more than 180 university professors and academics and sent them to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, though the survivors were later released on the request of prominent Italians.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Before the formation of ghettos, which began in the Distrikt in December 1939, Jews were encouraged to flee the city. For those who remained the German authorities decided in March 1941 to allocate a then suburban neighborhood, Podgórze District, to become Kraków's ghetto - there many Jews would die of illness or starvation. Initially, most ghettos were open and Jews were allowed to enter and exit freely. However, with time ghettos were generally closed and security became tighter. From autumn 1941, the SS developed the policy of Extermination through labour, which further worsened the already bleak conditions for Jews. The ghetto inhabitants were later murdered or sent to German Extermination camps, including Bełżec and Auschwitz, and to Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. The largest deportations within the Distrikt occurred from June to September 1942. More specifically, the Kraków ghetto deportation occurred in the first week of June 1942, and in March 1943 the ghetto was definitely liquidated.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Roman Polanski, the film director, survived the Kraków ghetto. Oskar Schindler selected employees from the ghetto to work in his enamelware factory Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik (Emalia for short), saving them from the camps. Similarly, many men capable of physical labor were saved from the deportations to extermination camps and instead sent to labor camps across the General Government. By September 1943, the last of the Jews from the Kraków ghetto had been deported. Although looted by occupational authorities, Kraków remained relatively undamaged at the end of World War II, with most of the city's historical and architectural legacy spared. Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Ivan Konev entered the city on 18 January 1945, and began arresting Poles loyal to the Polish government-in-exile or those who had served in the Home Army.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After the war, under the Polish People's Republic (officially declared in 1952), the intellectual and academic community of Kraków came under complete political control. The universities were soon deprived of printing rights and autonomy. The Stalinist government of Poland ordered the construction of the country's largest steel mill in the newly created suburb of Nowa Huta. The creation of the giant Lenin Steelworks (now Sendzimir Steelworks owned by Mittal) sealed Kraków's transformation from a university city into an industrial centre. The new working-class population, drawn by the industrialization of Kraków, contributed to rapid growth.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In an effort that spanned two decades, Karol Wojtyła, cardinal archbishop of Kraków from 1964 to 1978, successfully lobbied for permission to build the first churches in the newly-industrial suburbs. In 1978 the Catholic Church elevated Wojtyła to the papacy as John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. In the same year, UNESCO, following the application of local authorities, placed Kraków Old Town on the first-ever list of World Heritage Sites.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Kraków lies in the southern part of Poland, on the Vistula River, 219 m (719 ft) above sea level; 230 km (143 mi) west from the border with Ukraine. The city is located on the border between different physiographic regions: Polish Uplands (Kraków-Częstochowa Upland in the north-western parts of the city and Małopolska Upland in the north-eastern parts of the city), Sandomierz Basin (eastern parts of the city) and Carpathians (Western Beskidian Foothills in the southern parts of the city).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "There are five nature reserves in Kraków, with a combined area of ca. 48.6 hectares (120 acres). Due to their ecological value, these areas are legally protected. The western part of the city, along its northern and north-western side, borders an area of international significance known as the Jurassic Bielany-Tyniec refuge. The main motives for the protection of this area include plant and animal wildlife and the area's geomorphological features and landscape. Another part of the city is located within the ecological 'corridor' of the Vistula River valley. This corridor is also assessed as being of international significance as part of the Pan-European ecological network. The city centre is situated on the left (northern) bank of the river.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Officially, Kraków has a temperate oceanic climate, denoted by Köppen classification as Cfb, best defined as a semicontinental climate. In older reference periods it was classified as a warm summer continental climate (Dfb). By classification of Wincenty Okołowicz, it has a warm temperate climate in the centre of continental Europe with the \"fusion\" of different features.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Due to its geographic location, the city may be under marine influence, sometimes Arctic influence, but without direct influence, giving the city variable meteorological conditions over short spaces of time.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Being towards Eastern Europe and a relatively considerable distance from the sea, Krakow has significant temperature differences according to the progress of different air masses, having four defined seasons of the year. Average temperatures in summer range from 18.6 to 20.4 °C (65 to 69 °F) and in winter from −0.6 to 0.8 °C (31 to 33 °F). The average annual temperature is 10.0 °C (50 °F). In summer temperatures often exceed 25 °C (77 °F), even reaching 30 °C (86 °F), while in winter temperatures drop to −5 °C (23 °F) at night and about 0 °C (32 °F) during the day. During very cold nights the temperature can drop to −15 °C (5 °F). The city lies near the Tatra Mountains, there are often occurrences of halny blowing (a foehn wind), causing temperatures to rise rapidly, and even in winter reach up to 20 °C (68 °F).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In relation to Warsaw, temperatures are very similar for most of the year, except that in the colder months southern Poland has a larger daily temperature range, more moderate winds, generally more rainy days and with greater chances of clear skies on average, especially in winter. The higher sun angle also allows for a longer growing season. In addition, for older data there was less sun than the capital of the country, about 30 minutes daily per year, but both have small differences in relative humidity and the direction of the winds is northeast.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The climate table below presents weather data from 2000 to 2012, although the official Köppen reference period was from 1981 to 2010 (therefore not being technically a climatological normal). According to ongoing measurements, the temperature has increased during these years as compared with the last series. This increase averages about 0.6 °C (1.1 °F) over all months. Warming is most pronounced during the winter months, with an increase of more than 1.0 °C (1.8 °F) in January.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Developed over many centuries, Kraków provides a showcase setting for many historic styles of architecture. As the city expanded, so too did the architectural achievements of its builders. It is for this reason that the variations in style and urban planning are so easily recognisable.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Built from its earliest nucleus outward, and having escaped much of the destruction endured by Poland during the 20th-century wars, Kraków's many architectural monuments can typically be seen in historical order by walking from the city centre out, towards its later districts. Kraków is one of the few medieval towns in Poland that does not have a historic Ratusz town hall in its Main Square, because it has not survived the Partitions of Poland.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kraków's historic centre, which includes the Old Town, Kazimierz and the Wawel Castle, was included as the first of its kind on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1978. The Stare Miasto is the most prominent example of an old town in the country. For many centuries Kraków was the royal capital of Poland, until Sigismund III Vasa relocated the court to Warsaw in 1596. The whole district is bisected by the Royal Road, the coronation route traversed by the Kings of Poland. The Route begins at St. Florian's Church outside the northern flank of the old city-walls in the medieval suburb of Kleparz; passes the Barbican of Kraków (Barbakan) built in 1499, and enters Stare Miasto through the Florian Gate. It leads down Floriańska Street through the Main Square, and up Grodzka to Wawel, the former seat of Polish royalty, overlooking the Vistula river. Old Town attracts visitors from all over the World. Kraków historic centre is one of the 13 places in Poland that are included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The architectural design of the district had survived all cataclysms of the past and retained its original form coming from the medieval times.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In addition to the old town, the city's district of Kazimierz is particularly notable for its many renaissance buildings and picturesque streets, as well as the historic Jewish quarter located in the north-eastern part of Kazimierz. Kazimierz was founded in the 14th century to the south-east of the city centre and soon became a wealthy, well-populated area where construction of imposing properties became commonplace. Perhaps the most important feature of medieval Kazimierz was the only major, permanent bridge (Pons Regalis) across the northern arm of the Vistula. This natural barrier used to separate Kazimierz from the Old Town for several centuries, while the bridge connected Kraków to the Wieliczka Salt Mine and the lucrative Hungarian trade route. The last structure at this location (at the end of modern Stradom Street) was dismantled in 1880 when the northern arm of the river was filled in with earth and rock, and subsequently built over.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "By the 1930s, Kraków had 120 officially registered synagogues and prayer houses that spanned across the old city. Much of Jewish intellectual life had moved to new centres like Podgórze. This, in turn, led to the redevelopment and renovation of much of Kazimierz and the development of new districts in Kraków. Most historic buildings in central Kazimierz today are preserved in their original form. Some old buildings, however, were not repaired after the devastation brought by the Second World War, and have remained empty. Most recent efforts at restoring the historic neighborhoods gained new impetus around 1993. Kazimierz is now a well-visited area, seeing a booming growth in Jewish-themed restaurants, bars, bookstores and souvenir shops.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "As the city of Kraków began to expand further under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the new architectural styles also developed. Key buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries in Kraków include the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, the directorate of the Polish State Railways as well as the original complex of Kraków Główny railway station and the city's Academy of Economics. It was also at around that time that Kraków's first radial boulevards began to appear, with the city undergoing a large-scale program aimed at transforming the ancient Polish capital into a sophisticated regional centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. New representative government buildings and multi-story tenement houses were built at around that time. Much of the urban-planning beyond the walls of the Old Town was done by Polish architects and engineers trained in Vienna. Some major projects of the era include the development of the Jagiellonian University's new premises and the building of the Collegium Novum just west of the Old Town. The imperial style planning of the city's further development continued until the return of Poland's independence, following the First World War. Early modernist style in Kraków is represented by such masterpieces as the Palace of Art by Franciszek Mączyński and the 'House under the Globe'. Secession style architecture, which had arrived in Kraków from Vienna, became popular towards the end of the Partitions.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "With Poland's regained independence came the major change in the fortunes of Kraków—now the second most important city of a sovereign nation. The state began to make new plans for the city development and commissioned a number of representative buildings. The predominant style for new projects was modernism with various interpretations of the art-deco style. Important buildings constructed in the style of Polish modernism include the Feniks 'LOT' building on Basztowa Street, the Feniks department store on the Main Square and the Municipal Savings Bank on Szczepański Square. The Józef Piłsudski house is also of note as a particularly good example of interwar architecture in the city.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After the Second World War, new government turned toward Soviet influence and the Stalinist monumentalism. The doctrine of Socialist realism in Poland, as in other countries of the People's Republics, was enforced from 1949 to 1956. It involved all domains of art, but its most spectacular achievements were made in the field of urban design. The guidelines for this new trend were spelled-out in a 1949 resolution of the National Council of Party Architects. Architecture was to become a weapon in establishing the new social order by the communists. The ideological impact of urban design was valued more than aesthetics. It aimed at expressing persistence and power. This form of architecture was implemented in the new industrial district of Nowa Huta with apartment blocks constructed according to a Stalinist blueprint, with repetitious courtyards and wide, tree-lined avenues.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Since the style of the Renaissance was generally regarded as the most revered in old Polish architecture, it was also used for augmenting Poland's Socialist national format. However, in the course of incorporating the principles of Socialist realism, there were quite a few deviations introduced by the communists. One of these was to more closely reflect Soviet architecture, which resulted in the majority of works blending into one another. From 1953, critical opinions in the Party were increasingly frequent, and the doctrine was given up in 1956 marking the end of Stalinism. The soc-realist centre of Nowa Huta is considered to be a meritorious monument of the times. This period in postwar architecture was followed by the mass-construction of large Panel System apartment blocks, most of which were built outside the city centre and thus do not encroach upon the beauty of the old or new towns. Some examples of the new style (e.g., Hotel Cracovia) recently listed as heritage monuments were built during the latter half of the 20th century in Kraków.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "After the Revolutions of 1989 and the birth of the Third Republic in the latter half of the 20th century, a number of new architectural projects were completed, including the construction of large business parks and commercial facilities such as the Galeria Krakowska, or infrastructure investments like the Kraków Fast Tram. A good example of this would be the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology designed by Arata Isozaki, the 2007-built Pawilon Wyspiański 2000, which is used as a multi-purpose information and exhibition space, or the Małopolski Garden of Arts (Małopolski Ogród Sztuki), a multi-purpose exhibition and theatre complex located in the historic Old Town.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "There are about 40 parks in Kraków including dozens of gardens and forests. Several, like the Planty Park, Botanical Garden, Zoological Garden, Royal Garden, Park Krakowski, Jordan Park and Błonia Park are located in the centre of the city; with Zakrzówek, Lasek Wolski forest, Strzelecki Park and Park Lotników (among others) in the surrounding districts. Parks cover about 318.5 hectares (787 acres), 1.2 sq mi) of the city.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Planty Park is the best-known park in Kraków. It was established between 1822 and 1830 in place of the old city walls, forming a green belt around the Old Town. It consists of a chain of smaller gardens designed in various styles and adorned with monuments. The park has an area of 21 hectares (52 acres) and a length of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi), forming a scenic walkway popular with Cracovians.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Jordan Park founded in 1889 by Henryk Jordan, was the first public park of its kind in Europe. The park built on the banks of the Rudawa river was equipped with running and exercise tracks, playgrounds, the swimming pool, amphitheatre, pavilions, and a pond for boat rowing and water bicycles. It is located on the grounds of a larger Kraków's Błonia Park. The less prominent Park Krakowski was founded in 1885 by Stanisław Rehman but has since been greatly reduced in size because of rapid real estate development. It was a popular destination point with many Cracovians at the end of the 19th century.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "There are five nature reserves in Kraków with a total area of 48.6 hectares (120 acres). Smaller green zones constitute parts of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland Jurassic Landscape Parks' Board, which deals with the protection areas of the Polish Jura. Under its jurisdiction are: the Bielany-Tyniec Landscape Park (Park Bielańsko-Tyniecki), Tenczynek Landscape Park (Park Tencziński) and Kraków Valleys Landscape Park (Park Krajobrazowy Dolinki Krakowskie), with their watersheds. All natural reserves of the Polish Jura Chain are part of the CORINE biotopes programme due to their unique flora, fauna, geomorphology and landscape. The western part of Kraków constitutes the so-called Obszar Krakowski ecological network, including the ecological corridor of the Vistula river. The southern slopes of limestone hills provide conditions for the development of thermophilous vegetation, grasslands and scrubs.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The city is spaced along an extended latitudinal transect of the Vistula River Valley with a network of tributaries including its right tributary Wilga, and left: Rudawa, Białucha, Dłubnia and Sanka. The rivers and their valleys along with bodies of water are some of the most interesting natural wonders of Kraków.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Kraków and its environment, surrounded by mountains, suffer from Europe's dirtiest air pollution because of smog, caused by burning coal for heating, especially in winter.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Kraków City Council has 43 elected members, one of whom is the mayor, or President of Kraków, elected every four years. The election of the City Council and of the local head of government, which takes place at the same time, is based on legislation introduced on 20 June 2002. The President of Kraków, re-elected for his fourth term in 2014, is Jacek Majchrowski. Several members of the Polish national Parliament (Sejm) are elected from the Kraków constituency. The city's official symbols include a coat of arms, a flag, a seal, and a banner.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The responsibilities of Kraków's president include drafting and implementing resolutions, enacting city bylaws, managing the city budget, employing city administrators, and preparing against floods and natural disasters. The president fulfills his duties with the help of the City Council, city managers and city inspectors. In the 1990s, the city government was reorganised to better differentiate between its political agenda and administrative functions. As a result, the Office of Public Information was created to handle inquiries and foster communication between city departments and citizens at large.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 2000, the city government introduced a new long-term program called \"Safer City\" in cooperation with the Police, Traffic, Social Services, Fire, Public Safety, and the Youth Departments. Subsequently, the number of criminal offences dropped by 3 percent between 2000 and 2001, and the rate of detection increased by 1.4 percent to a total of 30.2 percent in the same period. The city is receiving help in carrying out the program from all educational institutions and the local media, including TV, radio and the press.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kraków is divided into 18 administrative districts (dzielnica) or boroughs, each with a degree of autonomy within its own municipal government. Prior to March 1991, the city had been divided into four quarters which still give a sense of identity to Kraków – the towns of Podgórze, Nowa Huta, and Krowodrza which were amalgamated into the city of Kraków as it expanded, and the ancient town centre of Kraków itself.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The oldest neighborhoods of Kraków were incorporated into the city before the late-18th century. They include the Old Town (Stare Miasto), once contained within the city defensive walls and now encircled by the Planty park; the Wawel District, which is the site of the Royal Castle and the cathedral; Stradom and Kazimierz with its historic Jewish quarter, the latter originally divided into Christian and Jewish quarters; as well as the ancient town of Kleparz.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Major districts added in the 19th and 20th centuries include Podgórze, which until 1915, was a separate town on the southern bank of the Vistula, and Nowa Huta, east of the city centre, built after World War II.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Among the most notable historic districts of the city are: Wawel Hill, home to Wawel Castle and Wawel Cathedral, where many historic Polish kings are buried; the medieval Old Town, with its Main Market Square (200 metres (660 ft) square); dozens of old churches and museums; the 14th-century buildings of the Jagiellonian University; and Kazimierz, the historical centre of Kraków's Jewish social and religious life.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Old Town district of Kraków is home to about 6,000 historic sites and more than 2,000,000 works of art. Its rich variety of heritage architecture includes Romanesque (e.g., St. Andrew's Church, Kraków), Renaissance, Baroque and Gothic buildings. Kraków's palaces, churches, theatres and mansions display a great variety of color, architectural details, stained glass, paintings, sculptures, and furnishings.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In the Market Square stands the Gothic St. Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki). It was rebuilt in the 14th-century and features the famous wooden altar (Altarpiece of Veit Stoss), the largest Gothic altarpiece in the world, carved by Veit Stoss. From the church's main tower a trumpet call (hejnał mariacki), is sounded every hour. The melody, which used to announce the opening and closing of city gates, ends unexpectedly in midstream. According to legend, the tune was played during the 13th-century Tatar invasion by a guard warning citizens against the attack. He was shot by an archer of the invading Tatar forces whilst playing, the bugle call breaking off at the moment he died. The story was recounted in a book published in 1928 called The Trumpeter of Krakow, by Eric P. Kelly, which won a Newbery Award.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The current divisions were introduced by the Kraków City Hall on 19 April 1995. Districts were assigned Roman numerals as well as the name: Stare Miasto (I), Grzegórzki (II), Prądnik Czerwony (III), Prądnik Biały (IV), Łobzów (V), Bronowice (VI), Zwierzyniec (VII), Dębniki (VIII), Łagiewniki-Borek Fałęcki (IX), Swoszowice (X), Podgórze Duchackie (XI), Bieżanów-Prokocim (XII), Podgórze (XIII), Czyżyny (XIV), Mistrzejowice (XV), Bieńczyce (XVI), Wzgórza Krzesławickie (XVII), and Nowa Huta (XVIII).",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Map of districts of the City of Kraków",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Interactive map. For more information, click on district number.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Kraków is one of Poland's most important economic centres and the economic hub of the Lesser Poland (Małopolska) region. Since the fall of communism, the private sector has been growing steadily. There are about 50 large multinational companies in the city, including Google, Uber, IBM, Shell, UBS, HSBC, Motorola, Aptiv, MAN, General Electric, ABB, Aon, Akamai, Cisco, Hitachi, Altria, Capgemini, and Sabre Holdings, along with other British, German and Scandinavian-based firms. The city is also the global headquarters for Comarch, an enterprise software house. Kraków is the second most-visited city in Poland (after Warsaw). According to the World Investment Report 2011 by the UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Kraków is also the most emergent city location for investment in global BPO projects (Business Process Outsourcing) in the world.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In 2011, the city budget, which is presented by the Mayor of Kraków on 15 November annually, has a projected revenue of 3,500,000,000 złoty. The primary sources of revenue were as follows: 14% from the municipal taxation on real estate properties and the use of amenities, 30% in transfers from the national budget, and 34% in state subsidies. Projected expenditures, totaling 3,520,000,000 złoty, included 21% in city development costs and 79% in city maintenance costs. Of the maintenance costs, as much as 39% were spent on education and childcare. The City of Kraków's development costs included; 41% toward construction of roads, transport, and communication (combined), and 25% for the city's infrastructure and environment. The city has a high bond credit rating, and some 60% of the population is under the age of 45.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Unity Tower was completed in 2020 after almost 30 years, creating a new business and residential centre. It is the tallest building in the city.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Krakow has a long history of entrepreneurship, perhaps best reflected in the fact the most important square in the city is called the Main Market Square (Rynek Główny).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Since the early 2000s a startup community has emerged in Krakow, In the early days the Krakow: Europe's Silicon Valley web page was the on line hub of the community. Most important now is the OMGKRK foundation and its Facebook group which has over 6200 members and acted as a community notice board for the startup community.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Jan Thurzo, a Hungarian entrepreneur and mining engineer who was from 1477 an Alderman and later Mayor of Kraków. He established the Fugger–Thurzo company with Jakob Fugger. Fugger monopolised copper mining and trade in the Holy Roman Empire around 1500 and has been described as the richest man who has ever lived.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Michal Hornstein, born in Krakow, and a graduate of a Krakow Business School, escaped from a Nazi death camp transport. He moved to Montreal in 1951 where he founded Federal Construction Ltd., a real estate company focussing on apartments and shopping centres. He was recognised as a major philanthropist in Montreal and supported the arts, education and medicine, for example with this Gift of Old Masters to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Helena Rubinstein, born in Kraków, established the Helena Rubenstein inc. cosmetics company which was sold to Colgate Palmolive in 1973 for $142.3 million in stock and cash, and was said to be one of the world's richest women.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Janusz Filipiak established the successful IT company Comarch in 1993 which in 2018 employed 5500 people, and sponsors the Cracovia football team.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Piotr Wilam [pl] established the Pascal Publishing House, the internet portal Onet.pl and seed capital fund Innovation Nest.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Rafał Brzoska is the founder and CEO of InPost, which went public in January 2021 raising $3 billion.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Michał Borkowski founded Brainly in 2009, one of the world's leading peer to peer homework support networks with 300 million users.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Kraków is one of the co-location centres of Knowledge and Innovation Community (Sustainable Energy) of The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "InnoEnergy is an integrated alliance of reputable organisations from the education, research and industry sectors. It was created based on long standing links of cooperation as well as the principles of excellence. The partners have jointly developed a strategy to tackle the weaknesses of the European innovation landscape in the field of sustainable energy.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Public transport is based on a fairly dense network of tram and bus routes operated by a municipal company, supplemented by a number of private minibus operators. Local trains connect some of the suburbs. The bulk of the city's historic area has been turned into a pedestrian zone with rickshaws and horse-drawn carriages; however, the trams run within a three-block radius. The historic means of transportation in the city can be examined at the Museum of Municipal Engineering in the Kazimierz district, with many old trams, cars and buses.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Railway connections are available to most Polish cities, e.g. Katowice, Częstochowa, Szczecin, Gdynia and Warsaw. International destinations include Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Lviv, Kyiv, and Odesa (June–September). The main railway station is located just outside the Old Town District and is well-served by public transport.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Kraków's airport, officially named Kraków John Paul II International Airport (IATA: KRK), is located 11 km (7 mi) west of the city. Direct trains cover the route between Kraków Główny train station and the airport in 20 minutes. Kraków Airport served around 5,800,000 passengers in 2017. Also, the Katowice International Airport is located 80 kilometres (50 miles) or about 75 minutes from Kraków.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In Autumn 2016 Poland's oldest Bicycle-sharing system was modernized and now offers 1,500 bikes at 169 stations under the name of Wavelo (pl), which is owned by BikeU of the French multinational company Egis.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Kraków had a recorded population of 774,839 in 2019. Selected demographic indicators are presented in a table (below), compiled on the basis of only the population living in Kraków permanently. The larger metropolitan area of the city encompasses a territory in which (in 2010) 1,393,893 inhabitants live.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Already in the Middle Ages, the population of Kraków consisting of numerous ethnic groups, began to grow rapidly. It doubled between 1100 and 1300 from 5,000 to 10,000, and in 1400 counted 14,000 inhabitants. By 1550, the population of metropolitan Kraków was 18,000; although it decreased to 15,000 in the next fifty years due to calamity. By the early 17th century the Kraków population had reached 28,000 inhabitants.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In the historical 1931 census preceding World War II, 78.1% of Cracovians declared Polish as their primary language, with Yiddish or Hebrew at 20.9%, Ukrainian 0.4%, German 0.3%, and Russian 0.1%. The ravages of history have greatly reduced the percentage of ethnic minorities living in Kraków.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In the last two decades, Kraków has seen a large growth of immigrant population. In the 2002 census, only 0.25% of respondents living in the city declared a non-Polish nationality primarily Ukrainian and Russian. As of 2019, it was estimated that foreigners accounted for as much as 10% of the city's population, with Ukrainians being the most numerous group (between 11,000 and 50,000).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "The metropolitan city of Kraków is known as the city of churches. The abundance of landmark, historic temples along with the plenitude of monasteries and convents earned the city a countrywide reputation as the \"Northern Rome\" in the past. The churches of Kraków comprise over 120 places of worship (2007) of which over 65 were built in the 20th century. More are still being added. In addition to Roman Catholicism, other denominations present include Jehovah's Witnesses, Mariavite Church, Polish Catholic Church, Polish Orthodox Church, Protestantism and Latter-Day Saints.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "As of 2017, weekly Mass attendance in the Archdiocese of Krakow was 49.9 percent, above the national Polish average of 38.3 percent.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Kraków contains also an outstanding collection of monuments of Jewish sacred architecture unmatched anywhere in Poland. Kraków was an influential centre of Jewish spiritual life before the outbreak of World War II, with all its manifestations of religious observance from Orthodox to Hasidic and Reform flourishing side by side. There were at least 90 synagogues in Kraków active before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, serving its burgeoning Jewish community of 60,000–80,000 (out of the city's total population of 237,000), established since the early 12th century.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Most synagogues of Kraków were ruined during World War II by the Nazis who despoiled them of all ceremonial objects, and used them as storehouses for ammunition, firefighting equipment, as general storage facilities and stables. The post-Holocaust Jewish population of the city had dwindled to about 5,900 before the end of the 1940s. Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah (emigration to Israel) without visas or exit permits upon the conclusion of World War II. By contrast, Stalin forcibly kept Russian Jews in the Soviet Union, as agreed to in the Yalta Conference. In recent time, thanks to efforts of the local Jewish and Polish organisations including foreign financial aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, many synagogues underwent major restorations and serve religious and tourist purposes.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Kraków is a major centre of education. Twenty-four institutions of higher education offer courses in the city, with more than 200,000 students. Jagiellonian University, the oldest university in Poland and ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement as the second-best university in the country, was founded in 1364 as Studium Generale and renamed in 1817 to commemorate the royal Jagiellonian dynasty of Poland and Lithuania. Its principal academic asset is the Jagiellonian Library, with more than 4 million volumes, including a large collection of medieval manuscripts like Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and the Balthasar Behem Codex. With 42,325 students (2005) and 3,605 academic staff, the Jagiellonian University is also one of the leading research centres in Poland. Famous historical figures connected with the university include Saint John Cantius, Jan Długosz, Nicolaus Copernicus, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Jan Kochanowski, King John III Sobieski, Pope John Paul II and Nobel laureates Ivo Andrić and Wisława Szymborska.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "AGH University of Science and Technology, established in 1919, is the largest technical university in Poland, with more than 15 faculties and student enrollment exceeding 30,000. It was ranked by the Polish edition of Newsweek as the best technical university in the country in 2004. During its 80-year history, more than 73,000 students graduated from AGH with master's or bachelor's degrees. Some 3,600 persons were granted the degree of Doctor of Science, and about 900 obtained the qualification of Habilitated Doctor.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Other institutions of higher learning include Academy of Music in Kraków first conceived as conservatory in 1888, one of the oldest and most prestigious conservatories in Central Europe and a major concert venue; Kraków University of Economics, established in 1925; Pedagogical University, in operation since 1946; Agricultural University of Kraków, offering courses since 1890 (initially as a part of Jagiellonian University); Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest Fine Arts Academy in Poland, founded by the Polish painter Jan Matejko; Ludwik Solski Academy for the Dramatic Arts; The Pontifical Academy of Theology; AGH University of Science and Technology and Krakow University of Technology, which has more than 37,000 graduates.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Scientific societies and their branches in Kraków conduct scientific and educational work in local and countrywide scale. The Academy of Learning, Krakow Scientific Society, Association of Law Students' Library of the Jagiellonian University, Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists, Polish Geological Society, Polish Theological Society in Kraków, Polish Section of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and Polish Society for Synchrotron Radiation all have their main seats in Kraków.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Kraków was named the official European Capital of Culture for the year 2000 by the European Union. It is a major attraction for both local and international tourists, attracting nearly 13 million visitors a year. Major landmarks include the Main Market Square with St. Mary's Basilica and the Sukiennice Cloth Hall, the Wawel Castle, the National Art Museum, the Zygmunt Bell at the Wawel Cathedral, and the medieval St. Florian's Gate with the Barbican along the Royal Coronation Route. Kraków has 28 museums and public art galleries. Among them is the Czartoryski Museum featuring works by Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt as well as the EUROPEUM - European Culture Centre and the Archaeological Museum of Kraków whose collection highlights include the Zbruch Idol and the Bronocice Pot.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Kraków's 28 museums are separated into the national and municipal museums; the city also has a number of art collections and public art galleries. The National Museum, established in 1879, as well as the National Art Collection on Wawel Hill, are all accessible to the general public.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The National Art Collection is located at the Wawel, the former residence of three dynasties of Polish monarchs. Royal Chambers feature art, period furniture, Polish and European paintings, collectibles, and a major collection of 16th-century monumental Flemish tapestries. Wawel Treasury and Armoury features Polish royal memorabilia, jewels, applied art, and 15th- to 18th-century arms. The Wawel Eastern Collection features Turkish tents and military accessories. The National Museum holds the largest body of artworks in the country with collections consisting of several hundred thousand items kept in big part in the Main Building at Ul. 3 Maja, although there are eleven other separate divisions of the museum in the city, one of the most popular being The Gallery of the 19th Century Polish Art in Sukiennice with the collection of some of the best known paintings and sculptures of the Young Poland movement. The latest division called Europeum with Brueghel among a hundred Western European paintings was inaugurated in 2013.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Other notable museums in Kraków include the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology (at M. Konopnickiej 26), Stanisław Wyspiański Museum (at 11 Szczepanska St), Jan Matejko Manor House in Krzesławice, – a museum devoted to the master painter and his life, Emeryk Hutten Czapski Museum, and Józef Mehoffer Manor.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The Rynek Underground museum, under the main square, showcases Kraków's over 1,000-year history though its streets, activities and artifacts. The construction of the museum was preceded by extensive excavations which started in 2005 and, as more and more was found, continued eventually until 2010.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Krakil - Museum of illusions is a space where illusions meet scientific inventions and the arts: physics and optics are displayed together with artworks and classical riddles.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The Polish Aviation Museum, considered the world's eighth best aviation museum by CNN, features over 200 aircraft including a Sopwith Camel among other First World War biplanes; a comprehensive display of aero engines; and a complete collection of airplane types developed by Poland after 1945. Activities of smaller museums around Kraków and in the Lesser Poland region are promoted and supported by the Małopolska Institute of Culture; the Institute organises annual Małopolska Heritage Days. The Lenin Museum was open from 1954 to 1989.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The city has several famous theatres, including the Narodowy Stary Teatr (the National Old Theatre), the Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, the Bagatela Theatre, the Ludowy Theatre, and the Groteska Theatre of Puppetry, as well as the Opera Krakowska and Kraków Operetta. The city's principal concert hall and the home of the Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra is the Kraków Philharmonic (Filharmonia Krakowska) built in 1931.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Kraków hosts many annual and biannual artistic events, some of international significance such as the Misteria Paschalia (Baroque music), Sacrum-Profanum (contemporary music), the Krakow Screen Festival (popular music), the Festival of Polish Music (classical music), Dedications (theatre), the Kraków Film Festival (one of Europe's oldest short films events), Etiuda&Anima International Film Festival (the oldest international art-film event in Poland), Biennial of Graphic Arts, and the Jewish Culture Festival. Kraków was the residence of two Polish Nobel laureates in literature, Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz; a third Nobel laureate, the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric, lived and studied in Kraków. Other former longtime residents include internationally renowned Polish film directors Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, both of whom are Academy Award winners.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Opera Krakowska one of the leading national opera companies, stages 200 performances each year including ballet, operettas and musicals. It has, in its main repertoire, the greatest world and Polish opera classics. The Opera moved into its first permanent House in the autumn of 2008. It is in charge also of the Summer Festival of Opera and Operetta.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Kraków is home to two major Polish festivals of early music presenting forgotten Baroque oratorios and operas: Opera Rara, and Misteria Paschalia. Meanwhile, Capella Cracoviensis runs the Music in Old Krakow International Festival.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Academy of Music in Kraków, founded in 1888, is known worldwide as the alma mater of the contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and it is also the only one in Poland to have two winners of the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw among its alumni. The academy organises concerts of its students and guests throughout the whole year.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Music organisations and venues include: Kraków Philharmonic, Sinfonietta Cracovia (a.k.a. the Orchestra of the Royal City of Kraków), the Polish Radio Choir of Kraków, Organum Academic Choir, the Mixed Mariański Choir (Mieszany Chór Mariański), Kraków Academic Choir of the Jagiellonian University, the Kraków Chamber Choir, Amar Corde String Quartet, Consortium Iagellonicum Baroque Orchestra of the Jagiellonian University, Brass Band of T. Sendzimir Steelworks, and Camerata Chamber Orchestra of Radio Kraków.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "According to official statistics, in 2019 Kraków was visited by over 14 million tourists including 3.3 million foreign travellers. The visitors spent over 7.5 billion zlotys (ca. €1.7 billion) in the city (without travel costs and pre-booked accommodation). Most foreign tourists came from Germany (14.2%), United Kingdom (13.9%), Italy (11.5%), France (11.2%), Spain (10.4%) and Ukraine (5.4%). The Kraków tour-guide from the Lesser Poland Visitors Bureau indicated that not all statistics are recorded due to the considerable number of those who come, staying in readily available private rooms paid for by cash, especially from Eastern Europe.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The main reasons for visiting the city are: its historical monuments, recreation as well as relatives and friends (placing third in the ranking), religion and business. There are 120 quality hotels in Kraków (usually about half full) offering 15,485 overnight accommodations. The average stay last for about 4 to 7 nights. The survey conducted among the travelers showed that they enjoyed the city's friendliness most, with 90% of Polish tourists and 87% foreigners stating that they would recommend visiting it. Notable points of interest outside the city include the Wieliczka salt mine, the Tatra Mountains 100 km (62 mi) to the south, the historic city of Częstochowa (north-west), the well-preserved former Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, and Ojcowski National Park, which includes the Renaissance Castle at Pieskowa Skała. Kraków has been awarded a number of top international rankings such as the 1st place in the Top city-break destinations 2014 survey conducted by the British consumer association Which?.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Kraków was the host city of the 2014 FIVB Men's Volleyball World Championship and 2016 European Men's Handball Championship. It has also been selected as the European City of Sport for 2014.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Football is one of the most popular sports in the city. The two teams with the largest following are thirteen-time Polish champion Wisła Kraków, and five-time champion Cracovia, both founded in 1906 as the oldest still existing in Poland. They have been involved in the most intense rivalry in the country and one of the most intense in all of Europe, known as the Holy War (Święta Wojna). Other football clubs include Hutnik Kraków, Wawel Kraków, Wieczysta Kraków and one-time Polish champion Garbarnia Kraków. There is also the first-league rugby club Juvenia Kraków. Kraków has a number of additional, equally valued sports teams including twelve-time Polish ice hockey champions Cracovia and the twenty-time women's basketball champions Wisła Kraków.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The Cracovia Marathon, with thousands of participants from two dozen countries annually, has been held in the city since 2002. Poland's first F1 racing driver Robert Kubica was born and brought up in Kraków, as was former WWE tag team champion Ivan Putski, and Top 10 ranked women's tennis player Agnieszka Radwańska.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The construction of a new Tauron Arena Kraków began in May 2010; for concerts, indoor athletics, hockey, basketball, futsal and other events. The facility area has 61,434 m, with maximum area of the arena court of 4 546 m. The average capacity is 18,000 for concerts, and 15,000 for sport events, with maximum number of spectators being 22,000. The Arena boasts Poland's largest LED media façade, with a total surface of 5,200 m of LED strip lighting, wrapping around the stadium, and one of Europe's largest LED screens, measuring over 540 m.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Kraków was bidding to host the 2022 Winter Olympics with Jasná but the bid was rejected by a majority (69.72%) of the vote in a referendum on 16 May 2014. The referendum was organised after a wave of criticism from citizens who believed that the Olympics would not promote the city. The organizing committee of \"Krakow 2022\" spent almost $40,000 to pay for a citizen-approved logo, but many citizens considered this a waste of public money. The committee was rumoured to have fraudulently used several million zlotys for unknown expenses.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "In May 2019, the Polish Olympic Committee announced Kraków as host of the Polish bid for the 2023 European Games, On 22 June 2019, The European Olympic Committees at the General Assembly in Minsk, Belarus announced that Kraków will host the 2023 edition.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Kraków is referred to by various names in different languages. An old English name for the city is Cracow; though it has become less common in recent decades, some sources still use it. The city is known in Czech, Slovak and Serbian as Krakov, in Hungarian as Krakkó, in Lithuanian as Krokuva, in Finnish as Krakova, in German and Dutch as Krakau, in Latin, Spanish and Italian as Cracovia, in French as Cracovie, in Portuguese as Cracóvia and in Russian as Краков. Ukrainian and Yiddish languages refer to it as Krakiv (Краків) and Kroke (קראָקע) respectively.",
"title": "International relations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Kraków is twinned, or maintains close relations, with 36 cities around the world:",
"title": "International relations"
}
] |
Kraków, Cracow in English, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, economic, cultural and artistic life. Cited as one of Europe's most beautiful cities, its Old Town with Wawel Royal Castle was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, one of the world's first sites granted the status. The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland's second-most-important city. It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was reported by Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a 10th-century merchant from Córdoba, as a busy trading centre of Central Europe in 985. With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic centre. As of 2023, the city has a population of 804,237, with approximately 8 million additional people living within a 100 km (62 mi) radius of its main square. After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, the newly defined Distrikt Krakau became the capital of Germany's General Government. The Jewish population of the city was forced into a walled zone known as the Kraków Ghetto, from where they were sent to Nazi extermination camps such as the nearby Auschwitz, and Nazi concentration camps like Płaszów. However, the city was spared from destruction and major bombing. In 1978, Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elevated to the papacy as Pope John Paul II—the first non-Italian pope in 455 years. Also that year, UNESCO approved Kraków's entire Old Town and historic centre and the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine as Poland's first World Heritage Sites. Kraków is classified as a global city with the ranking of "high sufficiency" by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Its extensive cultural heritage across the epochs of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture includes Wawel Cathedral and Wawel Royal Castle on the banks of the Vistula, St. Mary's Basilica, Saints Peter and Paul Church and the largest medieval market square in Europe, Rynek Główny. Kraków is home to Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest universities in the world and traditionally Poland's most reputable institution of higher learning. The city also hosts a number of institutions of national significance such as the National Museum, Kraków Opera, Juliusz Słowacki Theatre, National Stary Theatre and the Jagiellonian Library. The city is served by John Paul II International Airport, the country's second busiest airport and the most important international airport for the inhabitants of south-eastern Poland. In 2000, Kraków was named European Capital of Culture. In 2013, Kraków was officially approved as a UNESCO City of Literature. The city hosted World Youth Day in 2016 and the European Games in 2023.
|
2001-09-08T18:36:08Z
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2023-12-30T14:20:50Z
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Kora (instrument)
|
The kora (Manding languages: ߞߐߙߊ kɔra) is a stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp.
The kora is built from gourd, cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator with a long hardwood neck. The skin is supported by two handles that run underneath it. It has 21 strings, each of which plays a different note. These strings are supported by a notched, double free-standing bridge. The kora doesn't fit into any one category of musical instrument, but rather several, and must be classified as a "double-bridge-harp-lute." The strings run in two divided ranks, characteristic of a double harp. They do not end in a soundboard but are instead held in notches on a bridge, classifying it as a bridge harp. The strings originate from a string arm or neck and cross a bridge directly supported by a resonating chamber, also making it a lute.
The sound of a kora resembles that of a harp, though when played in the traditional style it bears resemblance to a guitar played using the flamenco or Delta blues technique of plucking polyrhythmic patterns with both hands (using the remaining fingers to secure the instrument by holding the hand posts on either side of the strings). Ostinato riffs ("kumbengo") and improvised solo runs ("birimintingo") are played at the same time by skilled players.
Kora players have traditionally come from jali families (also from the Mandinka tribes) who are traditional historians, genealogists and storytellers who pass their skills on to their descendants. Though played in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Senegal, the instrument was first discovered in the Gambia. While those from neighbouring Guinea were known to carry the lute, Senegalese Griots were known as carriers of a hand drum known as the 'sabar'. Most West African musicians prefer the term "jali" to "griot," which is the French word. "Jali" means something similar to a "bard" or oral historian.
Traditional koras feature strings, eleven played by the left hand and ten by the right. Modern koras made in the Casamance region of southern Senegal sometimes feature additional bass strings, adding up to four strings to the traditional 21. Strings were traditionally made from thin strips of hide, such as cow or antelope skin. Today, most strings are made from harp strings or nylon fishing line, sometimes plaited together to create thicker strings.
A vital accessory in the past was the nyenmyemo, a leaf-shaped plate of tin or brass with wire loops threaded around the edge. Clamped to the bridge, or the top end of the neck it produced sympathetic sounds, serving as an amplifier since the sound carried well into the open air. In today's environment, players usually prefer or need an electronic pickup.
By moving the konso (a system of leather tuning rings) up and down the neck, a kora player can retune the instrument into one of four seven-note scales. These scales are close in tuning to western major, minor and Lydian modes.
In the 1300s, the traveller Ibn Battuta mentioned that the women who accompanied Dugha to perform were carrying bows that they plucked. He did not mention the number of strings, but this clearly shows the existence of harp instruments in 14th century Mali and could be the earliest written reference to the kora. The kora is designed like a bow with a gourd, similarly to Ibn Battuta's description, but Battuta did not go into enough detail about the instruments for them to be identifiable. The earliest European reference to the kora in Western literature is in Travels in Interior Districts of Africa (1799) by the Scotsman Mungo Park. The most likely scenario, based on Mandinka oral tradition, suggests that the origins of the kora may ultimately be linked with Jali Mady Fouling Cissoko, some time after the founding of Kaabu in the 16th century.
The kora is mentioned in the Senegalese national anthem "Pincez Tous vos Koras, Frappez les Balafons."
Nowadays, koras are increasingly made with guitar machine heads instead of the traditional konso (leather rings). The advantage is that they are much easier to tune. The disadvantage is that this design limits the tuning range of the instrument because string lengths are more fixed and lighter strings are needed to lift it much more than a tone. Learning to tune a traditional kora is arguably as difficult as learning to play it, and many tourists who are entranced by the sound while in West Africa buy koras and then find themselves unable to keep it in tune once they are home, relegating it to the status of ornament. Koras can be converted to replace the leather rings with machine heads. Wooden pegs and harp pegs are also used, but both can still cause tuning problems in damper climates unless made with great skill.
In the late 20th century, a 25-string model of the kora was developed, though it has been adopted by only a few players, primarily in the region of Casamance, in southern Senegal. Some kora players such as Seckou Keita have double necked koras, allowing them to switch from one tuning to another within seconds, giving them increased flexibility.
The French Benedictine monks of the Keur Moussa Abbey in Senegal (who possibly were the first to introduce guitar machine heads instead of leather rings in the late seventies) conceived a method based on scores to teach the instrument. Brother Dominique Catta, choirmaster of the Keur Moussa Abbey, was the first Western composer who wrote for the kora (solo pieces as well as duets with Western instruments).
An electric instrument modeled on the kora (but made primarily of metal) called the gravikord was invented in the late 20th century by instrument builder and musician Robert Grawi. It has 24 strings and is tuned and played differently than the kora. Another instrument, the gravi-kora, a 21-stringed electro-acoustic instrument, was later developed by Robert Grawi especially for kora players who wanted a modern instrument. Its playing and tuning are the same as the traditional kora. The gravi-kora has been adopted by kora players such as Daniel Berkman, Jacques Burtin, and Foday Musa Suso, who featured it in recordings with jazz innovator Herbie Hancock, with his band Mandingo, and on Suso's New World Power album.
As part of the oral tradition of West Africa, music for the kora was not written until the 20th century. Ethnomusicologists were the only ones to record some traditional airs in the normal grand staff method, using the G clef and the F clef.
Today, kora scores are written on a single G clef, following the Keur Moussa notation system. This notation system was created for the kora in the late 1970s by Brother Dominique Catta, a monk of the Keur Moussa Monastery (Senegal). The seven low notes that should be written on the F clef are replaced by Arabic or Roman numerals and written on the G clef.
While jali still compose in the traditional way (without writing scores), some Western musicians began to write partitures for the kora and adopted the Keur Moussa notation system at the beginning of the 1980s. More than 200 scores have already been written for kora solo or kora and Western instruments. Two notable Western composers for the kora are Brother Dominique Catta and Jacques Burtin (France), who wrote most of these scores, though composers like Carole Ouellet (Canada), Brother Grégoire Philippe (Monastère de Keur Moussa) and Sister Claire Marie Ledoux (France) have also contributed with their own original works.
Derek Gripper (Cape Town, South Africa) has transcribed a number of West African kora compositions by Toumani Diabaté and others for performance on western-style classical guitar, and has performed some of these transcriptions on two recordings and in concert from 2012 through 2017.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The kora (Manding languages: ߞߐߙߊ kɔra) is a stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The kora is built from gourd, cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator with a long hardwood neck. The skin is supported by two handles that run underneath it. It has 21 strings, each of which plays a different note. These strings are supported by a notched, double free-standing bridge. The kora doesn't fit into any one category of musical instrument, but rather several, and must be classified as a \"double-bridge-harp-lute.\" The strings run in two divided ranks, characteristic of a double harp. They do not end in a soundboard but are instead held in notches on a bridge, classifying it as a bridge harp. The strings originate from a string arm or neck and cross a bridge directly supported by a resonating chamber, also making it a lute.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The sound of a kora resembles that of a harp, though when played in the traditional style it bears resemblance to a guitar played using the flamenco or Delta blues technique of plucking polyrhythmic patterns with both hands (using the remaining fingers to secure the instrument by holding the hand posts on either side of the strings). Ostinato riffs (\"kumbengo\") and improvised solo runs (\"birimintingo\") are played at the same time by skilled players.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kora players have traditionally come from jali families (also from the Mandinka tribes) who are traditional historians, genealogists and storytellers who pass their skills on to their descendants. Though played in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali and Senegal, the instrument was first discovered in the Gambia. While those from neighbouring Guinea were known to carry the lute, Senegalese Griots were known as carriers of a hand drum known as the 'sabar'. Most West African musicians prefer the term \"jali\" to \"griot,\" which is the French word. \"Jali\" means something similar to a \"bard\" or oral historian.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Traditional koras feature strings, eleven played by the left hand and ten by the right. Modern koras made in the Casamance region of southern Senegal sometimes feature additional bass strings, adding up to four strings to the traditional 21. Strings were traditionally made from thin strips of hide, such as cow or antelope skin. Today, most strings are made from harp strings or nylon fishing line, sometimes plaited together to create thicker strings.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A vital accessory in the past was the nyenmyemo, a leaf-shaped plate of tin or brass with wire loops threaded around the edge. Clamped to the bridge, or the top end of the neck it produced sympathetic sounds, serving as an amplifier since the sound carried well into the open air. In today's environment, players usually prefer or need an electronic pickup.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "By moving the konso (a system of leather tuning rings) up and down the neck, a kora player can retune the instrument into one of four seven-note scales. These scales are close in tuning to western major, minor and Lydian modes.",
"title": "Description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 1300s, the traveller Ibn Battuta mentioned that the women who accompanied Dugha to perform were carrying bows that they plucked. He did not mention the number of strings, but this clearly shows the existence of harp instruments in 14th century Mali and could be the earliest written reference to the kora. The kora is designed like a bow with a gourd, similarly to Ibn Battuta's description, but Battuta did not go into enough detail about the instruments for them to be identifiable. The earliest European reference to the kora in Western literature is in Travels in Interior Districts of Africa (1799) by the Scotsman Mungo Park. The most likely scenario, based on Mandinka oral tradition, suggests that the origins of the kora may ultimately be linked with Jali Mady Fouling Cissoko, some time after the founding of Kaabu in the 16th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The kora is mentioned in the Senegalese national anthem \"Pincez Tous vos Koras, Frappez les Balafons.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Nowadays, koras are increasingly made with guitar machine heads instead of the traditional konso (leather rings). The advantage is that they are much easier to tune. The disadvantage is that this design limits the tuning range of the instrument because string lengths are more fixed and lighter strings are needed to lift it much more than a tone. Learning to tune a traditional kora is arguably as difficult as learning to play it, and many tourists who are entranced by the sound while in West Africa buy koras and then find themselves unable to keep it in tune once they are home, relegating it to the status of ornament. Koras can be converted to replace the leather rings with machine heads. Wooden pegs and harp pegs are also used, but both can still cause tuning problems in damper climates unless made with great skill.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the late 20th century, a 25-string model of the kora was developed, though it has been adopted by only a few players, primarily in the region of Casamance, in southern Senegal. Some kora players such as Seckou Keita have double necked koras, allowing them to switch from one tuning to another within seconds, giving them increased flexibility.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The French Benedictine monks of the Keur Moussa Abbey in Senegal (who possibly were the first to introduce guitar machine heads instead of leather rings in the late seventies) conceived a method based on scores to teach the instrument. Brother Dominique Catta, choirmaster of the Keur Moussa Abbey, was the first Western composer who wrote for the kora (solo pieces as well as duets with Western instruments).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "An electric instrument modeled on the kora (but made primarily of metal) called the gravikord was invented in the late 20th century by instrument builder and musician Robert Grawi. It has 24 strings and is tuned and played differently than the kora. Another instrument, the gravi-kora, a 21-stringed electro-acoustic instrument, was later developed by Robert Grawi especially for kora players who wanted a modern instrument. Its playing and tuning are the same as the traditional kora. The gravi-kora has been adopted by kora players such as Daniel Berkman, Jacques Burtin, and Foday Musa Suso, who featured it in recordings with jazz innovator Herbie Hancock, with his band Mandingo, and on Suso's New World Power album.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "",
"title": "Scores"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "As part of the oral tradition of West Africa, music for the kora was not written until the 20th century. Ethnomusicologists were the only ones to record some traditional airs in the normal grand staff method, using the G clef and the F clef.",
"title": "Scores"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Today, kora scores are written on a single G clef, following the Keur Moussa notation system. This notation system was created for the kora in the late 1970s by Brother Dominique Catta, a monk of the Keur Moussa Monastery (Senegal). The seven low notes that should be written on the F clef are replaced by Arabic or Roman numerals and written on the G clef.",
"title": "Scores"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "While jali still compose in the traditional way (without writing scores), some Western musicians began to write partitures for the kora and adopted the Keur Moussa notation system at the beginning of the 1980s. More than 200 scores have already been written for kora solo or kora and Western instruments. Two notable Western composers for the kora are Brother Dominique Catta and Jacques Burtin (France), who wrote most of these scores, though composers like Carole Ouellet (Canada), Brother Grégoire Philippe (Monastère de Keur Moussa) and Sister Claire Marie Ledoux (France) have also contributed with their own original works.",
"title": "Scores"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Derek Gripper (Cape Town, South Africa) has transcribed a number of West African kora compositions by Toumani Diabaté and others for performance on western-style classical guitar, and has performed some of these transcriptions on two recordings and in concert from 2012 through 2017.",
"title": "Scores"
}
] |
The kora is a stringed instrument used extensively in West Africa. A kora typically has 21 strings, which are played by plucking with the fingers. It combines features of the lute and harp.
|
2001-09-10T17:24:36Z
|
2023-12-18T21:51:25Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kora_(instrument)
|
16,820 |
Kathleen Kenyon
|
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, DBE, FBA, FSA (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
Kathleen Kenyon was born in London, England, in 1906. She was the eldest daughter of Sir Frederic Kenyon, biblical scholar and later director of the British Museum. Her grandfather was lawyer and Fellow of All Souls College, John Robert Kenyon, and her great-great-grandfather was the politician and lawyer Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon. She grew up in Bloomsbury, London, in a house attached to the British Museum, with her mother, Amy Kenyon, and sister Nora Kenyon. Known for being hard-headed and stubborn, Kathleen grew up as a tomboy, fishing, climbing trees and playing a variety of sports.
Determined that she and her sister should be well educated, Kathleen's father encouraged wide reading and independent study. In later years Kenyon would remark that her father's position at the British Museum was particularly helpful for her education. Kathleen was an excellent student, winning awards at school and particularly excelling in history. She studied first at St Paul's Girls' School, where she was Head Girl, before winning an Exhibition to read history at Somerville College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Kenyon won a Blue for her college in hockey and became the first female president of the Oxford University Archaeological Society. She graduated in 1929 and began a career in archaeology.
Although working on several important sites across Europe, it was her excavations in Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) in the 1950s that established her as one of the foremost archaeologists in the field. In 1962, Kenyon was made Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. She retired in 1973 to Erbistock and was appointed a DBE. Kenyon never married. From 1974, Kenyon was the Honorary Vice President of the Chester Archaeological Society.
A career in archaeology was first suggested to Kathleen by Margery Fry, librarian at Somerville College. After graduation Kenyon's first field experience was as a photographer for the pioneering excavations at Great Zimbabwe in 1929, led by Gertrude Caton-Thompson. Returning to England, Kenyon joined the archaeological couple Tessa Wheeler and her husband Mortimer Wheeler on their excavation of the Romano-British settlement of Verulamium (St Albans), 20 miles North of London. Working there each summer between 1930 and 1935, Kenyon learned from Mortimer Wheeler the discipline of meticulously controlled and recorded stratigraphic excavation. Wheeler entrusted her with the direction of the excavation of the Roman theatre.
In the years 1931 to 1934, Kenyon worked simultaneously at Samaria, then under the administration of the British Mandate for Palestine, with John and Grace Crowfoot. There she cut a stratigraphic trench across the summit of the mound and down the Northern and Southern slopes, exposing the Iron II to the Roman period stratigraphic sequence of the site. In addition to providing crucial dating material for the Iron Age stratigraphy of Palestine, she obtained key stratified data for the study of Eastern terra sigilata ware.
In 1934, Kenyon was closely associated with the Wheelers in the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. From 1936 to 1939, she carried out important excavations at the Jewry Wall in the city of Leicester. These were published in the Illustrated London News 1937 with pioneering reconstruction drawings by the artist Alan Sorrell whom she had happened to notice sketching her dig.
In the years leading up to the Second World War work in the Middle East became increasingly difficult, so she excavated in Leicester, on the site of the Roman bath complex. Although she was reluctant to abandon the view that she was uncovering a Roman Forum.
During the Second World War, Kenyon served as Divisional Commander of the Red Cross in Hammersmith, London, and later as acting director and Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London.
After the war, she excavated in Southwark, at The Wrekin, Shropshire and elsewhere in Britain, as well as at Sabratha, a Roman city in Libya. As a member of the Council of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ), Kenyon was involved in the efforts to reopen the School after the hiatus of the Second World War. In January 1951 she travelled to the Transjordan and undertook excavations in the West Bank at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) on behalf of the BSAJ. The initial findings were first viewed by the public in the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain 1951 with a reconstruction drawing by Alan Sorrell. Her work at Jericho, from 1952 until 1958, made her world-famous and established a lasting legacy in the archaeological methodology of the Levant. Ground-breaking discoveries concerning the Neolithic cultures of the Levant were made in this ancient settlement. Her excavation of the Early Bronze Age walled city and the external cemeteries of the end of the Early Bronze Age, together with her analysis of the stratified pottery of these periods established her as the leading authority on that period. Kenyon focused her attention on the absence of certain Cypriot pottery at City IV, arguing for an older destruction date than that of her predecessors. Jericho was recognized as the oldest continuously occupied settlement in history because of her discoveries. At the same time she also completed the publication of the excavations at Samaria. Her volume, Samaria Sebaste III: The Objects, appeared in 1957. Having completed her excavations at Tell es-Sultan in 1958, Kenyon excavated in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967, concentrating on the 'City of David' to the immediate south of the Temple Mount.
Although Kenyon had no doubt the sites she excavated were linked to the Old Testament narrative, she nevertheless drew attention to inconsistencies, concluding that Solomon's "stables" at Megiddo were totally impractical for holding horses (1978:72), and that Jericho fell long before Joshua's arrival (1978:35). Consequently, Kenyon's work has been cited to support the Minimalist School of Biblical Archaeology.
Kenyon's legacy in the field of excavation technique and ceramic methodology is attested to by Larry G. Herr, one of the directors of the Madaba Plains Project. He attributes to her directly the first of the key events (after the advances made by William F. Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim in the 1920s) that brought about our modern understanding of pottery in the southern Levant:
"The first event was the refinement of stratigraphic techniques that Kathleen Kenyon's dig at Jericho catalyzed. The strict separation of earth layers, or archaeological sediments, also allowed the strict separation of ceramic assemblages".
Herr detects Kenyon's powerful indirect influence in the second event that promoted advance within ceramic methodology, namely:
"the importation of Kenyon's digging techniques by Larry Toombs and Joe Callaway to Ernest Wright's project at Balata. Here, they combined Wright's interest in ceramic typology in the best Albright tradition with Kenyon's methods of excavation, which allowed the isolation of clear, stratigraphically determined pottery assemblages".
Herr summarises the somewhat mixed nature of Kenyon's legacy: for all the positive advances, there were also shortcomings:
"Kenyon... did not capitalize fully on (the) implication of her stratigraphic techniques by producing final publications promptly. Indeed her method of digging, which most of us have subsequently adopted, causes a proliferation of loci that excavators often have difficulty keeping straight long enough to produce coherent published stratigraphic syntheses. Moreover, her insistence that excavation proceed in narrow trenches denies us, when we use the Jericho reports, the confidence that her loci, and the pottery assemblages that go with them, represent understandable human activity patterns over coherently connected living areas. The individual layers, insufficiently exposed horizontally, simply cannot be interpreted credibly in terms of function. This further makes publication difficult, both to produce and to use".
From 1948 to 1962, she lectured in Levantine Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Kenyon's teaching complemented her excavations at Jericho Jericho and Jerusalem. In 1962, she was appointed Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford.
In the 1973 New Year Honours, following her retirement from Oxford, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) "for services to archaeology". She was an elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). She was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Independence by the King of Jordan in 1977.
The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, amalgamated within the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in 1998, was officially renamed the Kenyon Institute on 10 July 2003 in honour of Kathleen Kenyon.
The Kathleen Kenyon Archaeology Collection, a collection of Kenyon's books and papers purchased from her estate in 1984, is housed at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
The finds from her excavations are held in a number of collections, including the British Museum, the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, while the bulk of archive material is located at the Manchester Museum.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, DBE, FBA, FSA (5 January 1906 – 24 August 1978) was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kathleen Kenyon was born in London, England, in 1906. She was the eldest daughter of Sir Frederic Kenyon, biblical scholar and later director of the British Museum. Her grandfather was lawyer and Fellow of All Souls College, John Robert Kenyon, and her great-great-grandfather was the politician and lawyer Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon. She grew up in Bloomsbury, London, in a house attached to the British Museum, with her mother, Amy Kenyon, and sister Nora Kenyon. Known for being hard-headed and stubborn, Kathleen grew up as a tomboy, fishing, climbing trees and playing a variety of sports.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Determined that she and her sister should be well educated, Kathleen's father encouraged wide reading and independent study. In later years Kenyon would remark that her father's position at the British Museum was particularly helpful for her education. Kathleen was an excellent student, winning awards at school and particularly excelling in history. She studied first at St Paul's Girls' School, where she was Head Girl, before winning an Exhibition to read history at Somerville College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Kenyon won a Blue for her college in hockey and became the first female president of the Oxford University Archaeological Society. She graduated in 1929 and began a career in archaeology.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Although working on several important sites across Europe, it was her excavations in Tell es-Sultan (Jericho) in the 1950s that established her as one of the foremost archaeologists in the field. In 1962, Kenyon was made Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. She retired in 1973 to Erbistock and was appointed a DBE. Kenyon never married. From 1974, Kenyon was the Honorary Vice President of the Chester Archaeological Society.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A career in archaeology was first suggested to Kathleen by Margery Fry, librarian at Somerville College. After graduation Kenyon's first field experience was as a photographer for the pioneering excavations at Great Zimbabwe in 1929, led by Gertrude Caton-Thompson. Returning to England, Kenyon joined the archaeological couple Tessa Wheeler and her husband Mortimer Wheeler on their excavation of the Romano-British settlement of Verulamium (St Albans), 20 miles North of London. Working there each summer between 1930 and 1935, Kenyon learned from Mortimer Wheeler the discipline of meticulously controlled and recorded stratigraphic excavation. Wheeler entrusted her with the direction of the excavation of the Roman theatre.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the years 1931 to 1934, Kenyon worked simultaneously at Samaria, then under the administration of the British Mandate for Palestine, with John and Grace Crowfoot. There she cut a stratigraphic trench across the summit of the mound and down the Northern and Southern slopes, exposing the Iron II to the Roman period stratigraphic sequence of the site. In addition to providing crucial dating material for the Iron Age stratigraphy of Palestine, she obtained key stratified data for the study of Eastern terra sigilata ware.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1934, Kenyon was closely associated with the Wheelers in the foundation of the Institute of Archaeology of University College London. From 1936 to 1939, she carried out important excavations at the Jewry Wall in the city of Leicester. These were published in the Illustrated London News 1937 with pioneering reconstruction drawings by the artist Alan Sorrell whom she had happened to notice sketching her dig.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the years leading up to the Second World War work in the Middle East became increasingly difficult, so she excavated in Leicester, on the site of the Roman bath complex. Although she was reluctant to abandon the view that she was uncovering a Roman Forum.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "During the Second World War, Kenyon served as Divisional Commander of the Red Cross in Hammersmith, London, and later as acting director and Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology of the University of London.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "After the war, she excavated in Southwark, at The Wrekin, Shropshire and elsewhere in Britain, as well as at Sabratha, a Roman city in Libya. As a member of the Council of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ), Kenyon was involved in the efforts to reopen the School after the hiatus of the Second World War. In January 1951 she travelled to the Transjordan and undertook excavations in the West Bank at Jericho (Tell es-Sultan) on behalf of the BSAJ. The initial findings were first viewed by the public in the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain 1951 with a reconstruction drawing by Alan Sorrell. Her work at Jericho, from 1952 until 1958, made her world-famous and established a lasting legacy in the archaeological methodology of the Levant. Ground-breaking discoveries concerning the Neolithic cultures of the Levant were made in this ancient settlement. Her excavation of the Early Bronze Age walled city and the external cemeteries of the end of the Early Bronze Age, together with her analysis of the stratified pottery of these periods established her as the leading authority on that period. Kenyon focused her attention on the absence of certain Cypriot pottery at City IV, arguing for an older destruction date than that of her predecessors. Jericho was recognized as the oldest continuously occupied settlement in history because of her discoveries. At the same time she also completed the publication of the excavations at Samaria. Her volume, Samaria Sebaste III: The Objects, appeared in 1957. Having completed her excavations at Tell es-Sultan in 1958, Kenyon excavated in Jerusalem from 1961 to 1967, concentrating on the 'City of David' to the immediate south of the Temple Mount.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Although Kenyon had no doubt the sites she excavated were linked to the Old Testament narrative, she nevertheless drew attention to inconsistencies, concluding that Solomon's \"stables\" at Megiddo were totally impractical for holding horses (1978:72), and that Jericho fell long before Joshua's arrival (1978:35). Consequently, Kenyon's work has been cited to support the Minimalist School of Biblical Archaeology.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Kenyon's legacy in the field of excavation technique and ceramic methodology is attested to by Larry G. Herr, one of the directors of the Madaba Plains Project. He attributes to her directly the first of the key events (after the advances made by William F. Albright at Tell Beit Mirsim in the 1920s) that brought about our modern understanding of pottery in the southern Levant:",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "\"The first event was the refinement of stratigraphic techniques that Kathleen Kenyon's dig at Jericho catalyzed. The strict separation of earth layers, or archaeological sediments, also allowed the strict separation of ceramic assemblages\".",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Herr detects Kenyon's powerful indirect influence in the second event that promoted advance within ceramic methodology, namely:",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "\"the importation of Kenyon's digging techniques by Larry Toombs and Joe Callaway to Ernest Wright's project at Balata. Here, they combined Wright's interest in ceramic typology in the best Albright tradition with Kenyon's methods of excavation, which allowed the isolation of clear, stratigraphically determined pottery assemblages\".",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Herr summarises the somewhat mixed nature of Kenyon's legacy: for all the positive advances, there were also shortcomings:",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "\"Kenyon... did not capitalize fully on (the) implication of her stratigraphic techniques by producing final publications promptly. Indeed her method of digging, which most of us have subsequently adopted, causes a proliferation of loci that excavators often have difficulty keeping straight long enough to produce coherent published stratigraphic syntheses. Moreover, her insistence that excavation proceed in narrow trenches denies us, when we use the Jericho reports, the confidence that her loci, and the pottery assemblages that go with them, represent understandable human activity patterns over coherently connected living areas. The individual layers, insufficiently exposed horizontally, simply cannot be interpreted credibly in terms of function. This further makes publication difficult, both to produce and to use\".",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "From 1948 to 1962, she lectured in Levantine Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Kenyon's teaching complemented her excavations at Jericho Jericho and Jerusalem. In 1962, she was appointed Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford.",
"title": "Archaeological career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 1973 New Year Honours, following her retirement from Oxford, she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) \"for services to archaeology\". She was an elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and of the Society of Antiquaries of London (FSA). She was made a Grand Officer of the Order of Independence by the King of Jordan in 1977.",
"title": "Awards and commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, amalgamated within the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in 1998, was officially renamed the Kenyon Institute on 10 July 2003 in honour of Kathleen Kenyon.",
"title": "Awards and commemoration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Kathleen Kenyon Archaeology Collection, a collection of Kenyon's books and papers purchased from her estate in 1984, is housed at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.",
"title": "Kenyon Collection"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The finds from her excavations are held in a number of collections, including the British Museum, the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, while the bulk of archive material is located at the Manchester Museum.",
"title": "Kenyon Collection"
}
] |
Dame Kathleen Mary Kenyon, was a British archaeologist of Neolithic culture in the Fertile Crescent. She led excavations of Tell es-Sultan, the site of ancient Jericho, from 1952 to 1958, and has been called one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century. She was Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1973, having undertaken her own studies at Somerville College, Oxford.
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2001-09-11T13:06:23Z
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2023-10-26T08:27:48Z
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16,821 |
Callicrates
|
Callicrates or Kallikrates (/kəˈlɪkrəˌtiːz/; Greek: Καλλικράτης [Kaliˈkratis]) was an ancient Greek architect active in the middle of the fifth century BC. He and Ictinus were architects of the Parthenon (Plutarch, Pericles, 13). An inscription identifies him as the architect of "the Temple of Nike" on the Acropolis of Athens (IG I 35). The temple in question is either the amphiprostyle Temple of Athena Nike now visible on the site or a small-scale predecessor (naiskos) whose remains were found in the later temple's foundations.
An inscription identifies Callicrates as one of the architects of the Classical circuit wall of the Acropolis (IG I 45), and Plutarch further states (loc. cit.) that he was contracted to build the Middle of three defensive walls linking Athens and Piraeus.
A crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.
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Callicrates or Kallikrates (; Greek: Καλλικράτης ) was an ancient Greek architect active in the middle of the fifth century BC. He and Ictinus were architects of the Parthenon (Plutarch, Pericles, 13). An inscription identifies him as the architect of "the Temple of Nike" on the Acropolis of Athens (IG I3 35). The temple in question is either the amphiprostyle Temple of Athena Nike now visible on the site or a small-scale predecessor (naiskos) whose remains were found in the later temple's foundations. An inscription identifies Callicrates as one of the architects of the Classical circuit wall of the Acropolis (IG I3 45), and Plutarch further states (loc. cit.) that he was contracted to build the Middle of three defensive walls linking Athens and Piraeus. A crater on the planet Mercury was named in his honor.
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2001-09-12T03:31:35Z
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2023-10-13T19:26:52Z
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16,822 |
Kingdom of Jerusalem
|
The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as the Latin Kingdom, was a Crusader state that was established in the Levant immediately after the First Crusade. It lasted for almost two hundred years, from the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 until the siege of Acre in 1291. Its history is divided into two periods with a brief interruption in its existence, beginning with its collapse after the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 and its restoration after the Third Crusade in 1192.
The original Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted from 1099 to 1187 before being almost entirely overrun by the Ayyubid Sultanate under Saladin. Following the Third Crusade, it was re-established in Acre in 1192. The re-established state is commonly known as the "Second Kingdom of Jerusalem" or alternatively as the "Kingdom of Acre" after its new capital city. Acre remained the capital for the rest of its existence excluding the two decades that followed the Crusaders' establishment of partial control over Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade, through the diplomacy of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen vis-à-vis the Ayyubids.
The vast majority of the Crusaders who established and settled the Kingdom of Jerusalem were from the Kingdom of France, as were the knights and soldiers who made up the bulk of the steady flow of reinforcements throughout the two-hundred-year span of its existence; its rulers and elite were therefore predominantly French. French Crusaders also brought their language to the Levant, thus establishing Old French as the lingua franca of the Crusader states, in which Latin served as the official language. While the majority of the population in the countryside comprised Christians and Muslims from local Levantine ethnicities, many Europeans (primarily French and Italian) also arrived to settle in villages across the region.
At first the kingdom was little more than a loose collection of towns and cities captured during the First Crusade, but at its height in the mid-12th century, the kingdom encompassed roughly the territory of modern-day Israel, Palestine and the southern parts of Lebanon. From the Mediterranean Sea, the kingdom extended in a thin strip of land from Beirut in the north to the Sinai Desert in the south; into modern Jordan and Syria in the east, and towards Fatimid Egypt in the west. Three other Crusader states founded during and after the First Crusade were located further north: the County of Edessa (1097–1144), the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), and the County of Tripoli (1109–1289). While all three were independent, they were closely tied to Jerusalem. Beyond these to the north and west lay the states of Armenian Cilicia and the Byzantine Empire, with which Jerusalem had a close relationship in the twelfth century. Further east, various Muslim emirates were located which were ultimately allied with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The kingdom was ruled by King Aimery of Lusignan (1197–1205), the King of Cyprus, another crusader state founded during the Third Crusade. Dynastic ties also strengthened with Tripoli, Antioch, and Armenia. The kingdom was soon increasingly dominated by the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (reigned 1220–1250) had ambitions in the Crusader state, claiming the kingdom by marriage, but his presence sparked a civil war (1228–1243) among the kingdom's nobility. The kingdom became little more than a pawn in the politics and warfare of the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties in Egypt, as well as the Khwarezmian and Mongol invaders. As a relatively minor kingdom, it received little financial or military support from Europe; despite numerous small expeditions, Europeans generally proved unwilling to undertake an expensive journey to the east for an apparently losing cause. The Mamluk sultans Baibars (reigned 1260–1277) and al-Ashraf Khalil (reigned 1290–1293) eventually reconquered all the remaining crusader strongholds, culminating in the destruction of Acre in 1291.
The kingdom was ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse, although the Crusaders themselves and their descendants were an elite Catholic minority. They imported many customs and institutions from their homelands in Europe, and there were close familial and political connections with the West throughout the kingdom's existence. The kingdom also inherited "oriental" qualities, influenced by pre-existing customs and populations. The majority of the kingdom's inhabitants were native Christians, especially Greek and Syriac Orthodox, as well as Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. The native Christians and Muslims, who were a marginalized lower class, tended to speak Greek and Arabic, while the crusaders, who came mainly from France, spoke French. There were also a small number of Jews and Samaritans.
According to Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled through the kingdom around 1170, there were 1,000 Samaritans in Nablus, 200 in Caesarea and 300 in Ascalon. This sets a lower bound for the Samaritan population at 1,500, since the contemporary Tolidah, a Samaritan chronicle, also mentions communities in Gaza and Acre. Benjamin of Tudela estimated the total Jewish population of 14 cities in the kingdom to be 1,200, making the Samaritan population of the time larger than the Jewish, perhaps for the only time in history.
The First Crusade was preached at the Council of Clermont in 1095 by Pope Urban II, with the goal of assisting the Byzantine Empire against the invasions of the "Turks and Arabs" and "to destroy this vile race from the lands of our friends." However, the main objective quickly became the control of the Holy Land. The Byzantines were frequently at war with the Seljuks and other Turkish dynasties for control of Anatolia and Syria. The Sunni Seljuks had formerly ruled the Seljuk Empire, but this empire had collapsed into several smaller states after the death of Malik-Shah I in 1092. Malik-Shah was succeeded in the Anatolian Sultanate of Rum by Kilij Arslan I, and in Syria by his brother Tutush I, who died in 1095. Tutush's sons Fakhr al-Mulk Radwan and Duqaq inherited Aleppo and Damascus respectively, further dividing Syria amongst emirs antagonistic towards each other, as well as Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul. This disunity among the Anatolian and Syrian emirs allowed the Crusaders to overcome any military opposition they faced on the way to Jerusalem.
Egypt and much of Palestine were controlled by the Arab Shi'ite Fatimid Caliphate, which had extended further into Syria before the arrival of the Seljuks. Warfare between the Fatimids and Seljuks caused great disruption for the local Christians and for Western pilgrims. The Fatimids, under the nominal rule of caliph al-Musta'li but actually controlled by vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073; they recaptured it in 1098 from the Artuqids, a smaller Turkish tribe associated with the Seljuks, just before the arrival of the crusaders.
The Crusaders arrived at Jerusalem in June 1099; a few of the neighbouring towns (Ramla, Lydda, Bethlehem, and others) were taken first, and Jerusalem itself was captured on July 15. On 22 July, a council was held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to establish a king for the newly created Kingdom of Jerusalem. Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon were recognized as the leaders of the crusade and the siege of Jerusalem. Raymond was the wealthier and more powerful of the two, but at first he refused to become king, perhaps attempting to show his piety and probably hoping that the other nobles would insist upon his election anyway. The more popular Godfrey did not hesitate like Raymond, and accepted the position as leader. Most modern historians chronicle that he took the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri ("advocate" or "defender" of the Holy Sepulchre). Others report that Godfrey himself seems to have used the more ambiguous term princeps, or simply retained his title of dux from Lower Lorraine. According to William of Tyre, writing in the later 12th century when Godfrey had become a legendary hero, he refused to wear "a crown of gold" where Christ had worn "a crown of thorns". Raymond was incensed and took his army to forage away from the city. The new kingdom, and Godfrey's reputation, was secured with the defeat of the Fatimid Egyptian army under al-Afdal Shahanshah at the Battle of Ascalon one month after the conquest, on August 12, but Raymond and Godfrey's continued antagonism prevented the crusaders from taking control of Ascalon itself.
There was still some uncertainty about what to do with the new kingdom. The papal legate Daimbert of Pisa convinced Godfrey to hand over Jerusalem to him as Latin Patriarch, with the intention to set up a theocratic state directly under papal control. According to William of Tyre, Godfrey may have supported Daimbert's efforts, and he agreed to take possession of "one or two other cities and thus enlarge the kingdom" if Daimbert were permitted to rule Jerusalem. Godfrey did indeed increase the boundaries of the kingdom, by capturing Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, and other cities, and reducing many others to tributary status. He set the foundations for the system of vassalage in the kingdom, establishing the Principality of Galilee and the County of Jaffa, but his reign was short, and he died of an illness in 1100. His brother Baldwin of Boulogne successfully outmanoeuvred Daimbert and claimed Jerusalem for himself as "King of the Latins of Jerusalem". Daimbert compromised by crowning Baldwin I in Bethlehem rather than Jerusalem, but the path for a monarchy had been laid. Within this framework, a Catholic church hierarchy was established, overtop of the local Eastern Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox authorities, who retained their own hierarchies (the Catholics considered them schismatics and thus illegitimate, and vice versa). Under the Latin Patriarch, there were four suffragan archdioceses and numerous dioceses.
During Baldwin I's reign, the kingdom expanded even further. The number of European inhabitants increased, as the minor crusade of 1101 brought reinforcements to the kingdom. Baldwin repopulated Jerusalem with Franks and native Christians, after his expedition across the Jordan in 1115. With help from the Italian city-states and other adventurers, notably King Sigurd I of Norway, Baldwin captured the port cities of Acre (1104), Beirut (1110), and Sidon (1111), while exerting his suzerainty over the other crusader states to the north – Edessa (which he had founded in 1097 during the crusade), Antioch, and Tripoli, which he helped capture in 1109. He successfully defended against Muslim invasions, from the Fatimids at the numerous battles at Ramla and elsewhere in the southwest of the kingdom, and from Damascus and Mosul at the Battle of al-Sannabra in the northeast in 1113. As Thomas Madden says, Baldwin was "the true founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem", who "had transformed a tenuous arrangement into a solid feudal state. With brilliance and diligence, he established a strong monarchy, conquered the Palestinian coast, reconciled the crusader barons, and built strong frontiers against the kingdom's Muslim neighbours."
Baldwin brought with him an Armenian wife, traditionally named Arda (although never named such by contemporaries), whom he had married to gain political support from the Armenian population in Edessa, and whom he quickly set aside when he no longer needed Armenian support in Jerusalem. He bigamously married Adelaide del Vasto, regent of Sicily, in 1113, but was convinced to divorce her as well in 1117; Adelaide's son from her first marriage, Roger II of Sicily, never forgave Jerusalem, and for decades withheld much-needed Sicilian naval support.
Baldwin died without heirs in 1118, during a campaign against Egypt, and the kingdom was offered to his brother Eustace III of Boulogne, who had accompanied Baldwin and Godfrey on the crusade. Eustace was uninterested, and instead the crown passed to Baldwin's relative, probably a cousin, Baldwin of Le Bourg, who had previously succeeded him in Edessa. Baldwin II was an able ruler, and he too successfully defended against Fatimid and Seljuk invasions. Although Antioch was severely weakened after the Battle of Ager Sanguinis in 1119, and Baldwin himself was held captive by the emir of Aleppo from 1123 to 1124, Baldwin led the crusader states to victory at the Battle of Azaz in 1125. His reign saw the establishment of the first military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar; the earliest surviving written laws of the kingdom, compiled at the Council of Nablus in 1120; and the first commercial treaty with the Republic of Venice, the Pactum Warmundi, in 1124. The increase of naval and military support from Venice led to the capture of Tyre that year. The influence of Jerusalem was further extended over Edessa and Antioch, where Baldwin II acted as regent when their own leaders were killed in battle, although there were regency governments in Jerusalem as well during Baldwin's captivity. Baldwin was married to the Armenian noblewoman Morphia of Melitene, and had four daughters: Hodierna and Alice, who married into the families of the Count of Tripoli and Prince of Antioch; Ioveta, who became an influential abbess; and the eldest, Melisende, who was his heir and succeeded him upon his death in 1131, with her husband Fulk V of Anjou as king-consort. Their son, the future Baldwin III, was named co-heir by his grandfather.
Fulk was an experienced crusader and had brought military support to the kingdom during a pilgrimage in 1120. He brought Jerusalem into the sphere of the Angevin Empire, as the father of Geoffrey V of Anjou and grandfather of the future Henry II of England. Not everyone appreciated the imposition of a foreigner as king. In 1132 Antioch, Tripoli, and Edessa all asserted their independence and conspired to prevent Fulk from exercising the suzerainty of Jerusalem over them. He defeated Tripoli in battle, and settled the regency in Antioch by arranging a marriage between the countess, Melisende's niece Constance, and his own relative Raymond of Poitiers. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the native crusader nobles opposed Fulk's preference for his Angevin retinue. In 1134 Hugh II of Jaffa revolted against Fulk, allying with the Muslim garrison at Ascalon, for which he was convicted of treason in absentia. The Latin Patriarch intervened to settle the dispute, but an assassination attempt was then made on Hugh, for which Fulk was blamed. This scandal allowed Melisende and her supporters to gain control of the government, just as her father had intended. Accordingly, Fulk "became so uxorious that...not even in unimportant cases did he take any measures without her knowledge and assistance."
Fulk was then faced with a new and more dangerous enemy: the atabeg Zengi of Mosul, who had taken control of Aleppo and had set his sights on Damascus as well; the union of these three states would have been a serious blow to the growing power of Jerusalem. A brief intervention in 1137–1138 by the Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus, who wished to assert imperial suzerainty over all the crusader states, did nothing to stop the threat of Zengi; in 1139 Damascus and Jerusalem recognized the severity of the threat to both states, and an alliance was concluded which halted Zengi's advance. Fulk used this time to construct numerous castles, including Ibelin and Kerak. After the death of both Fulk and Emperor John in separate hunting accidents in 1143, Zengi invaded and conquered Edessa in 1144. Queen Melisende, now regent for her elder son Baldwin III, appointed a new constable, Manasses of Hierges, to head the army after Fulk's death, but Edessa could not be recaptured, despite Zengi's own assassination in 1146. The fall of Edessa shocked Europe, and a Second Crusade arrived in 1148.
After meeting in Acre in June, the crusading kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany agreed with Melisende, Baldwin III and the major nobles of the kingdom to attack Damascus. Zengi's territory had been divided amongst his sons after his death, and Damascus no longer felt threatened, so an alliance had been made with Zengi's son Nur ad-Din, the emir of Aleppo. Perhaps remembering attacks launched on Jerusalem from Damascus in previous decades, Damascus seemed to be the best target for the crusade, rather than Aleppo or another city to the north which would have allowed for the recapture of Edessa. The subsequent Siege of Damascus was a complete failure; when the city seemed to be on the verge of collapse, the crusader army suddenly moved against another section of the walls, and was driven back. The Crusaders retreated within three days. There were rumours of treachery and bribery, and Conrad III felt betrayed by the nobility of Jerusalem. Whatever the reason for the failure, the French and German armies returned home, and a few years later Damascus was firmly under Nur ad-Din's control.
The failure of the Second Crusade had dire long-term consequences for the kingdom. The West was hesitant to send large-scale expeditions; for the next few decades, only small armies came, headed by minor European nobles who desired to make a pilgrimage. The Muslim states of Syria were meanwhile gradually united by Nur ad-Din, who defeated the Principality of Antioch at the Battle of Inab in 1149 and gained control of Damascus in 1154. Nur ad-Din was extremely pious and during his rule the concept of jihad came to be interpreted as a kind of counter-crusade against the kingdom, which was an impediment to Muslim unity, both political and spiritual.
In Jerusalem, the Crusaders were distracted by a conflict between Melisende and Baldwin III. Melisende continued to rule as regent long after Baldwin came of age. She was supported by, among others, Manasses of Hierges, who essentially governed for her as constable; her son Amalric, whom she set up as Count of Jaffa; Philip of Milly; and the Ibelin family. Baldwin asserted his independence by mediating disputes in Antioch and Tripoli, and gained the support of the Ibelin brothers when they began to oppose Manasses' growing power, thanks to his marriage to their widowed mother Helvis of Ramla. In 1153 Baldwin had himself crowned as sole ruler, and a compromise was reached by which the kingdom was divided in two, with Baldwin taking Acre and Tyre in the north and Melisende remaining in control of Jerusalem and the cities of the south. Baldwin was able to replace Manasses with one of his own supporters, Humphrey II of Toron. Baldwin and Melisende knew that this situation was untenable. Baldwin soon invaded his mother's possessions, defeated Manasses, and besieged his mother in the Tower of David in Jerusalem. Melisende surrendered and retired to Nablus, but Baldwin appointed her his regent and chief advisor, and she retained some of her influence, especially in appointing ecclesiastical officials. In 1153, Baldwin launched an offensive against Ascalon, the fortress in the south from which Fatimid Egyptian armies had continually raided Jerusalem since the foundation of the kingdom. The fortress was captured and was added to the County of Jaffa, still in the possession of his brother Amalric.
With the capture of Ascalon the southern border of the kingdom was now secure, and Egypt, formerly a major threat to the kingdom but now destabilized under the reign of several underaged caliphs, was reduced to a tributary state. Nur ad-Din remained a threat in the east, and Baldwin had to contend with the advances of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, who claimed suzerainty over the Principality of Antioch. In order to bolster the defences of the kingdom against the growing strength of the Muslims, Baldwin III made the first direct alliance with the Byzantine Empire, by marrying Theodora Comnena, a niece of emperor Manuel; Manuel married Baldwin's cousin Maria. As William of Tyre put it, it was hoped that Manuel would be able "to relieve from his own abundance the distress under which our realm was suffering and to change our poverty into superabundance".
The relationship between Byzantium and Jerusalem has divided historians, with some historians supporting the Byzantine interpretation that Amalric recognised Manuel as his overlord, while other scholars such as Andrew Jotischky see the relationship as one of Byzantine protection of Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem.
When Baldwin died childless in 1162, a year after his mother Melisende, the kingdom passed to his brother Amalric, who renewed the alliance negotiated by Baldwin. In 1163 the chaotic situation in Egypt led to a refusal to pay tribute to Jerusalem, and requests were sent to Nur ad-Din for assistance; in response, Amalric invaded, but was turned back when the Egyptians flooded the Nile at Bilbeis. The Egyptian vizier Shawar again requested help from Nur ad-Din, who sent his general Shirkuh, but Shawar quickly turned against him and allied with Amalric. Amalric and Shirkuh both besieged Bilbeis in 1164, but both withdrew due to Nur ad-Din's campaigns against Antioch, where Bohemond III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli were defeated at the Battle of Harim. It seemed likely that Antioch itself would fall to Nur ad-Din, but he withdrew when Emperor Manuel sent a large Byzantine force to the area. Nur ad-Din sent Shirkuh back to Egypt in 1166, and Shawar again allied with Amalric, who was defeated at the Battle of al-Babein. Despite the defeat, both sides withdrew, but Shawar remained in control with a crusader garrison in Cairo. Amalric cemented his alliance with Manuel by marrying Manuel's niece Maria Komnene in 1167, and an embassy led by William of Tyre was sent to Constantinople to negotiate a military expedition, but in 1168 Amalric pillaged Bilbeis without waiting for the naval support promised by Manuel. Amalric accomplished nothing else, but his actions prompted Shawar to switch sides again and seek help from Shirkuh. Shawar was promptly assassinated, and when Shirkuh died in 1169, he was succeeded by his nephew Yusuf, better known as Saladin. That year, Manuel sent a large Byzantine fleet of some 300 ships to assist Amalric, and the town of Damietta was placed under siege. However, the Byzantine fleet sailed with enough provisions for only three months. By the time the Crusaders were ready, supplies were already running out and the fleet retired. Each side sought to blame the other for the failure, but both knew that they could not take Egypt without the other's assistance: the alliance was maintained, and plans for another campaign in Egypt were made, which ultimately were to come to nought.
In the end, Nur ad-Din was victorious and Saladin established himself as Sultan of Egypt. Saladin soon began to assert his independence from Nur ad-Din, and with the death of both Amalric and Nur ad-Din in 1174, he was well-placed to begin exerting control over Nur ad-Din's Syrian possessions as well. Upon the death of the pro-western Emperor Manuel in 1180, the Kingdom of Jerusalem lost its most powerful ally.
The subsequent events have often been interpreted as a struggle between two opposing factions, the "court party", made up of Baldwin's mother, Amalric's first wife Agnes of Courtenay, her immediate family, and recent arrivals from Europe who were inexperienced in the affairs of the kingdom and who were in favour of war with Saladin; and the "noble party", led by Raymond of Tripoli and the lesser nobility of the kingdom, who favoured peaceful co-existence with the Muslims. This is the interpretation offered by William of Tyre, who was firmly placed in the "noble" camp, and his view was taken up by subsequent historians; in the 20th century, Marshall W. Baldwin, Steven Runciman, and Hans E. Mayer favoured this interpretation. Peter W. Edbury, on the other hand, argues that William, as well as the thirteenth-century authors who continued William's chronicle in French and were allied to Raymond's supporters in the Ibelin family, cannot be considered impartial. Although the events were clearly a dynastic struggle, "the division was not between native barons and newcomers from the West, but between the king's maternal and paternal kin."
Miles of Plancy was briefly bailli or regent during Baldwin IV's minority. Miles was assassinated in October 1174, and Count Raymond III of Tripoli, Amalric's first cousin, became regent. It is highly probable that Raymond or his supporters engineered the assassination. Baldwin reached his majority in 1176, and despite his illness he no longer had any legal need for a regent. Since Raymond was his nearest relative in the male line with a strong claim to the throne, there was concern about the extent of his ambitions, although he had no direct heirs of his own. To balance this, the king turned from time to time to his uncle, Joscelin III of Edessa, who was appointed seneschal in 1176; Joscelin was more closely related to Baldwin than Raymond was, but had no claim to the throne himself.
As a leper, Baldwin had no children and could not be expected to rule much longer, so the focus of his succession passed to his sister Sibylla and his younger half-sister Isabella. Baldwin and his advisors recognised that it was essential for Sibylla to be married to a Western nobleman in order to access support from European states in a military crisis; while Raymond was still regent, a marriage was arranged for Sibylla and William of Montferrat, a cousin of Louis VII of France and of Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. It was hoped that by allying with a relative of the Western emperor, Frederick would come to the kingdom's aid. Jerusalem looked again towards the Byzantine Empire for help, and Emperor Manuel was looking for a way to restore his empire's prestige after his defeat at the Battle of Myriokephalon in 1176; this mission was undertaken by Raynald of Châtillon. After William of Montferrat arrived in 1176, he fell ill and died in June 1177, leaving Sibylla widowed and pregnant with the future Baldwin V. Raynald was then named regent.
Soon afterwards, Philip of Flanders arrived in Jerusalem on pilgrimage; he was Baldwin IV's cousin, and the king offered him the regency and command of the army, both of which Philip refused, although he objected to the appointment of Raynald as regent. Philip then attempted to intervene in the negotiations for Sibylla's second husband, and suggested one of his own retinue, but the native barons refused his suggestion. In addition, Philip seemed to think he could carve out a territory of his own in Egypt, but he refused to participate in the planned Byzantine-Jerusalem expedition. The expedition was delayed and finally cancelled, and Philip took his army away to the north.
Most of the army of Jerusalem marched north with Philip, Raymond III, and Bohemond III to attack Hama, and Saladin took the opportunity to invade the kingdom. Baldwin proved to be an effective and energetic king as well as a brilliant military commander: he defeated Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in September 1177 despite being greatly outnumbered and having to rely on a levee-en-masse. Although Baldwin's presence despite his illness was inspirational, direct military decisions were actually made by Raynald.
Hugh III of Burgundy was expected to come to Jerusalem and marry Sibylla, but Hugh was unable to leave France due to the political unrest there in 1179–1180 following the death of Louis VII. Meanwhile, Baldwin IV's stepmother Maria, mother of Isabella and stepmother of Sibylla, married Balian of Ibelin. At Easter in 1180, Raymond and his cousin Bohemond III of Antioch attempted to force Sibylla to marry Balian's brother Baldwin of Ibelin. Raymond and Bohemond were King Baldwin's nearest male relatives in the paternal line, and could have claimed the throne if the king died without an heir or a suitable replacement. Before Raymond and Bohemond arrived, Agnes and King Baldwin arranged for Sibylla to be married to a Poitevin newcomer, Guy of Lusignan, whose older brother Amalric of Lusignan was already an established figure at court. Internationally, the Lusignans were useful as vassals of Baldwin and Sibylla's cousin Henry II of England. Baldwin betrothed eight-year-old Isabella to Humphrey IV of Toron, stepson of the powerful Raynald of Châtillon, thereby removing her from the influence of the Ibelin family and that of her mother.
The dispute between the two factions in the kingdom affected the election of a new Patriarch in 1180. When Patriarch Amalric died on 6 October 1180, the two most obvious choices for his successor were William of Tyre and Heraclius of Caesarea. They were fairly evenly matched in background and education, but politically they were allied with opposite parties, as Heraclius was one of Agnes of Courtenay's supporters. The canons of the Holy Sepulchre asked the king for advice, and Heraclius was chosen through Agnes' influence. There were rumours that Agnes and Heraclius were lovers, but this information comes from the partisan 13th-century continuations of William of Tyre's history, and there is no other evidence to substantiate such a claim.
At the end of 1181, Raynald of Châtillon raided south into Arabia, in the direction of Medina, although he did not make it that far. It was probably around this time that Raynald also attacked a Muslim caravan. The kingdom had a truce with Saladin at the time, and Raynald's actions have been seen as an independent act of brigandage; it is possible that he was trying to prevent Saladin from moving his forces north to take control of Aleppo, which would have strengthened Saladin's position. In response, Saladin attacked the kingdom in 1182, but was defeated at Belvoir Castle. King Baldwin, although quite ill, was still able to command the army in person. Saladin attempted to besiege Beirut from land and sea, and Baldwin raided Damascene territory, but neither side did significant damage. In December 1182, Raynald launched a naval expedition on the Red Sea, which made it as far south as Rabigh. The expedition was defeated and two of Raynald's men were actually taken to Mecca to be executed in public. Like his earlier raids, Raynald's expedition is usually seen as selfish and ultimately fatal for Jerusalem, but according to Bernard Hamilton, it was actually a shrewd strategy, meant to damage Saladin's prestige and reputation.
In 1183 a general tax was levied throughout the kingdom, which was unprecedented in Jerusalem and almost all of medieval Europe to that point. The tax helped pay for larger armies for the next few years. More troops were certainly needed, since Saladin was finally able to gain control of Aleppo, and with peace in his northern territories, he could focus on Jerusalem in the south. King Baldwin was so incapacitated by his leprosy that it was necessary to appoint a regent, and Guy of Lusignan was chosen, as he was Baldwin's legal heir and the king was not expected to live. The inexperienced Guy led the Frankish army against Saladin's incursions into the kingdom, but neither side made any real gains, and Guy was criticized by his opponents for not striking against Saladin when he had the chance.
In October 1183, Isabella married Humphrey of Toron at Kerak during a siege by Saladin, who perhaps hoped to take some valuable prisoners. As King Baldwin, although now blind and crippled, had recovered enough to resume his reign and his command of the army, Guy was removed from the regency and his five-year-old stepson, King Baldwin's nephew and namesake Baldwin, was crowned as co-king in November. King Baldwin himself then went to relieve the castle, carried on a litter, and attended by his mother. He was reconciled with Raymond of Tripoli and appointed him military commander. The siege was lifted in December and Saladin retreated to Damascus. Saladin attempted another siege in 1184, but Baldwin repelled that attack as well, and Saladin raided Nablus and other towns on the way home.
In October 1184, Guy of Lusignan led an attack on the Bedouin nomads from his base in Ascalon. Unlike Raynald's attacks on caravans, which may have had some military purpose, Guy attacked a group that was usually loyal to Jerusalem and provided intelligence about the movements of Saladin's troops. At the same time, King Baldwin contracted his final illness and Raymond of Tripoli, rather than Guy, was appointed as his regent. His nephew Baldwin was paraded in public, wearing his crown as Baldwin V. Baldwin IV finally succumbed to his leprosy in May 1185.
Meanwhile, the succession crisis had prompted a mission to the West to seek assistance. In 1184, Patriarch Heraclius travelled throughout the courts of Europe, but no help was forthcoming. Heraclius offered the "keys of the Holy Sepulchre, those of the Tower of David and the banner of the Kingdom of Jerusalem", but not the crown itself, to both Philip II of France and Henry II of England; the latter, as a grandson of Fulk, was a first cousin of the royal family of Jerusalem, and had promised to go on crusade after the murder of Thomas Becket. Both kings preferred to remain at home to defend their own territories, rather than act as regent for a child in Jerusalem. The few European knights who did travel to Jerusalem did not even see any combat, since the truce with Saladin had been re-established. William V of Montferrat was one of the few who came to his grandson Baldwin V's aid.
Baldwin V's rule, with Raymond of Tripoli as regent and his great-uncle Joscelin of Edessa as his guardian, was short. He was a sickly child and died in the summer of 1186. Raymond and his supporters went to Nablus, presumably in an attempt to prevent Sibylla from claiming the throne, but Sibylla and her supporters went to Jerusalem, where it was decided that the kingdom should pass to her, on the condition that her marriage to Guy be annulled. She agreed but only if she could choose her own husband and king, and after being crowned, she immediately crowned Guy with her own hands. Raymond had refused to attend the coronation, and in Nablus he suggested that Isabella and Humphrey should be crowned instead, but Humphrey refused to agree to this plan which would have certainly started a civil war. Humphrey went to Jerusalem and swore allegiance to Guy and Sibylla, as did most of Raymond's other supporters. Raymond himself refused to do so and left for Tripoli; Baldwin of Ibelin also refused, gave up his fiefs, and left for Antioch.
Raymond of Tripoli allied with Saladin against Guy and allowed a Muslim garrison to occupy his fief in Tiberias, probably hoping that Saladin would help him overthrow Guy. Saladin, meanwhile, had pacified his Mesopotamian territories, and was now eager to attack the crusader kingdom; he did not intend to renew the truce when it expired in 1187. Before the truce expired, Raynald of Chatillon, the lord of Oultrejourdain and of Kerak and one of Guy's chief supporters, recognized that Saladin was massing his troops, and attacked Muslim caravans in an attempt to disrupt this. Guy was on the verge of attacking Raymond, but realized that the kingdom would need to be united in the face of the threat from Saladin, and Balian of Ibelin effected a reconciliation between the two during Easter in 1187. Saladin attacked Kerak again in April, and in May, a Muslim raiding party ran into the much smaller embassy on its way to negotiate with Raymond, and defeated it at the Battle of Cresson near Nazareth. Raymond and Guy finally agreed to attack Saladin at Tiberias, but could not agree on a plan; Raymond thought a pitched battle should be avoided, but Guy probably remembered the criticism he faced for avoiding battle in 1183, and it was decided to march out against Saladin directly. On 4 July 1187, the army of the kingdom was utterly destroyed at the Battle of Hattin. Raymond of Tripoli, Balian of Ibelin, and Reginald of Sidon escaped, but Raynald was executed by Saladin and Guy was imprisoned in Damascus.
Over the next few months, Saladin easily overran the entire kingdom. Only the port of Tyre remained in Frankish hands, defended by Conrad of Montferrat, who had coincidentally arrived just in time from Constantinople. The fall of Jerusalem essentially ended the first Kingdom of Jerusalem. Much of the population, swollen with refugees fleeing Saladin's conquest of the surrounding territory, was allowed to flee to Tyre, Tripoli, or Egypt (whence they were sent back to Europe), but those who could not pay for their freedom were sold into slavery, and those who could were often robbed by Christians and Muslims alike on their way into exile. The capture of the city led to the Third Crusade, launched in 1189 and led by Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus and Frederick Barbarossa, though the last drowned en route.
Guy of Lusignan, who had been refused entry to Tyre by Conrad, began to besiege Acre in 1189. During the lengthy siege, which lasted until 1191, Patriarch Heraclius, Queen Sibylla and her daughters, and many others died of disease. With the death of Sibylla in 1190, Guy now had no legal claim to the kingship, and the succession passed to Sibylla's half-sister Isabella. Isabella's mother Maria and the Ibelins (now closely allied to Conrad) argued that Isabella and Humphrey's marriage was illegal, as she had been underage at the time; underlying this was the fact that Humphrey had betrayed his wife's cause in 1186. The marriage was annulled amid some controversy. Conrad, who was now the nearest kinsman to Baldwin V in the male line, and had already proved himself a capable military leader, then married Isabella, but Guy refused to concede the crown.
When Richard arrived in 1191, he and Philip took different sides in the succession dispute. Richard backed Guy, his vassal from Poitou, while Philip supported Conrad, a cousin of his late father Louis VII. After much ill feeling and ill health, Philip returned home in 1191, soon after the fall of Acre. Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 and the Battle of Jaffa in 1192, recovering most of the coast, but could not recover Jerusalem or any of the inland territory of the kingdom. It has been suggested that this may have actually been a strategic decision by Richard rather than a failure as such, as he may have recognized that Jerusalem, in particular, was in fact a strategic liability as long as the Crusaders were obligated to defend it, as it was isolated from the sea where Western reinforcements could arrive. Conrad was unanimously elected king in April 1192, but was murdered by the Hashshashin only days later. Eight days after that, the pregnant Isabella was married to Count Henry II of Champagne, nephew of Richard and Philip, but politically allied to Richard. As compensation, Richard sold Guy the island of Cyprus, which Richard had captured on the way to Acre, although Guy continued to claim the throne of Jerusalem until his death in 1194.
The crusade came to an end peacefully, with the Treaty of Ramla negotiated in 1192; Saladin allowed pilgrimages to be made to Jerusalem, allowing the crusaders to fulfil their vows, after which they all returned home. The native crusader barons set about rebuilding their kingdom from Acre and the other coastal cities.
For the next hundred years, the Kingdom of Jerusalem remained a tiny kingdom hugging the Syrian coastline. Its capital was moved to Acre and controlled most of the coastline of present-day Israel and southern and central Lebanon, including the strongholds and towns of Jaffa, Arsuf, Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. At best, it included only a few other significant cities, such as Ascalon and some interior fortresses, as well as suzerainty over Tripoli and Antioch. The new king, Henry of Champagne, died accidentally in 1197, and Isabella married for a fourth time, to Aimery of Lusignan, Guy's brother. Aimery had already inherited Cyprus from Guy, and had been crowned king by Frederick Barbarossa's son, Emperor Henry VI. Henry led a crusade in 1197 but died along the way. Nevertheless, his troops recaptured Beirut and Sidon for the kingdom before returning home in 1198. A five-year truce was then concluded with the Ayyubids in Syria in 1198.
The Ayyubid empire had fallen into civil war after the death of Saladin in 1193. His sons claimed various parts of his empire: az-Zahir took control of Aleppo, al-Aziz Uthman held Cairo, while his eldest son, al-Afdal, retained Damascus. Saladin's brother Al-Adil Sayf ad-Din (often called "Saphadin" by the Crusaders) acquired al-Jazira (northern Mesopotamia), and al-Adil's son al-Mu'azzam took possession of Karak and Transjordan. In 1196, al-Afdal was driven out of Damascus by al Adil in alliance with Uthman. When Uthman died in 1198, al Afdal returned to power as regent in Egypt for Uthman's infant son. Allied with az-Zahir, he then attacked his uncle in Damascus. The alliance fell apart, and al-Adil then defeated al Afdal in Egypt and annexed the country. In 1200 Al-Adil proclaimed himself Sultan of Egypt and Syria, entrusting Damascus to al-Mu'azzam and al-Jazira to another son, al-Kamil. Following a second unsuccessful siege of Damascus by the two brothers, Al Afdal accepted a fief consisting of Samosata and a number of other towns. Az-Zahir of Aleppo submitted to his uncle in 1202, thus re-uniting the Ayyubid territories.
Meanwhile, schemes were hatched to reconquer Jerusalem through Egypt. A Fourth Crusade was planned after the failure of the Third, but it resulted in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and most of the crusaders involved never arrived in the kingdom. Aimery, however, not knowing of the diversion to Constantinople, raided Egypt in advance of the expected invasion. Both Isabella and Aimery died in 1205 and again an underage girl, Isabella and Conrad's daughter Maria of Montferrat, became queen of Jerusalem. Isabella's half-brother John of Ibelin, the Old Lord of Beirut governed as regent until 1210 when Maria married an experienced French knight, John of Brienne. Maria died in childbirth in 1212, and John of Brienne continued to rule as regent for their daughter Isabella II.
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 called for a new, better-organized crusade against Egypt. In late 1217 King Andrew II of Hungary and Duke Leopold VI of Austria arrived in Acre and, along with John of Brienne, raided territory further inland, including Mount Tabor, but without success. After the departure of the Hungarians, the remaining Crusaders set about refortifying Caesarea and the Templar fortress of Château Pèlerin throughout the winter of 1217 and spring of 1218.
In the spring of 1218 the Fifth Crusade began in earnest when German crusader fleets landed at Acre. Along with King John, who was elected leader of the crusade, the fleets sailed to Egypt and besieged Damietta at the mouth of the Nile in May. The siege progressed slowly, and the Egyptian sultan al-Adil died in August 1218, supposedly of shock after the Crusaders managed to capture one of Damietta's towers. He was succeeded by his son al-Kamil. In the autumn of 1218 reinforcements arrived from Europe, including the papal legate Pelagius of Albano. In the winter the crusaders were affected by floods and disease, and the siege dragged on throughout 1219, when Francis of Assisi arrived to attempt to negotiate a truce. Neither side could agree to terms, despite the Ayyubid offer of a thirty-year truce and the restoration of Jerusalem and most of the rest of the former kingdom. The Crusaders finally managed to starve out the city and captured it in November. Al-Kamil retreated to the nearby fortress of al-Mansurah, but the crusaders remained in Damietta throughout 1219 and 1220, awaiting the arrival of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, while King John returned to Acre briefly to defend against al-Mu'azzam, who was raiding the kingdom from Damascus in John's absence. Still expecting the emperor's imminent arrival, in July 1221, the Crusaders set off towards Cairo, but they were stopped by the rising Nile, which al-Kamil allowed to flood by breaking the dams along its course. The sultan easily defeated the trapped Crusader army and regained Damietta. Emperor Frederick had, in fact, never left Europe at all.
After the failure of the crusade, John travelled throughout Europe seeking assistance, but found support only from Frederick, who then married John and Maria's daughter Isabella II in 1225. The next year, Isabella died giving birth to their son Conrad IV, who succeeded his mother to the throne although he never appeared in the East. Frederick had reneged on his promise to lead the Fifth Crusade, but was now eager to cement his claim to the throne through Conrad. There were also plans to join with al-Kamil in attacking al-Mu'azzam in Damascus, an alliance which had been discussed with Egyptian envoys in Italy. But after continually delaying his departure for the Holy Land, including suffering an outbreak of disease in his fleet, he was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1227. The crusaders, led not by Frederick but by his representatives Richard Filangieri, Henry IV, Duke of Limburg, and Hermann of Salza, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, arrived in the east late in 1227, and while waiting for the emperor they set about refortifying Sidon, where they built the sea castle, and Montfort, which later became the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. The Ayyubids of Damascus did not dare attack, as al-Mu'azzam had suddenly died not long before. Frederick finally arrived on the Sixth Crusade in September 1228, and claimed the regency of the kingdom in the name of his infant son.
Frederick immediately came into conflict with the native nobles of Outremer, some of whom resented his attempts to impose Imperial authority over both Cyprus and Jerusalem. The Cypriot nobles were already quarrelling amongst themselves about the regency for Henry I of Cyprus, who was still a child. The High Court of Cyprus had elected John of Ibelin as regent, but Henry's mother Alice of Champagne wished to appoint one of her supporters; Alice and her party, members or supporters of the Lusignan dynasty, sided with Frederick, whose father had crowned Aimery of Lusignan king in 1197. At Limassol, Frederick demanded that John give up not only the regency of Cyprus, but also John's own lordship of Beirut on the mainland. John argued that Frederick had no legal authority to make such demands and refused to give up either title. Frederick then imprisoned John's sons as hostages to guarantee John's support for his crusade.
John did accompany Frederick to the mainland, but Frederick was not well-received there; one of his few supporters was Balian, Lord of Sidon, who had welcomed the crusaders the year before and now acted as an ambassador to the Ayyubids. The death of al-Mu'azzam negated the proposed alliance with al-Kamil, who along with his brother al-Ashraf had taken possession of Damascus (as well as Jerusalem) from their nephew, al-Mu'azzam's son an-Nasir Dawud. However, al-Kamil presumably did not know of the small size of Frederick's army, nor the divisions within it caused by his excommunication, and wished to avoid defending his territories against another crusade. Frederick's presence alone was sufficient to regain Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and a number of surrounding castles without a fight: these were recovered in February 1229, in return for a ten-year truce with the Ayyubids and freedom of worship for Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants. The terms of the treaty were unacceptable to the Patriarch of Jerusalem Gerald of Lausanne, who placed the city under interdict. In March, Frederick crowned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but because of his excommunication and the interdict Jerusalem was never truly reincorporated into the kingdom, which continued to be ruled from Acre.
Meanwhile, in Italy, the Pope used Frederick's excommunication as an excuse to invade his Italian territories; the papal armies were led by Frederick's former father-in-law John of Brienne. Frederick was forced to return home in 1229, leaving the Holy Land "not in triumph, but showered with offal" by the citizens of Acre.
Nevertheless, Frederick sent an Imperial army in 1231, under Richard Filangieri, who occupied Beirut and Tyre, but was unable to gain control of Acre. John's supporters formed a commune in Acre, of which John himself was elected mayor in 1232. With the help of the Genoese merchants, the commune recaptured Beirut. John also attacked Tyre, but was defeated by Filangieri at the Battle of Casal Imbert in May 1232.
In Cyprus, King Henry I came of age in 1232 and John's regency was no longer necessary. Both John and Filangieri raced back to Cyprus to assert their authority, and the imperial forces were defeated at the Battle of Agridi on June 15. Henry became the undisputed king of Cyprus, but continued to support the Ibelins over the Lusignans and the imperial party. On the mainland, Filangieri had the support of Bohemund IV of Antioch, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Pisan merchants. John was supported by his nobles on Cyprus, and by his continental holdings in Beirut, Caesarea, and Arsuf, as well as by the Knights Templar and the Genoese. Neither side could make any headway, and in 1234 Gregory IX excommunicated John and his supporters. This was partly revoked in 1235, but still no peace could be made. John died in 1236 and the war was taken up by his son Balian of Beirut and his nephew Philip of Montfort.
Meanwhile, the treaty with the Ayyubids was set to expire in 1239. Plans for a new crusade to be led by Frederick came to nothing, and Frederick himself was excommunicated by Gregory IX again in 1239. However, other European nobles took up the cause, including Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, Peter of Dreux, and Amaury VI of Montfort, who arrived in Acre in September 1239. Theobald was elected leader of the crusade at a council in Acre, attended by most of the important nobles of the kingdom, including Walter of Brienne, John of Arsuf, and Balian of Sidon. The arrival of the crusade was a brief respite from the Lombard War; Filangieri remained in Tyre and did not participate. The council decided to refortify Ascalon in the south and attack Damascus in the north.
The crusaders may have been aware of the new divisions among the Ayyubids; al-Kamil had occupied Damascus in 1238 but had died soon afterwards, and his territory was inherited by his family. His sons al-Adil abu Bakr and as-Salih Ayyub inherited Egypt and Damascus. Ayyub marched on Cairo in an attempt to drive out al-Adil, but during his absence al-Kamil's brother as-Salih Isma'il took over Damascus, and Ayyub was taken prisoner by an-Nasir Dawud. The Crusaders, meanwhile, marched to Ascalon. Along the way, Walter of Brienne captured livestock intended to resupply Damascus, as the Ayyubids had probably learned of the Crusaders' plans to attack it. The victory was short-lived, however, as the Crusaders were then defeated by the Egyptian army at Gaza in November 1239. Henry II, Count of Bar was killed and Amaury of Montfort captured. The Crusaders returned to Acre, possibly because the native barons of the kingdom were suspicious of Filangieri in Tyre. Dawud took advantage of the Ayyubid victory to recapture Jerusalem in December, the ten-year truce having expired.
Although Ayyub was Dawud's prisoner, the two now allied against al-Adil in Egypt, which Ayyub seized in 1240. In Damascus, Isma'il recognized the threat of Dawud and Ayyub against his own possessions, and turned to the Crusaders for assistance. Theobald concluded a treaty with Isma'il, in return for territorial concessions that restored Jerusalem to Christian control, as well as much of the rest of the former kingdom, even more territory than Frederick had recovered in 1229. Theobald, however, was frustrated by the Lombard War, and returned home in September 1240. Almost immediately after Theobald's departure, Richard of Cornwall arrived. He completed the rebuilding of Ascalon, and also made peace with Ayyub in Egypt. Ayyub confirmed Isma'il's concessions in 1241, and prisoners taken at Gaza were exchanged by both sides. Richard returned to Europe in 1241.
Although the kingdom had essentially been restored, the Lombard War continued to occupy the kingdom's nobility. As the Templars and Hospitallers supported opposite sides, they also attacked each other, and the Templars broke the treaty with the Ayyubids by attacking Nablus in 1241. Conrad proclaimed that he had come of age in 1242, eliminating both Frederick's claim to the regency and the need for an imperial guardian to govern in his place, although he had not yet turned 15, the age of majority according to the customs of Jerusalem. Through Conrad, Frederick tried to send an imperial regent, but the anti-imperial faction in Acre argued that Jerusalem's laws allowed them to appoint their own regent. In June the Haute Cour granted the regency to Alice of Champagne, who, as the daughter of Isabella I, was Conrad's great-aunt and his closest relative living in the kingdom. Alice ordered Filangieri to be arrested, and along with the Ibelins and Venetians, besieged Tyre, which fell in July 1243. The Lombard War was over, but the king was still absent, as Conrad never came to the East. Alice was prevented from exercising any real power as regent by Philip of Montfort, who took control of Tyre, and Balian of Beirut, who continued to hold Acre.
The Ayyubids were still divided between Ayyub in Egypt, Isma'il in Damascus, and Dawud in Kerak. Isma'il, Dawud, and al-Mansur Ibrahim of Homs went to war with Ayyub, who hired the Khwarazmians to fight for him. The Khwarazmians were nomadic Turks from central Asia, who had recently been displaced by the Mongols further to the east and were now residing in Mesopotamia. With Ayyub's support, they sacked Jerusalem in the summer of 1244, leaving it in ruins and useless to both Christians and Muslims. In October, the Khwarazmians, along with the Egyptian army under the command of Baibars, were met by the Frankish army, led by Philip of Montfort, Walter of Brienne, and the masters of the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, along with al-Mansur and Dawud. On October 17 the Egyptian-Khwarazmian army destroyed the Frankish-Syrian coalition, and Walter of Brienne was taken captive and later executed. By 1247, Ayyub had reoccupied most of the territory that had been conceded in 1239, and had also gained control of Damascus.
A new crusade was discussed at the Council of Lyon in 1245 by Pope Innocent IV. The council deposed Frederick II, so no help could be expected from the empire, but King Louis IX of France had already vowed to go on crusade. Louis arrived in Cyprus in 1248, where he gathered an army of his own men, including his brothers Robert of Artois, Charles of Anjou, and Alphonse of Poitiers, and those of Cyprus and Jerusalem, led by the Ibelin family John of Jaffa, Guy of Ibelin, and Balian of Beirut. Once again the target was Egypt. Damietta was captured without resistance when the Crusaders landed in June 1249, but the crusade halted there until November, by which time the Egyptian sultan Ayyub had died and had been succeeded by his son Turanshah. In February, the Crusaders were defeated at the Battle of al-Mansurah, where Robert of Artois was killed. The crusaders were unable to cross the Nile, and, suffering from disease and lack of supplies, retreated towards Damietta in April. They were defeated along the way at the Battle of Fariskur, with Louis being taken captive by Turanshah. During Louis' captivity, Turanshah was overthrown by his Mamluk soldiers, led by the general Aybak, who then released Louis in May in return for Damietta and a large ransom. For the next four years Louis resided in Acre, and helped refortify that city along with Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon. He also made truces with the Ayyubids in Syria, and sent embassies to negotiate with the Mongols, who were beginning to threaten the Muslim world, before returning home in 1254. He left behind a large garrison of French soldiers in Acre, under the command of Geoffrey of Sergines.
In the midst of these events, Alice of Champagne had died in 1246 and had been replaced as regent by her son King Henry I of Cyprus, for whom John of Jaffa served as bailli in Acre. During Louis IX's stay in Acre, Henry I died in 1253, and was succeeded in Cyprus by his infant son Hugh II. Hugh was technically regent of Jerusalem as well, both for Conrad and for Conrad's son Conradin after Conrad died in 1254. Both Cyprus and Jerusalem were governed by Hugh's mother Plaisance of Antioch, but John remained bailli for Hugh in Acre. John made peace with Damascus and attempted to regain Ascalon; the Egyptians, now ruled by the Mamluk sultanate, besieged Jaffa in 1256 in response. John defeated them, and afterwards gave up the bailliage to his cousin John of Arsuf.
In 1256 the commercial rivalry between the Venetian and Genoese merchant colonies broke out into open warfare. In Acre, the two colonies disputed possession of the monastery of Saint Sabas. The Genoese, assisted by the Pisan merchants, attacked the Venetian quarter and burned their ships, but the Venetians drove them out. The Venetians were then expelled from Tyre by Philip of Monfort. John of Arsuf, John of Jaffa, John II of Beirut, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights supported the Venetians, who also convinced the Pisans to join them, while the Hospitallers supported the Genoese. In 1257 the Venetians conquered the monastery and destroyed its fortifications, although they were unable to expel the Genoese completely. They blockaded the Genoese quarter, but the Genoese were supplied by the Hospitallers, whose complex was nearby, and by Philip of Montfort who sent food from Tyre. In August 1257, John of Arsuf tried to end the war by granting commercial rights in Acre to the Republic of Ancona, an Italian ally of Genoa, but aside from Philip of Montfort and the Hospitallers, the rest of the nobles continued to support Venice. In June 1258, Philip and the Hospitallers marched on Acre while a Genoese fleet attacked the city by sea. The naval battle was won by Venice, and the Genoese were forced to abandon their quarter and flee to Tyre with Philip. The war also spread to Tripoli and Antioch, where the Embriaco family, descended from Genoese crusaders, was pitted against Bohemond VI of Antioch, who supported the Venetians. In 1261 the Patriarch, Jacques Pantaleon, organised a council to re-establish order in the kingdom, though the Genoese did not return to Acre.
It was during this period that the Mongols arrived in the Near East. Their presence further east had already displaced the Khwarazmians, and emissaries had been sent by various popes as well as Louis IX to ally or negotiate with them, but they were uninterested in alliances. They sacked Baghdad in 1258, and Aleppo and Damascus in 1260, destroying both the Abbasid caliphate and the last vestiges of the Ayyubid dynasty. Hethum I of Armenia and Bohemond VI of Antioch had already submitted to the Mongols as vassals. Some of the Mongols were Nestorian Christians, including Kitbuqa, one of the generals at the sieges of Baghdad and Damascus, but despite this, the nobles of Acre refused to submit. As the kingdom was by now a relatively unimportant state, the Mongols paid little attention to it, but there were a few skirmishes in 1260: the forces of Julian of Sidon killed the nephew of Kitbuqa, who responded by sacking Sidon, and John II of Beirut was also captured by the Mongols during another raid. The apparently inevitable Mongol conquest was stalled when Hulagu, the Mongol commander in Syria, returned home after the death of his brother Möngke Khan, leaving Kitbuqa with a small garrison. The Mamluks of Egypt then sought, and were granted, permission to advance through Frankish territory, and defeated the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in September 1260. Kitbuqa was killed and all of Syria fell under Mamluk control. On the way back to Egypt, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz was assassinated by the general Baibars, who was far less favourable than his predecessor to alliances with the Franks.
John of Arsuf had died in 1258 and was replaced as bailli by Geoffrey of Sergines, Louis IX's lieutenant in Acre. Plaisance died in 1261, but as her son Hugh II was still underage, Cyprus passed to his cousin Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan, whose mother Isabella of Cyprus, Alice of Champagne and Hugh I of Cyprus' daughter and Hugh II's aunt, took over the regency in Acre. She appointed, as bailli, her husband Henry of Antioch (who was also Plaisance's uncle), but died in 1264. The regency in Acre was then claimed by Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan and his cousin Hugh of Brienne, and Hugh II died in 1267 before he reached the age of majority. Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan won the dispute and succeeded Hugh II on Cyprus as Hugh III. When Conradin was executed in Sicily in 1268, there was no other Hohenstaufen heir to succeed him, and Hugh III inherited the Kingdom of Jerusalem as well in 1269. This was disputed by another branch of the Lusignan family: Maria of Antioch, daughter of Bohemond IV of Antioch and Melisende of Lusignan (herself a daughter of Isabella I and Amalric II), claimed the throne as the oldest living relative of Isabella I, but for the moment her claim was ignored. By this time, the Mamluks under Baibars were taking advantage of the kingdom's constant disputes, and began conquering the remaining crusader cities along the coast. In 1265, Baibars took Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf, and Safad and Toron in 1266. In 1268 he captured Jaffa and Beaufort, and then besieged and destroyed Antioch.
Hugh III and Baibars made a one-year truce after these conquests; Baibars knew that Louis IX was planning another crusade from Europe, and assumed that the target would once again be Egypt. But instead the crusade was diverted to Tunis, where Louis died. Baibars was free to continue his campaigns: in 1270 he had the Assassins kill Philip of Montfort, and in 1271 he captured the Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights strongholds of Krak des Chevaliers and Montfort Castle. He also besieged Tripoli, but abandoned it in May when Prince Edward of England arrived, the only part of Louis IX's crusade to arrive in the east. Edward could do nothing except arrange a ten-year truce with Baibars, who nevertheless attempted to have him assassinated as well. Edward left in 1272, and despite the Second Council of Lyon's plans for another crusade in 1274, no further large-scale expedition ever arrived. Hugh III's authority on the mainland began to break down; he was an unpopular king, and Beirut, the only territory left outside of Acre and Tyre, started to act independently. Its heiress, Isabella of Ibelin (widow of Hugh II), actually placed it under Baibars' protection. Finding the mainland ungovernable, Hugh III left for Cyprus, leaving Balian of Arsuf as bailli. Then in 1277, Maria of Antioch sold her claim to the kingdom to Charles of Anjou, who sent Roger of San Severino to represent him. The Venetians and Templars supported the claim, and Balian was powerless to oppose him. Baibars died in 1277 and was succeeded by Qalawun. In 1281 the ten-year truce expired and was renewed by Roger. Roger returned to Europe after the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, and was replaced by Odo Poilechien. Hugh III attempted to re-assert his authority on the mainland by landing at Beirut in 1283, but this was ineffective and he died in Tyre in 1284. He was succeeded briefly by his son John II, who died soon after in 1285, and was succeeded by his brother, Hugh III's other son Henry II. That year Qalawun captured the Hospitaller fortress of Marqab. Charles of Anjou also died in 1285, and the military orders and the commune of Acre accepted Henry II as king; Odo Poilechen refused to recognize him, but was allowed to hand Acre over to the Templars rather than Henry directly, and the Templars then handed it to the king. War broke out between the Venetians and Genoese again in 1287, and Tripoli fell to Qalawun in 1289. Although it was only a matter of time before Acre also fell, the end of the crusader kingdom was actually instigated in 1290 by newly arrived Crusaders, who rioted in Acre and attacked the city's Muslim merchants. Qalawun died before he could retaliate, but his son al-Ashraf Khalil arrived to besiege Acre in April 1291. Acre was defended by Henry II's brother Amalric of Tyre, the Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights, the Venetians and Pisans, the French garrison led by Jean I de Grailly, and the English garrison led by Otton de Grandson, but they were vastly outnumbered. Henry II himself arrived in May during the siege, but the city fell on May 18. Henry, Amalric, Otton, and Jean escaped, as did a young Templar named Roger de Flor, but most of the other defenders did not, including the master of the Templars Guillaume de Beaujeu. Tyre fell without a fight the next day, Sidon fell in June, and Beirut in July.
The Crusaders moved their headquarters north to cities such as Tortosa, but lost that too, and were forced to relocate their headquarters offshore to Cyprus. Some naval raids and attempts to retake territory were made over the next ten years, but with the loss of the island of Arwad in 1302–1303, the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist on the mainland. The kings of Cyprus for many decades hatched plans to regain the Holy Land, but without success. For the next seven centuries, up to today, a veritable multitude of European monarchs have used the title of King of Jerusalem.
The Latin population of the kingdom was always small; although a steady stream of settlers and new crusaders continually arrived, most of the original crusaders who fought in the First Crusade simply went home. According to William of Tyre, "barely three hundred knights and two thousand foot soldiers could be found" in the kingdom in 1100 during Godfrey's siege of Arsuf. From the very beginning, the Latins were little more than a colonial frontier exercising rule over the native Jewish, Samaritan, Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and Syriac populations.
As new generations grew up in the kingdom, they began to think of themselves as natives. Although they never gave up their core identity as Western Europeans or Franks, their clothing, diet, and commercialism integrated much oriental, particularly Byzantine, influence. As the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres wrote around 1124,
For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or Frank has in this land been made into a Galilaean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned.
The crusaders and their descendants often learned to speak Greek, Arabic, and other eastern languages, and intermarried with the native Christians (whether Greek, Syriac, or Armenian) and sometimes with converted Muslims. Nonetheless, the Frankish principalities remained a distinctive Occidental colony in the heart of Islam.
Fulcher, a participant in the First Crusade and chaplain of Baldwin I, continued his chronicle up to 1127. Fulcher's chronicle was very popular and was used as a source by other historians in the West, such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Almost as soon as Jerusalem had been captured, and continuing throughout the 12th century, many pilgrims arrived and left accounts of the new kingdom; among them are the English Sæwulf, the Kievan Abbot Daniel, the Frank Fretellus, the Byzantine Johannes Phocas, and the Germans John of Würzburg and Theoderich. Aside from these, thereafter there is no eyewitness to events in Jerusalem until William of Tyre, archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of Jerusalem, who began writing around 1167 and died around 1184, although he includes much information about the First Crusade and the intervening years from the death of Fulcher to his own time, drawn mainly from the writings of Albert of Aix and Fulcher himself. From the Muslim perspective, a chief source of information is Usamah ibn Munqidh, a soldier and frequent ambassador from Damascus to Jerusalem and Egypt, whose memoirs, Kitab al i'tibar, include lively accounts of crusader society in the east. Further information can be gathered from travellers such as Benjamin of Tudela and Ibn Jubayr.
The Kingdom at first was virtually bereft of a loyal subject population and had few knights to implement the laws and orders of the realm. With the arrival of Italian trading firms, the creation of the military orders, and immigration by European knights, artisans, and farmers, the affairs of the Kingdom improved and a feudal society developed, similar to but distinct from the society the crusaders knew in Europe. The nature of this society has long been a subject of debate among crusade historians.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, French scholars, such as E. G. Rey, Gaston Dodu, and René Grousset believed that the Crusaders, Muslims and Christians lived in a totally integrated society. Ronnie Ellenblum claims this view was influenced by French imperialism and colonialism; if medieval French crusaders could integrate themselves into local society, then certainly modern French colonies in the Levant could thrive. In the mid-20th century, scholars such as Joshua Prawer, R. C. Smail, Meron Benvenisti, and Claude Cahen argued instead that the Crusaders lived totally segregated from the native inhabitants, who were thoroughly Arabicized and/or Islamicized and were a constant threat to the foreign crusaders. Prawer argued further that the kingdom was an early attempt at colonization, in which the Crusaders were a small ruling class, who were dependent on the native population for survival but made no attempt to integrate with them. For this reason, the rural European society to which the Crusaders were accustomed was replaced by a more secure urban society in the pre-existing cities of the Levant.
According to Ellenblum's interpretation, the inhabitants of the Kingdom (Latin Christians living alongside native Greek and Syriac Christians, Shia and Sunni Arabs, Sufis, Bedouin, Druze, Jews, and Samaritans) all had major differences between each other as well as with the crusaders. Relations between eastern Christians and the Latin Crusaders were "complex and ambiguous", not simply friendly or hostile. He argues that Eastern Christians probably felt closer ties to their fellow Christian crusaders than Muslim Arabs.
Although the Crusaders came upon an ancient urban society, Ellenblum argues that they never completely abandoned their rural European lifestyle, nor was European society completely rural to begin with. Crusader settlement in the Levant resembled the types of colonization and settlement that were already being practised in Europe, a mixture of urban and rural civilization centred around fortresses. The Crusaders were neither totally integrated with the native population, nor segregated in the cities away from the rural natives; rather they settled in both urban and rural areas; specifically, in areas traditionally inhabited by Eastern Christians. Areas that were traditionally Muslim had very little crusader settlement, just as they already had very few native Christian inhabitants.
Into this mixed society the crusaders adapted existing institutions and introduced their familiar customs from Europe. As in Europe the nobles had vassals and were themselves vassals to the king. Agricultural production was regulated by the iqta, a Muslim system of land ownership and payments roughly (though far from exactly) equivalent to the feudal system of Europe, and this system was not heavily disrupted by the Crusaders.
As Hans Mayer says, "the Muslim inhabitants of the Latin Kingdom hardly ever appear in the Latin chronicles", so information on their role in society is difficult to find. The Crusaders "had a natural tendency to ignore these matters as simply without interest and certainly not worthy of record." Although Muslims, as well as Jews and Eastern Christians, had virtually no rights in the countryside, where they were essentially the property of the crusader lord who owned the land, Tolerance for other faiths was, in general, no higher or lower than that found elsewhere in the Middle East. Greeks, Syriacs, and Jews continued to live as they had before, subject to their own laws and courts, with their former Muslim overlords simply replaced by the Crusaders; Muslims now joined them at the lowest level of society. The ra'is, the leader of a Muslim or Syriac community, was a kind of vassal to whatever noble owned his land, but as the crusader nobles were absentee landlords the ra'is and their communities had a high degree of autonomy.
Arab-Andalusian geographer and traveller Ibn Jubayr, who was hostile to the Franks, described the Muslims living under the Christian crusaders' Kingdom of Jerusalem in the late 12th-century:
We left Tibnin by a road running past farms where Muslims live who do very well under the Franks-may Allah preserve us from such a temptation! The regulations imposed on them are the handing over of half of the grain crop at the time of harvest and the payment of a poll tax of one dinar and seven qirats, together with a light duty on their fruit trees. The Muslims own their own houses and rule themselves in their own way. This is the way the farms and big villages are organized in Frankish territory. Many Muslims are sorely tempted to settle here when they see the far from comfortable conditions in which their brethren live in the districts under Muslim rule. Unfortunately for the Muslims, they always have reason for complaint about the injustices of their chiefs in the lands governed by their coreligionists, whereas they can have nothing but praise for the conduct of the Franks, whose justice they can always rely on.
In the cities, Muslims and Eastern Christians were free, although no Muslims were permitted to live in Jerusalem itself. They were second-class citizens and played no part in politics or law, and owed no military service to the crown, although in some cities they may have been the majority of the population. Likewise, citizens of the Italian city-states owed nothing as they lived in autonomous quarters in the port cities.
21st century positions on the question of cultural integration or cultural apartheid remain divergent. Interactions between the Franks and the native Muslims and Christians, though muddled, exhibited a practical coexistence. Though likely overstated, the accounts of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh of Shaizar's travels through Antioch and Jerusalem described a level of aristocratic exchange elevated above ethnic prejudice. Contact between Muslims and Christians came on the administrative or personal level (on the basis of taxes or translation), not communal or cultural, representative of a hierarchical lord over subject relationship. Evidence of inter-cultural integration remains scarce, but evidence of inter-cultural cooperation and complex social interaction proves more common. Key use of the word dragoman, literally translator, with Syriac administrators and Arabic headsmen represented the direct need for negotiation of interests on both sides. Comments on households with Arabic-speaking Christians and a few Arabized Jews and Muslims represent a less dichotomous relationship than the mid-20th-century historians depicted. Rather, the commonality of Frankish Christians having non-Frankish priests, doctors, and other roles within households and inter-cultural communities presents the lack of standardized discrimination. Jerusalemite William of Tyre complained about a trend to hire Jewish or Muslim medical practitioners over their Latin and Frankish counterparts. Evidence even indicates alterations to Frankish cultural and social customs regarding hygiene (notorious amongst Arabs for their lack of washing and knowledge of bathhouse culture), going so far as to ensure water supplies for domestic use in addition to irrigation.
It is impossible to give an accurate estimate of the population of the kingdom. Josiah Russell calculates that all of Syria had about 2.3 million people at the time of the crusades, with perhaps eleven thousand villages; most of these, of course, were outside of crusader rule even at the greatest extent of all four crusader states. It has been estimated by scholars such as Joshua Prawer and Meron Benvenisti that there were at most 120,000 Franks and 100,000 Muslims living in the cities, with another 250,000 Muslim and Eastern Christian peasants in the countryside. The Crusaders accounted for 15–25% of the total population. Benjamin Z. Kedar estimates that there were between 300,000 and 360,000 non-Franks in the Kingdom, 250,000 of whom were villagers in the countryside, and "one may assume that Muslims were in the majority in some, possibly most parts of the kingdom of Jerusalem…" As Ronnie Ellenblum points out, there simply is not enough existing evidence to accurately count the population and any estimate is inherently unreliable. Contemporary chronicler William of Tyre recorded the census of 1183, which was intended to determine the number of men available to defend against an invasion, and to determine the amount of tax money that could be obtained from the inhabitants, Muslim or Christian. If the population was actually counted, William did not record the number. In the 13th century, John of Ibelin drew up a list of fiefs and the number of knights owed by each, but this gives no indication of the non-noble, non-Latin population.
The Mamluks, led by Baibars, eventually made good their pledge to cleanse the entire Middle East of the Franks. With the fall of Antioch (1268), Tripoli (1289), and Acre (1291), those Christians unable to leave the cities were massacred or enslaved and the last traces of Christian rule in the Levant disappeared.
An unknown number of Muslim slaves lived in the Kingdom. There was a very large slave market in Acre that functioned throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Italian merchants were sometimes accused of selling Southeastern European Christians as slaves along with Muslim slaves. Slavery was less common than ransom, especially for prisoners of war; the large numbers of prisoners taken during raids and battles every year ensured that ransom money flowed freely between the Christian and Muslim states. Escape for prisoners and slaves was probably not difficult, as the inhabitants of the countryside were majority Muslim, and fugitive slaves were always a problem. The only legal means of manumission was conversion to (Catholic) Christianity. No Christian, whether Western or Eastern, was permitted by law to be sold into slavery.
The assizes of Jerusalem provided a legal framework for slavery in the Kingdom. The document stipulated that « villeins, animals or some other chattel » could be traded. « Villeins » were rural semi-free laborers akin to serfs. There were also multiple ways to become chattel slaves. People could be slaves by birth, enslaved by being captured in a raid, or as a penalty for debt or for helping a runaway slave.
The nomadic Bedouin tribes were considered to be the property of the king and under his protection. They could be sold or alienated just like any other property, and later in the 12th century, they were often under the protection of a lesser noble or one of the military orders.
The urban composition of the area, combined with the presence of the Italian merchants, led to the development of an economy that was much more commercial than it was agricultural. Palestine had always been a crossroads for trade; now, this trade extended to Europe as well. European goods, such as the woolen textiles of northern Europe, made their way to the Middle East and Asia, while Asian goods were transported back to Europe. Jerusalem was especially involved in the silk, cotton and spice trade; other items that first appeared in Europe through trade with crusader Jerusalem included oranges and sugar, the latter of which chronicler William of Tyre called "very necessary for the use and health of mankind." In the countryside, wheat, barley, legumes, olives, grapes, and dates were grown. The Italian city-states made enormous profits from this trade, thanks to commercial treaties like the Pactum Warmundi, and it influenced their Renaissance in later centuries.
Colonies of Genoa and Venice in Palestine also took on agricultural ventures in their concessions. They especially cultivated Sugar for export to Europe. Sugar cane had been introduced in Palestine by the Arabs. To work on the sugar fields, Italian colonists utilized slaves or serfs of Arab or Syrian origin, or local serfs. Sugar manufacturing began in Tyre. In the 13th century, sugar production continued to increase in Palestine, and merchants could export it duty-free through the port of Acre until its conquest in 1291. The sugar exploitation system pioneered in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is seen as a precursor to the sugar plantations in the Americas.
Jerusalem collected money through tribute payments, first from the coastal cities which had not yet been captured, and later from other neighbouring states such as Damascus and Egypt, which the Crusaders could not conquer directly. After Baldwin I extended his rule over Oultrejordain, Jerusalem gained revenue from the taxation of Muslim caravans passing from Syria to Egypt or Arabia. The money economy of Jerusalem meant that their manpower problem could be partially solved by paying for mercenaries, an uncommon occurrence in medieval Europe. Mercenaries could be fellow European crusaders, or, perhaps more often, Muslim soldiers, including the famous Turcopoles.
Jerusalem was the centre of education in the kingdom. There was a school in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the basic skills of reading and writing Latin were taught; The relative wealth of the merchant class meant that their children could be educated there along with the children of nobles – it is likely that William of Tyre was a classmate of future king Baldwin III. Higher education had to be undertaken at one of the universities in Europe; the development of a university was impossible in the culture of crusader Jerusalem, where warfare was far more important than philosophy or theology. Nonetheless, the nobility and general Frankish population were noted for their high literacy: lawyers and clerks were in abundance, and the study of law, history, and other academic subjects was a beloved pastime of the royal family and the nobility. Jerusalem had an extensive library not only of ancient and medieval Latin works but of Arabic literature, much of which was apparently captured from Usamah ibn Munqidh and his entourage after a shipwreck in 1154. The Holy Sepulchre contained the kingdom's scriptorium and the city had a chancery where royal charters and other documents were produced. Aside from Latin, the standard written language of medieval Europe, the populace of crusader Jerusalem communicated in vernacular forms of French and Italian; Greek, Armenian, and even Arabic were used by Frankish settlers.
In Jerusalem itself, the greatest architectural endeavour was the expansion of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in western Gothic style. This expansion consolidated all the separate shrines on the site into one building, and was completed by 1149. Outside of Jerusalem, castles and fortresses were the major focus of construction: Kerak and Montreal in Oultrejordain and Ibelin near Jaffa are among the numerous examples of crusader castles.
Crusader art was a mix of Western, Byzantine, and Islamic styles. The major cities featured baths, interior plumbing, and other advanced hygienic tools which were lacking in most other cities and towns throughout the world. The foremost examples of crusader art are perhaps the Melisende Psalter, an illuminated manuscript commissioned between 1135 and 1143 and now located in the British Library, and the sculpted Nazareth Capitals. Paintings and mosaics were popular forms of art in the kingdom, but many of these were destroyed by the Mamluks in the 13th century; only the most durable fortresses survived the reconquest.
Immediately after the First Crusade, land was distributed to loyal vassals of Godfrey, forming numerous feudal lordships within the kingdom. This was continued by Godfrey's successors. The number and importance of the lordships varied throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and many cities were part of the royal domain. The king was assisted by a number of officers of state. The king and the royal court were normally located in Jerusalem, but due to the prohibition on Muslim inhabitants, the capital was small and underpopulated. The king just as often held court at Acre, Nablus, Tyre, or wherever else he happened to be. In Jerusalem, the royal family lived firstly on the Temple Mount, before the foundation of the Knights Templar, and later in the palace complex surrounding the Tower of David; there was another palace complex in Acre.
Because the nobles tended to live in Jerusalem rather than on estates in the countryside, they had a larger influence on the king than they would have had in Europe. The nobles, along with the bishops, formed the haute cour (high court), which was responsible for confirming the election of a new king (or a regent if necessary), collecting taxes, minting coins, allotting money to the king, and raising armies. The haute cour was the only judicial body for the nobles of the kingdom, hearing criminal cases such as murder, rape, and treason, and simpler feudal disputes such as the recovery of slaves, sales and purchases of fiefs, and default of service. Punishments included forfeiture of land and exile, or in extreme cases death. The first laws of the kingdom were, according to tradition, established during Godfrey of Bouillon's short reign, but were more probably established by Baldwin II at the Council of Nablus in 1120. Benjamin Z. Kedar argued that the canons of the Council of Nablus were in force in the 12th century but had fallen out of use by the thirteenth. Marwan Nader questions this and suggests that the canons may not have applied to the whole kingdom at all times. The most extensive collection of laws, together known as the Assizes of Jerusalem, were written in the mid-13th century, although many of them are purported to be twelfth-century in origin.
There were other, lesser courts for non-nobles and non-Latins; the Cour des Bourgeois provided justice for non-noble Latins, dealing with minor criminal offences such as assault and theft, and provided rules for disputes between non-Latins, who had fewer legal rights. Special courts such as the Cour de la Fond (for commercial disputes in the markets) and the Cour de la Mer (an admiralty court) existed in the coastal cities. The extent to which native Islamic and Eastern Christian courts continued to function is unknown, but the ra'is probably exercised some legal authority on a local level. The Cour des Syriens judged non-criminal matters among the native Christians (the "Syriacs"). For criminal matters, non-Latins were to be tried in the Cour des Bourgeois (or even the Haute Cour if the crime was sufficiently severe).
The Italian communes were granted almost complete autonomy from the very early days of the Kingdom, thanks to their military and naval support in the years following the First Crusade. This autonomy included the right to administer their own justice, although the kinds of cases that fell under their jurisdiction varied at different times.
The king was recognised as head of the Haute Cour, although he was legally only primus inter pares.
After the loss of all territory in the Levant in 1291, there were late attempts at further crusades, nominally proposing to recapture Jerusalem, but with the rise of the Ottoman Empire their character was more and more that of a desperate defensive war rarely reaching beyond the Balkans (Alexandrian Crusade, Smyrniote crusades). Henry IV of England made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1393–4, and he later vowed to lead a crusade to recapture the city, but he did not undertake such a campaign before his death in 1413. The Levant remained under Ottoman control from 1517 until the Partition of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
With the Fall of Ruad in 1302, the Kingdom of Jerusalem lost its final outpost on the Levantine coast, its possession closest to the Holy Land now being Cyprus. Henry II of Jerusalem retained the title of king of Jerusalem until his death in 1324, and the title continued to be claimed by his successors, the kings of Cyprus. The title of "king of Jerusalem" was also continuously used by the Angevin kings of Naples, whose founder, Charles of Anjou, had in 1277 bought a claim to the throne from Mary of Antioch. Thereafter, this claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem was treated as a tributary of the crown of Naples, which often changed hands by testament or conquest rather than direct inheritance. As Naples was a papal fief, the Popes often endorsed the title of King of Jerusalem as well as of Naples, and the history of these claims is that of the Neapolitan Kingdom. In 1441, control of the Kingdom of Naples was lost to Alfonso V of Aragon and the title thus was claimed by the kings of Spain, and after the War of the Spanish Succession both by the House of Bourbon and the House of Habsburg. The title is still in de facto use by the Spanish Crown, currently held by Felipe VI of Spain. It was also claimed by Otto von Habsburg as Habsburg pretender until 1958, and by the kings of Italy until 1946.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as the Latin Kingdom, was a Crusader state that was established in the Levant immediately after the First Crusade. It lasted for almost two hundred years, from the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 until the siege of Acre in 1291. Its history is divided into two periods with a brief interruption in its existence, beginning with its collapse after the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 and its restoration after the Third Crusade in 1192.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The original Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted from 1099 to 1187 before being almost entirely overrun by the Ayyubid Sultanate under Saladin. Following the Third Crusade, it was re-established in Acre in 1192. The re-established state is commonly known as the \"Second Kingdom of Jerusalem\" or alternatively as the \"Kingdom of Acre\" after its new capital city. Acre remained the capital for the rest of its existence excluding the two decades that followed the Crusaders' establishment of partial control over Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade, through the diplomacy of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen vis-à-vis the Ayyubids.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The vast majority of the Crusaders who established and settled the Kingdom of Jerusalem were from the Kingdom of France, as were the knights and soldiers who made up the bulk of the steady flow of reinforcements throughout the two-hundred-year span of its existence; its rulers and elite were therefore predominantly French. French Crusaders also brought their language to the Levant, thus establishing Old French as the lingua franca of the Crusader states, in which Latin served as the official language. While the majority of the population in the countryside comprised Christians and Muslims from local Levantine ethnicities, many Europeans (primarily French and Italian) also arrived to settle in villages across the region.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "At first the kingdom was little more than a loose collection of towns and cities captured during the First Crusade, but at its height in the mid-12th century, the kingdom encompassed roughly the territory of modern-day Israel, Palestine and the southern parts of Lebanon. From the Mediterranean Sea, the kingdom extended in a thin strip of land from Beirut in the north to the Sinai Desert in the south; into modern Jordan and Syria in the east, and towards Fatimid Egypt in the west. Three other Crusader states founded during and after the First Crusade were located further north: the County of Edessa (1097–1144), the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), and the County of Tripoli (1109–1289). While all three were independent, they were closely tied to Jerusalem. Beyond these to the north and west lay the states of Armenian Cilicia and the Byzantine Empire, with which Jerusalem had a close relationship in the twelfth century. Further east, various Muslim emirates were located which were ultimately allied with the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The kingdom was ruled by King Aimery of Lusignan (1197–1205), the King of Cyprus, another crusader state founded during the Third Crusade. Dynastic ties also strengthened with Tripoli, Antioch, and Armenia. The kingdom was soon increasingly dominated by the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (reigned 1220–1250) had ambitions in the Crusader state, claiming the kingdom by marriage, but his presence sparked a civil war (1228–1243) among the kingdom's nobility. The kingdom became little more than a pawn in the politics and warfare of the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties in Egypt, as well as the Khwarezmian and Mongol invaders. As a relatively minor kingdom, it received little financial or military support from Europe; despite numerous small expeditions, Europeans generally proved unwilling to undertake an expensive journey to the east for an apparently losing cause. The Mamluk sultans Baibars (reigned 1260–1277) and al-Ashraf Khalil (reigned 1290–1293) eventually reconquered all the remaining crusader strongholds, culminating in the destruction of Acre in 1291.",
"title": "Geographic boundaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The kingdom was ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse, although the Crusaders themselves and their descendants were an elite Catholic minority. They imported many customs and institutions from their homelands in Europe, and there were close familial and political connections with the West throughout the kingdom's existence. The kingdom also inherited \"oriental\" qualities, influenced by pre-existing customs and populations. The majority of the kingdom's inhabitants were native Christians, especially Greek and Syriac Orthodox, as well as Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. The native Christians and Muslims, who were a marginalized lower class, tended to speak Greek and Arabic, while the crusaders, who came mainly from France, spoke French. There were also a small number of Jews and Samaritans.",
"title": "People"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to Benjamin of Tudela, who travelled through the kingdom around 1170, there were 1,000 Samaritans in Nablus, 200 in Caesarea and 300 in Ascalon. This sets a lower bound for the Samaritan population at 1,500, since the contemporary Tolidah, a Samaritan chronicle, also mentions communities in Gaza and Acre. Benjamin of Tudela estimated the total Jewish population of 14 cities in the kingdom to be 1,200, making the Samaritan population of the time larger than the Jewish, perhaps for the only time in history.",
"title": "People"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The First Crusade was preached at the Council of Clermont in 1095 by Pope Urban II, with the goal of assisting the Byzantine Empire against the invasions of the \"Turks and Arabs\" and \"to destroy this vile race from the lands of our friends.\" However, the main objective quickly became the control of the Holy Land. The Byzantines were frequently at war with the Seljuks and other Turkish dynasties for control of Anatolia and Syria. The Sunni Seljuks had formerly ruled the Seljuk Empire, but this empire had collapsed into several smaller states after the death of Malik-Shah I in 1092. Malik-Shah was succeeded in the Anatolian Sultanate of Rum by Kilij Arslan I, and in Syria by his brother Tutush I, who died in 1095. Tutush's sons Fakhr al-Mulk Radwan and Duqaq inherited Aleppo and Damascus respectively, further dividing Syria amongst emirs antagonistic towards each other, as well as Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul. This disunity among the Anatolian and Syrian emirs allowed the Crusaders to overcome any military opposition they faced on the way to Jerusalem.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Egypt and much of Palestine were controlled by the Arab Shi'ite Fatimid Caliphate, which had extended further into Syria before the arrival of the Seljuks. Warfare between the Fatimids and Seljuks caused great disruption for the local Christians and for Western pilgrims. The Fatimids, under the nominal rule of caliph al-Musta'li but actually controlled by vizier al-Afdal Shahanshah, had lost Jerusalem to the Seljuks in 1073; they recaptured it in 1098 from the Artuqids, a smaller Turkish tribe associated with the Seljuks, just before the arrival of the crusaders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Crusaders arrived at Jerusalem in June 1099; a few of the neighbouring towns (Ramla, Lydda, Bethlehem, and others) were taken first, and Jerusalem itself was captured on July 15. On 22 July, a council was held in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to establish a king for the newly created Kingdom of Jerusalem. Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon were recognized as the leaders of the crusade and the siege of Jerusalem. Raymond was the wealthier and more powerful of the two, but at first he refused to become king, perhaps attempting to show his piety and probably hoping that the other nobles would insist upon his election anyway. The more popular Godfrey did not hesitate like Raymond, and accepted the position as leader. Most modern historians chronicle that he took the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri (\"advocate\" or \"defender\" of the Holy Sepulchre). Others report that Godfrey himself seems to have used the more ambiguous term princeps, or simply retained his title of dux from Lower Lorraine. According to William of Tyre, writing in the later 12th century when Godfrey had become a legendary hero, he refused to wear \"a crown of gold\" where Christ had worn \"a crown of thorns\". Raymond was incensed and took his army to forage away from the city. The new kingdom, and Godfrey's reputation, was secured with the defeat of the Fatimid Egyptian army under al-Afdal Shahanshah at the Battle of Ascalon one month after the conquest, on August 12, but Raymond and Godfrey's continued antagonism prevented the crusaders from taking control of Ascalon itself.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "There was still some uncertainty about what to do with the new kingdom. The papal legate Daimbert of Pisa convinced Godfrey to hand over Jerusalem to him as Latin Patriarch, with the intention to set up a theocratic state directly under papal control. According to William of Tyre, Godfrey may have supported Daimbert's efforts, and he agreed to take possession of \"one or two other cities and thus enlarge the kingdom\" if Daimbert were permitted to rule Jerusalem. Godfrey did indeed increase the boundaries of the kingdom, by capturing Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, and other cities, and reducing many others to tributary status. He set the foundations for the system of vassalage in the kingdom, establishing the Principality of Galilee and the County of Jaffa, but his reign was short, and he died of an illness in 1100. His brother Baldwin of Boulogne successfully outmanoeuvred Daimbert and claimed Jerusalem for himself as \"King of the Latins of Jerusalem\". Daimbert compromised by crowning Baldwin I in Bethlehem rather than Jerusalem, but the path for a monarchy had been laid. Within this framework, a Catholic church hierarchy was established, overtop of the local Eastern Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox authorities, who retained their own hierarchies (the Catholics considered them schismatics and thus illegitimate, and vice versa). Under the Latin Patriarch, there were four suffragan archdioceses and numerous dioceses.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During Baldwin I's reign, the kingdom expanded even further. The number of European inhabitants increased, as the minor crusade of 1101 brought reinforcements to the kingdom. Baldwin repopulated Jerusalem with Franks and native Christians, after his expedition across the Jordan in 1115. With help from the Italian city-states and other adventurers, notably King Sigurd I of Norway, Baldwin captured the port cities of Acre (1104), Beirut (1110), and Sidon (1111), while exerting his suzerainty over the other crusader states to the north – Edessa (which he had founded in 1097 during the crusade), Antioch, and Tripoli, which he helped capture in 1109. He successfully defended against Muslim invasions, from the Fatimids at the numerous battles at Ramla and elsewhere in the southwest of the kingdom, and from Damascus and Mosul at the Battle of al-Sannabra in the northeast in 1113. As Thomas Madden says, Baldwin was \"the true founder of the kingdom of Jerusalem\", who \"had transformed a tenuous arrangement into a solid feudal state. With brilliance and diligence, he established a strong monarchy, conquered the Palestinian coast, reconciled the crusader barons, and built strong frontiers against the kingdom's Muslim neighbours.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Baldwin brought with him an Armenian wife, traditionally named Arda (although never named such by contemporaries), whom he had married to gain political support from the Armenian population in Edessa, and whom he quickly set aside when he no longer needed Armenian support in Jerusalem. He bigamously married Adelaide del Vasto, regent of Sicily, in 1113, but was convinced to divorce her as well in 1117; Adelaide's son from her first marriage, Roger II of Sicily, never forgave Jerusalem, and for decades withheld much-needed Sicilian naval support.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Baldwin died without heirs in 1118, during a campaign against Egypt, and the kingdom was offered to his brother Eustace III of Boulogne, who had accompanied Baldwin and Godfrey on the crusade. Eustace was uninterested, and instead the crown passed to Baldwin's relative, probably a cousin, Baldwin of Le Bourg, who had previously succeeded him in Edessa. Baldwin II was an able ruler, and he too successfully defended against Fatimid and Seljuk invasions. Although Antioch was severely weakened after the Battle of Ager Sanguinis in 1119, and Baldwin himself was held captive by the emir of Aleppo from 1123 to 1124, Baldwin led the crusader states to victory at the Battle of Azaz in 1125. His reign saw the establishment of the first military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar; the earliest surviving written laws of the kingdom, compiled at the Council of Nablus in 1120; and the first commercial treaty with the Republic of Venice, the Pactum Warmundi, in 1124. The increase of naval and military support from Venice led to the capture of Tyre that year. The influence of Jerusalem was further extended over Edessa and Antioch, where Baldwin II acted as regent when their own leaders were killed in battle, although there were regency governments in Jerusalem as well during Baldwin's captivity. Baldwin was married to the Armenian noblewoman Morphia of Melitene, and had four daughters: Hodierna and Alice, who married into the families of the Count of Tripoli and Prince of Antioch; Ioveta, who became an influential abbess; and the eldest, Melisende, who was his heir and succeeded him upon his death in 1131, with her husband Fulk V of Anjou as king-consort. Their son, the future Baldwin III, was named co-heir by his grandfather.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Fulk was an experienced crusader and had brought military support to the kingdom during a pilgrimage in 1120. He brought Jerusalem into the sphere of the Angevin Empire, as the father of Geoffrey V of Anjou and grandfather of the future Henry II of England. Not everyone appreciated the imposition of a foreigner as king. In 1132 Antioch, Tripoli, and Edessa all asserted their independence and conspired to prevent Fulk from exercising the suzerainty of Jerusalem over them. He defeated Tripoli in battle, and settled the regency in Antioch by arranging a marriage between the countess, Melisende's niece Constance, and his own relative Raymond of Poitiers. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, the native crusader nobles opposed Fulk's preference for his Angevin retinue. In 1134 Hugh II of Jaffa revolted against Fulk, allying with the Muslim garrison at Ascalon, for which he was convicted of treason in absentia. The Latin Patriarch intervened to settle the dispute, but an assassination attempt was then made on Hugh, for which Fulk was blamed. This scandal allowed Melisende and her supporters to gain control of the government, just as her father had intended. Accordingly, Fulk \"became so uxorious that...not even in unimportant cases did he take any measures without her knowledge and assistance.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Fulk was then faced with a new and more dangerous enemy: the atabeg Zengi of Mosul, who had taken control of Aleppo and had set his sights on Damascus as well; the union of these three states would have been a serious blow to the growing power of Jerusalem. A brief intervention in 1137–1138 by the Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus, who wished to assert imperial suzerainty over all the crusader states, did nothing to stop the threat of Zengi; in 1139 Damascus and Jerusalem recognized the severity of the threat to both states, and an alliance was concluded which halted Zengi's advance. Fulk used this time to construct numerous castles, including Ibelin and Kerak. After the death of both Fulk and Emperor John in separate hunting accidents in 1143, Zengi invaded and conquered Edessa in 1144. Queen Melisende, now regent for her elder son Baldwin III, appointed a new constable, Manasses of Hierges, to head the army after Fulk's death, but Edessa could not be recaptured, despite Zengi's own assassination in 1146. The fall of Edessa shocked Europe, and a Second Crusade arrived in 1148.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After meeting in Acre in June, the crusading kings Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany agreed with Melisende, Baldwin III and the major nobles of the kingdom to attack Damascus. Zengi's territory had been divided amongst his sons after his death, and Damascus no longer felt threatened, so an alliance had been made with Zengi's son Nur ad-Din, the emir of Aleppo. Perhaps remembering attacks launched on Jerusalem from Damascus in previous decades, Damascus seemed to be the best target for the crusade, rather than Aleppo or another city to the north which would have allowed for the recapture of Edessa. The subsequent Siege of Damascus was a complete failure; when the city seemed to be on the verge of collapse, the crusader army suddenly moved against another section of the walls, and was driven back. The Crusaders retreated within three days. There were rumours of treachery and bribery, and Conrad III felt betrayed by the nobility of Jerusalem. Whatever the reason for the failure, the French and German armies returned home, and a few years later Damascus was firmly under Nur ad-Din's control.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The failure of the Second Crusade had dire long-term consequences for the kingdom. The West was hesitant to send large-scale expeditions; for the next few decades, only small armies came, headed by minor European nobles who desired to make a pilgrimage. The Muslim states of Syria were meanwhile gradually united by Nur ad-Din, who defeated the Principality of Antioch at the Battle of Inab in 1149 and gained control of Damascus in 1154. Nur ad-Din was extremely pious and during his rule the concept of jihad came to be interpreted as a kind of counter-crusade against the kingdom, which was an impediment to Muslim unity, both political and spiritual.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In Jerusalem, the Crusaders were distracted by a conflict between Melisende and Baldwin III. Melisende continued to rule as regent long after Baldwin came of age. She was supported by, among others, Manasses of Hierges, who essentially governed for her as constable; her son Amalric, whom she set up as Count of Jaffa; Philip of Milly; and the Ibelin family. Baldwin asserted his independence by mediating disputes in Antioch and Tripoli, and gained the support of the Ibelin brothers when they began to oppose Manasses' growing power, thanks to his marriage to their widowed mother Helvis of Ramla. In 1153 Baldwin had himself crowned as sole ruler, and a compromise was reached by which the kingdom was divided in two, with Baldwin taking Acre and Tyre in the north and Melisende remaining in control of Jerusalem and the cities of the south. Baldwin was able to replace Manasses with one of his own supporters, Humphrey II of Toron. Baldwin and Melisende knew that this situation was untenable. Baldwin soon invaded his mother's possessions, defeated Manasses, and besieged his mother in the Tower of David in Jerusalem. Melisende surrendered and retired to Nablus, but Baldwin appointed her his regent and chief advisor, and she retained some of her influence, especially in appointing ecclesiastical officials. In 1153, Baldwin launched an offensive against Ascalon, the fortress in the south from which Fatimid Egyptian armies had continually raided Jerusalem since the foundation of the kingdom. The fortress was captured and was added to the County of Jaffa, still in the possession of his brother Amalric.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "With the capture of Ascalon the southern border of the kingdom was now secure, and Egypt, formerly a major threat to the kingdom but now destabilized under the reign of several underaged caliphs, was reduced to a tributary state. Nur ad-Din remained a threat in the east, and Baldwin had to contend with the advances of the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus, who claimed suzerainty over the Principality of Antioch. In order to bolster the defences of the kingdom against the growing strength of the Muslims, Baldwin III made the first direct alliance with the Byzantine Empire, by marrying Theodora Comnena, a niece of emperor Manuel; Manuel married Baldwin's cousin Maria. As William of Tyre put it, it was hoped that Manuel would be able \"to relieve from his own abundance the distress under which our realm was suffering and to change our poverty into superabundance\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The relationship between Byzantium and Jerusalem has divided historians, with some historians supporting the Byzantine interpretation that Amalric recognised Manuel as his overlord, while other scholars such as Andrew Jotischky see the relationship as one of Byzantine protection of Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "When Baldwin died childless in 1162, a year after his mother Melisende, the kingdom passed to his brother Amalric, who renewed the alliance negotiated by Baldwin. In 1163 the chaotic situation in Egypt led to a refusal to pay tribute to Jerusalem, and requests were sent to Nur ad-Din for assistance; in response, Amalric invaded, but was turned back when the Egyptians flooded the Nile at Bilbeis. The Egyptian vizier Shawar again requested help from Nur ad-Din, who sent his general Shirkuh, but Shawar quickly turned against him and allied with Amalric. Amalric and Shirkuh both besieged Bilbeis in 1164, but both withdrew due to Nur ad-Din's campaigns against Antioch, where Bohemond III of Antioch and Raymond III of Tripoli were defeated at the Battle of Harim. It seemed likely that Antioch itself would fall to Nur ad-Din, but he withdrew when Emperor Manuel sent a large Byzantine force to the area. Nur ad-Din sent Shirkuh back to Egypt in 1166, and Shawar again allied with Amalric, who was defeated at the Battle of al-Babein. Despite the defeat, both sides withdrew, but Shawar remained in control with a crusader garrison in Cairo. Amalric cemented his alliance with Manuel by marrying Manuel's niece Maria Komnene in 1167, and an embassy led by William of Tyre was sent to Constantinople to negotiate a military expedition, but in 1168 Amalric pillaged Bilbeis without waiting for the naval support promised by Manuel. Amalric accomplished nothing else, but his actions prompted Shawar to switch sides again and seek help from Shirkuh. Shawar was promptly assassinated, and when Shirkuh died in 1169, he was succeeded by his nephew Yusuf, better known as Saladin. That year, Manuel sent a large Byzantine fleet of some 300 ships to assist Amalric, and the town of Damietta was placed under siege. However, the Byzantine fleet sailed with enough provisions for only three months. By the time the Crusaders were ready, supplies were already running out and the fleet retired. Each side sought to blame the other for the failure, but both knew that they could not take Egypt without the other's assistance: the alliance was maintained, and plans for another campaign in Egypt were made, which ultimately were to come to nought.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the end, Nur ad-Din was victorious and Saladin established himself as Sultan of Egypt. Saladin soon began to assert his independence from Nur ad-Din, and with the death of both Amalric and Nur ad-Din in 1174, he was well-placed to begin exerting control over Nur ad-Din's Syrian possessions as well. Upon the death of the pro-western Emperor Manuel in 1180, the Kingdom of Jerusalem lost its most powerful ally.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The subsequent events have often been interpreted as a struggle between two opposing factions, the \"court party\", made up of Baldwin's mother, Amalric's first wife Agnes of Courtenay, her immediate family, and recent arrivals from Europe who were inexperienced in the affairs of the kingdom and who were in favour of war with Saladin; and the \"noble party\", led by Raymond of Tripoli and the lesser nobility of the kingdom, who favoured peaceful co-existence with the Muslims. This is the interpretation offered by William of Tyre, who was firmly placed in the \"noble\" camp, and his view was taken up by subsequent historians; in the 20th century, Marshall W. Baldwin, Steven Runciman, and Hans E. Mayer favoured this interpretation. Peter W. Edbury, on the other hand, argues that William, as well as the thirteenth-century authors who continued William's chronicle in French and were allied to Raymond's supporters in the Ibelin family, cannot be considered impartial. Although the events were clearly a dynastic struggle, \"the division was not between native barons and newcomers from the West, but between the king's maternal and paternal kin.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Miles of Plancy was briefly bailli or regent during Baldwin IV's minority. Miles was assassinated in October 1174, and Count Raymond III of Tripoli, Amalric's first cousin, became regent. It is highly probable that Raymond or his supporters engineered the assassination. Baldwin reached his majority in 1176, and despite his illness he no longer had any legal need for a regent. Since Raymond was his nearest relative in the male line with a strong claim to the throne, there was concern about the extent of his ambitions, although he had no direct heirs of his own. To balance this, the king turned from time to time to his uncle, Joscelin III of Edessa, who was appointed seneschal in 1176; Joscelin was more closely related to Baldwin than Raymond was, but had no claim to the throne himself.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "As a leper, Baldwin had no children and could not be expected to rule much longer, so the focus of his succession passed to his sister Sibylla and his younger half-sister Isabella. Baldwin and his advisors recognised that it was essential for Sibylla to be married to a Western nobleman in order to access support from European states in a military crisis; while Raymond was still regent, a marriage was arranged for Sibylla and William of Montferrat, a cousin of Louis VII of France and of Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor. It was hoped that by allying with a relative of the Western emperor, Frederick would come to the kingdom's aid. Jerusalem looked again towards the Byzantine Empire for help, and Emperor Manuel was looking for a way to restore his empire's prestige after his defeat at the Battle of Myriokephalon in 1176; this mission was undertaken by Raynald of Châtillon. After William of Montferrat arrived in 1176, he fell ill and died in June 1177, leaving Sibylla widowed and pregnant with the future Baldwin V. Raynald was then named regent.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Soon afterwards, Philip of Flanders arrived in Jerusalem on pilgrimage; he was Baldwin IV's cousin, and the king offered him the regency and command of the army, both of which Philip refused, although he objected to the appointment of Raynald as regent. Philip then attempted to intervene in the negotiations for Sibylla's second husband, and suggested one of his own retinue, but the native barons refused his suggestion. In addition, Philip seemed to think he could carve out a territory of his own in Egypt, but he refused to participate in the planned Byzantine-Jerusalem expedition. The expedition was delayed and finally cancelled, and Philip took his army away to the north.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Most of the army of Jerusalem marched north with Philip, Raymond III, and Bohemond III to attack Hama, and Saladin took the opportunity to invade the kingdom. Baldwin proved to be an effective and energetic king as well as a brilliant military commander: he defeated Saladin at the Battle of Montgisard in September 1177 despite being greatly outnumbered and having to rely on a levee-en-masse. Although Baldwin's presence despite his illness was inspirational, direct military decisions were actually made by Raynald.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Hugh III of Burgundy was expected to come to Jerusalem and marry Sibylla, but Hugh was unable to leave France due to the political unrest there in 1179–1180 following the death of Louis VII. Meanwhile, Baldwin IV's stepmother Maria, mother of Isabella and stepmother of Sibylla, married Balian of Ibelin. At Easter in 1180, Raymond and his cousin Bohemond III of Antioch attempted to force Sibylla to marry Balian's brother Baldwin of Ibelin. Raymond and Bohemond were King Baldwin's nearest male relatives in the paternal line, and could have claimed the throne if the king died without an heir or a suitable replacement. Before Raymond and Bohemond arrived, Agnes and King Baldwin arranged for Sibylla to be married to a Poitevin newcomer, Guy of Lusignan, whose older brother Amalric of Lusignan was already an established figure at court. Internationally, the Lusignans were useful as vassals of Baldwin and Sibylla's cousin Henry II of England. Baldwin betrothed eight-year-old Isabella to Humphrey IV of Toron, stepson of the powerful Raynald of Châtillon, thereby removing her from the influence of the Ibelin family and that of her mother.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The dispute between the two factions in the kingdom affected the election of a new Patriarch in 1180. When Patriarch Amalric died on 6 October 1180, the two most obvious choices for his successor were William of Tyre and Heraclius of Caesarea. They were fairly evenly matched in background and education, but politically they were allied with opposite parties, as Heraclius was one of Agnes of Courtenay's supporters. The canons of the Holy Sepulchre asked the king for advice, and Heraclius was chosen through Agnes' influence. There were rumours that Agnes and Heraclius were lovers, but this information comes from the partisan 13th-century continuations of William of Tyre's history, and there is no other evidence to substantiate such a claim.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "At the end of 1181, Raynald of Châtillon raided south into Arabia, in the direction of Medina, although he did not make it that far. It was probably around this time that Raynald also attacked a Muslim caravan. The kingdom had a truce with Saladin at the time, and Raynald's actions have been seen as an independent act of brigandage; it is possible that he was trying to prevent Saladin from moving his forces north to take control of Aleppo, which would have strengthened Saladin's position. In response, Saladin attacked the kingdom in 1182, but was defeated at Belvoir Castle. King Baldwin, although quite ill, was still able to command the army in person. Saladin attempted to besiege Beirut from land and sea, and Baldwin raided Damascene territory, but neither side did significant damage. In December 1182, Raynald launched a naval expedition on the Red Sea, which made it as far south as Rabigh. The expedition was defeated and two of Raynald's men were actually taken to Mecca to be executed in public. Like his earlier raids, Raynald's expedition is usually seen as selfish and ultimately fatal for Jerusalem, but according to Bernard Hamilton, it was actually a shrewd strategy, meant to damage Saladin's prestige and reputation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1183 a general tax was levied throughout the kingdom, which was unprecedented in Jerusalem and almost all of medieval Europe to that point. The tax helped pay for larger armies for the next few years. More troops were certainly needed, since Saladin was finally able to gain control of Aleppo, and with peace in his northern territories, he could focus on Jerusalem in the south. King Baldwin was so incapacitated by his leprosy that it was necessary to appoint a regent, and Guy of Lusignan was chosen, as he was Baldwin's legal heir and the king was not expected to live. The inexperienced Guy led the Frankish army against Saladin's incursions into the kingdom, but neither side made any real gains, and Guy was criticized by his opponents for not striking against Saladin when he had the chance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In October 1183, Isabella married Humphrey of Toron at Kerak during a siege by Saladin, who perhaps hoped to take some valuable prisoners. As King Baldwin, although now blind and crippled, had recovered enough to resume his reign and his command of the army, Guy was removed from the regency and his five-year-old stepson, King Baldwin's nephew and namesake Baldwin, was crowned as co-king in November. King Baldwin himself then went to relieve the castle, carried on a litter, and attended by his mother. He was reconciled with Raymond of Tripoli and appointed him military commander. The siege was lifted in December and Saladin retreated to Damascus. Saladin attempted another siege in 1184, but Baldwin repelled that attack as well, and Saladin raided Nablus and other towns on the way home.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In October 1184, Guy of Lusignan led an attack on the Bedouin nomads from his base in Ascalon. Unlike Raynald's attacks on caravans, which may have had some military purpose, Guy attacked a group that was usually loyal to Jerusalem and provided intelligence about the movements of Saladin's troops. At the same time, King Baldwin contracted his final illness and Raymond of Tripoli, rather than Guy, was appointed as his regent. His nephew Baldwin was paraded in public, wearing his crown as Baldwin V. Baldwin IV finally succumbed to his leprosy in May 1185.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Meanwhile, the succession crisis had prompted a mission to the West to seek assistance. In 1184, Patriarch Heraclius travelled throughout the courts of Europe, but no help was forthcoming. Heraclius offered the \"keys of the Holy Sepulchre, those of the Tower of David and the banner of the Kingdom of Jerusalem\", but not the crown itself, to both Philip II of France and Henry II of England; the latter, as a grandson of Fulk, was a first cousin of the royal family of Jerusalem, and had promised to go on crusade after the murder of Thomas Becket. Both kings preferred to remain at home to defend their own territories, rather than act as regent for a child in Jerusalem. The few European knights who did travel to Jerusalem did not even see any combat, since the truce with Saladin had been re-established. William V of Montferrat was one of the few who came to his grandson Baldwin V's aid.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Baldwin V's rule, with Raymond of Tripoli as regent and his great-uncle Joscelin of Edessa as his guardian, was short. He was a sickly child and died in the summer of 1186. Raymond and his supporters went to Nablus, presumably in an attempt to prevent Sibylla from claiming the throne, but Sibylla and her supporters went to Jerusalem, where it was decided that the kingdom should pass to her, on the condition that her marriage to Guy be annulled. She agreed but only if she could choose her own husband and king, and after being crowned, she immediately crowned Guy with her own hands. Raymond had refused to attend the coronation, and in Nablus he suggested that Isabella and Humphrey should be crowned instead, but Humphrey refused to agree to this plan which would have certainly started a civil war. Humphrey went to Jerusalem and swore allegiance to Guy and Sibylla, as did most of Raymond's other supporters. Raymond himself refused to do so and left for Tripoli; Baldwin of Ibelin also refused, gave up his fiefs, and left for Antioch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Raymond of Tripoli allied with Saladin against Guy and allowed a Muslim garrison to occupy his fief in Tiberias, probably hoping that Saladin would help him overthrow Guy. Saladin, meanwhile, had pacified his Mesopotamian territories, and was now eager to attack the crusader kingdom; he did not intend to renew the truce when it expired in 1187. Before the truce expired, Raynald of Chatillon, the lord of Oultrejourdain and of Kerak and one of Guy's chief supporters, recognized that Saladin was massing his troops, and attacked Muslim caravans in an attempt to disrupt this. Guy was on the verge of attacking Raymond, but realized that the kingdom would need to be united in the face of the threat from Saladin, and Balian of Ibelin effected a reconciliation between the two during Easter in 1187. Saladin attacked Kerak again in April, and in May, a Muslim raiding party ran into the much smaller embassy on its way to negotiate with Raymond, and defeated it at the Battle of Cresson near Nazareth. Raymond and Guy finally agreed to attack Saladin at Tiberias, but could not agree on a plan; Raymond thought a pitched battle should be avoided, but Guy probably remembered the criticism he faced for avoiding battle in 1183, and it was decided to march out against Saladin directly. On 4 July 1187, the army of the kingdom was utterly destroyed at the Battle of Hattin. Raymond of Tripoli, Balian of Ibelin, and Reginald of Sidon escaped, but Raynald was executed by Saladin and Guy was imprisoned in Damascus.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Over the next few months, Saladin easily overran the entire kingdom. Only the port of Tyre remained in Frankish hands, defended by Conrad of Montferrat, who had coincidentally arrived just in time from Constantinople. The fall of Jerusalem essentially ended the first Kingdom of Jerusalem. Much of the population, swollen with refugees fleeing Saladin's conquest of the surrounding territory, was allowed to flee to Tyre, Tripoli, or Egypt (whence they were sent back to Europe), but those who could not pay for their freedom were sold into slavery, and those who could were often robbed by Christians and Muslims alike on their way into exile. The capture of the city led to the Third Crusade, launched in 1189 and led by Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus and Frederick Barbarossa, though the last drowned en route.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Guy of Lusignan, who had been refused entry to Tyre by Conrad, began to besiege Acre in 1189. During the lengthy siege, which lasted until 1191, Patriarch Heraclius, Queen Sibylla and her daughters, and many others died of disease. With the death of Sibylla in 1190, Guy now had no legal claim to the kingship, and the succession passed to Sibylla's half-sister Isabella. Isabella's mother Maria and the Ibelins (now closely allied to Conrad) argued that Isabella and Humphrey's marriage was illegal, as she had been underage at the time; underlying this was the fact that Humphrey had betrayed his wife's cause in 1186. The marriage was annulled amid some controversy. Conrad, who was now the nearest kinsman to Baldwin V in the male line, and had already proved himself a capable military leader, then married Isabella, but Guy refused to concede the crown.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "When Richard arrived in 1191, he and Philip took different sides in the succession dispute. Richard backed Guy, his vassal from Poitou, while Philip supported Conrad, a cousin of his late father Louis VII. After much ill feeling and ill health, Philip returned home in 1191, soon after the fall of Acre. Richard defeated Saladin at the Battle of Arsuf in 1191 and the Battle of Jaffa in 1192, recovering most of the coast, but could not recover Jerusalem or any of the inland territory of the kingdom. It has been suggested that this may have actually been a strategic decision by Richard rather than a failure as such, as he may have recognized that Jerusalem, in particular, was in fact a strategic liability as long as the Crusaders were obligated to defend it, as it was isolated from the sea where Western reinforcements could arrive. Conrad was unanimously elected king in April 1192, but was murdered by the Hashshashin only days later. Eight days after that, the pregnant Isabella was married to Count Henry II of Champagne, nephew of Richard and Philip, but politically allied to Richard. As compensation, Richard sold Guy the island of Cyprus, which Richard had captured on the way to Acre, although Guy continued to claim the throne of Jerusalem until his death in 1194.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The crusade came to an end peacefully, with the Treaty of Ramla negotiated in 1192; Saladin allowed pilgrimages to be made to Jerusalem, allowing the crusaders to fulfil their vows, after which they all returned home. The native crusader barons set about rebuilding their kingdom from Acre and the other coastal cities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "For the next hundred years, the Kingdom of Jerusalem remained a tiny kingdom hugging the Syrian coastline. Its capital was moved to Acre and controlled most of the coastline of present-day Israel and southern and central Lebanon, including the strongholds and towns of Jaffa, Arsuf, Caesarea, Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut. At best, it included only a few other significant cities, such as Ascalon and some interior fortresses, as well as suzerainty over Tripoli and Antioch. The new king, Henry of Champagne, died accidentally in 1197, and Isabella married for a fourth time, to Aimery of Lusignan, Guy's brother. Aimery had already inherited Cyprus from Guy, and had been crowned king by Frederick Barbarossa's son, Emperor Henry VI. Henry led a crusade in 1197 but died along the way. Nevertheless, his troops recaptured Beirut and Sidon for the kingdom before returning home in 1198. A five-year truce was then concluded with the Ayyubids in Syria in 1198.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Ayyubid empire had fallen into civil war after the death of Saladin in 1193. His sons claimed various parts of his empire: az-Zahir took control of Aleppo, al-Aziz Uthman held Cairo, while his eldest son, al-Afdal, retained Damascus. Saladin's brother Al-Adil Sayf ad-Din (often called \"Saphadin\" by the Crusaders) acquired al-Jazira (northern Mesopotamia), and al-Adil's son al-Mu'azzam took possession of Karak and Transjordan. In 1196, al-Afdal was driven out of Damascus by al Adil in alliance with Uthman. When Uthman died in 1198, al Afdal returned to power as regent in Egypt for Uthman's infant son. Allied with az-Zahir, he then attacked his uncle in Damascus. The alliance fell apart, and al-Adil then defeated al Afdal in Egypt and annexed the country. In 1200 Al-Adil proclaimed himself Sultan of Egypt and Syria, entrusting Damascus to al-Mu'azzam and al-Jazira to another son, al-Kamil. Following a second unsuccessful siege of Damascus by the two brothers, Al Afdal accepted a fief consisting of Samosata and a number of other towns. Az-Zahir of Aleppo submitted to his uncle in 1202, thus re-uniting the Ayyubid territories.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Meanwhile, schemes were hatched to reconquer Jerusalem through Egypt. A Fourth Crusade was planned after the failure of the Third, but it resulted in the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and most of the crusaders involved never arrived in the kingdom. Aimery, however, not knowing of the diversion to Constantinople, raided Egypt in advance of the expected invasion. Both Isabella and Aimery died in 1205 and again an underage girl, Isabella and Conrad's daughter Maria of Montferrat, became queen of Jerusalem. Isabella's half-brother John of Ibelin, the Old Lord of Beirut governed as regent until 1210 when Maria married an experienced French knight, John of Brienne. Maria died in childbirth in 1212, and John of Brienne continued to rule as regent for their daughter Isabella II.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 called for a new, better-organized crusade against Egypt. In late 1217 King Andrew II of Hungary and Duke Leopold VI of Austria arrived in Acre and, along with John of Brienne, raided territory further inland, including Mount Tabor, but without success. After the departure of the Hungarians, the remaining Crusaders set about refortifying Caesarea and the Templar fortress of Château Pèlerin throughout the winter of 1217 and spring of 1218.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the spring of 1218 the Fifth Crusade began in earnest when German crusader fleets landed at Acre. Along with King John, who was elected leader of the crusade, the fleets sailed to Egypt and besieged Damietta at the mouth of the Nile in May. The siege progressed slowly, and the Egyptian sultan al-Adil died in August 1218, supposedly of shock after the Crusaders managed to capture one of Damietta's towers. He was succeeded by his son al-Kamil. In the autumn of 1218 reinforcements arrived from Europe, including the papal legate Pelagius of Albano. In the winter the crusaders were affected by floods and disease, and the siege dragged on throughout 1219, when Francis of Assisi arrived to attempt to negotiate a truce. Neither side could agree to terms, despite the Ayyubid offer of a thirty-year truce and the restoration of Jerusalem and most of the rest of the former kingdom. The Crusaders finally managed to starve out the city and captured it in November. Al-Kamil retreated to the nearby fortress of al-Mansurah, but the crusaders remained in Damietta throughout 1219 and 1220, awaiting the arrival of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, while King John returned to Acre briefly to defend against al-Mu'azzam, who was raiding the kingdom from Damascus in John's absence. Still expecting the emperor's imminent arrival, in July 1221, the Crusaders set off towards Cairo, but they were stopped by the rising Nile, which al-Kamil allowed to flood by breaking the dams along its course. The sultan easily defeated the trapped Crusader army and regained Damietta. Emperor Frederick had, in fact, never left Europe at all.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "After the failure of the crusade, John travelled throughout Europe seeking assistance, but found support only from Frederick, who then married John and Maria's daughter Isabella II in 1225. The next year, Isabella died giving birth to their son Conrad IV, who succeeded his mother to the throne although he never appeared in the East. Frederick had reneged on his promise to lead the Fifth Crusade, but was now eager to cement his claim to the throne through Conrad. There were also plans to join with al-Kamil in attacking al-Mu'azzam in Damascus, an alliance which had been discussed with Egyptian envoys in Italy. But after continually delaying his departure for the Holy Land, including suffering an outbreak of disease in his fleet, he was excommunicated by Pope Gregory IX in 1227. The crusaders, led not by Frederick but by his representatives Richard Filangieri, Henry IV, Duke of Limburg, and Hermann of Salza, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, arrived in the east late in 1227, and while waiting for the emperor they set about refortifying Sidon, where they built the sea castle, and Montfort, which later became the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights. The Ayyubids of Damascus did not dare attack, as al-Mu'azzam had suddenly died not long before. Frederick finally arrived on the Sixth Crusade in September 1228, and claimed the regency of the kingdom in the name of his infant son.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Frederick immediately came into conflict with the native nobles of Outremer, some of whom resented his attempts to impose Imperial authority over both Cyprus and Jerusalem. The Cypriot nobles were already quarrelling amongst themselves about the regency for Henry I of Cyprus, who was still a child. The High Court of Cyprus had elected John of Ibelin as regent, but Henry's mother Alice of Champagne wished to appoint one of her supporters; Alice and her party, members or supporters of the Lusignan dynasty, sided with Frederick, whose father had crowned Aimery of Lusignan king in 1197. At Limassol, Frederick demanded that John give up not only the regency of Cyprus, but also John's own lordship of Beirut on the mainland. John argued that Frederick had no legal authority to make such demands and refused to give up either title. Frederick then imprisoned John's sons as hostages to guarantee John's support for his crusade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "John did accompany Frederick to the mainland, but Frederick was not well-received there; one of his few supporters was Balian, Lord of Sidon, who had welcomed the crusaders the year before and now acted as an ambassador to the Ayyubids. The death of al-Mu'azzam negated the proposed alliance with al-Kamil, who along with his brother al-Ashraf had taken possession of Damascus (as well as Jerusalem) from their nephew, al-Mu'azzam's son an-Nasir Dawud. However, al-Kamil presumably did not know of the small size of Frederick's army, nor the divisions within it caused by his excommunication, and wished to avoid defending his territories against another crusade. Frederick's presence alone was sufficient to regain Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and a number of surrounding castles without a fight: these were recovered in February 1229, in return for a ten-year truce with the Ayyubids and freedom of worship for Jerusalem's Muslim inhabitants. The terms of the treaty were unacceptable to the Patriarch of Jerusalem Gerald of Lausanne, who placed the city under interdict. In March, Frederick crowned himself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but because of his excommunication and the interdict Jerusalem was never truly reincorporated into the kingdom, which continued to be ruled from Acre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Meanwhile, in Italy, the Pope used Frederick's excommunication as an excuse to invade his Italian territories; the papal armies were led by Frederick's former father-in-law John of Brienne. Frederick was forced to return home in 1229, leaving the Holy Land \"not in triumph, but showered with offal\" by the citizens of Acre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Nevertheless, Frederick sent an Imperial army in 1231, under Richard Filangieri, who occupied Beirut and Tyre, but was unable to gain control of Acre. John's supporters formed a commune in Acre, of which John himself was elected mayor in 1232. With the help of the Genoese merchants, the commune recaptured Beirut. John also attacked Tyre, but was defeated by Filangieri at the Battle of Casal Imbert in May 1232.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In Cyprus, King Henry I came of age in 1232 and John's regency was no longer necessary. Both John and Filangieri raced back to Cyprus to assert their authority, and the imperial forces were defeated at the Battle of Agridi on June 15. Henry became the undisputed king of Cyprus, but continued to support the Ibelins over the Lusignans and the imperial party. On the mainland, Filangieri had the support of Bohemund IV of Antioch, the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitaller, and the Pisan merchants. John was supported by his nobles on Cyprus, and by his continental holdings in Beirut, Caesarea, and Arsuf, as well as by the Knights Templar and the Genoese. Neither side could make any headway, and in 1234 Gregory IX excommunicated John and his supporters. This was partly revoked in 1235, but still no peace could be made. John died in 1236 and the war was taken up by his son Balian of Beirut and his nephew Philip of Montfort.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Meanwhile, the treaty with the Ayyubids was set to expire in 1239. Plans for a new crusade to be led by Frederick came to nothing, and Frederick himself was excommunicated by Gregory IX again in 1239. However, other European nobles took up the cause, including Theobald IV, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, Peter of Dreux, and Amaury VI of Montfort, who arrived in Acre in September 1239. Theobald was elected leader of the crusade at a council in Acre, attended by most of the important nobles of the kingdom, including Walter of Brienne, John of Arsuf, and Balian of Sidon. The arrival of the crusade was a brief respite from the Lombard War; Filangieri remained in Tyre and did not participate. The council decided to refortify Ascalon in the south and attack Damascus in the north.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The crusaders may have been aware of the new divisions among the Ayyubids; al-Kamil had occupied Damascus in 1238 but had died soon afterwards, and his territory was inherited by his family. His sons al-Adil abu Bakr and as-Salih Ayyub inherited Egypt and Damascus. Ayyub marched on Cairo in an attempt to drive out al-Adil, but during his absence al-Kamil's brother as-Salih Isma'il took over Damascus, and Ayyub was taken prisoner by an-Nasir Dawud. The Crusaders, meanwhile, marched to Ascalon. Along the way, Walter of Brienne captured livestock intended to resupply Damascus, as the Ayyubids had probably learned of the Crusaders' plans to attack it. The victory was short-lived, however, as the Crusaders were then defeated by the Egyptian army at Gaza in November 1239. Henry II, Count of Bar was killed and Amaury of Montfort captured. The Crusaders returned to Acre, possibly because the native barons of the kingdom were suspicious of Filangieri in Tyre. Dawud took advantage of the Ayyubid victory to recapture Jerusalem in December, the ten-year truce having expired.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Although Ayyub was Dawud's prisoner, the two now allied against al-Adil in Egypt, which Ayyub seized in 1240. In Damascus, Isma'il recognized the threat of Dawud and Ayyub against his own possessions, and turned to the Crusaders for assistance. Theobald concluded a treaty with Isma'il, in return for territorial concessions that restored Jerusalem to Christian control, as well as much of the rest of the former kingdom, even more territory than Frederick had recovered in 1229. Theobald, however, was frustrated by the Lombard War, and returned home in September 1240. Almost immediately after Theobald's departure, Richard of Cornwall arrived. He completed the rebuilding of Ascalon, and also made peace with Ayyub in Egypt. Ayyub confirmed Isma'il's concessions in 1241, and prisoners taken at Gaza were exchanged by both sides. Richard returned to Europe in 1241.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Although the kingdom had essentially been restored, the Lombard War continued to occupy the kingdom's nobility. As the Templars and Hospitallers supported opposite sides, they also attacked each other, and the Templars broke the treaty with the Ayyubids by attacking Nablus in 1241. Conrad proclaimed that he had come of age in 1242, eliminating both Frederick's claim to the regency and the need for an imperial guardian to govern in his place, although he had not yet turned 15, the age of majority according to the customs of Jerusalem. Through Conrad, Frederick tried to send an imperial regent, but the anti-imperial faction in Acre argued that Jerusalem's laws allowed them to appoint their own regent. In June the Haute Cour granted the regency to Alice of Champagne, who, as the daughter of Isabella I, was Conrad's great-aunt and his closest relative living in the kingdom. Alice ordered Filangieri to be arrested, and along with the Ibelins and Venetians, besieged Tyre, which fell in July 1243. The Lombard War was over, but the king was still absent, as Conrad never came to the East. Alice was prevented from exercising any real power as regent by Philip of Montfort, who took control of Tyre, and Balian of Beirut, who continued to hold Acre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Ayyubids were still divided between Ayyub in Egypt, Isma'il in Damascus, and Dawud in Kerak. Isma'il, Dawud, and al-Mansur Ibrahim of Homs went to war with Ayyub, who hired the Khwarazmians to fight for him. The Khwarazmians were nomadic Turks from central Asia, who had recently been displaced by the Mongols further to the east and were now residing in Mesopotamia. With Ayyub's support, they sacked Jerusalem in the summer of 1244, leaving it in ruins and useless to both Christians and Muslims. In October, the Khwarazmians, along with the Egyptian army under the command of Baibars, were met by the Frankish army, led by Philip of Montfort, Walter of Brienne, and the masters of the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights, along with al-Mansur and Dawud. On October 17 the Egyptian-Khwarazmian army destroyed the Frankish-Syrian coalition, and Walter of Brienne was taken captive and later executed. By 1247, Ayyub had reoccupied most of the territory that had been conceded in 1239, and had also gained control of Damascus.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "A new crusade was discussed at the Council of Lyon in 1245 by Pope Innocent IV. The council deposed Frederick II, so no help could be expected from the empire, but King Louis IX of France had already vowed to go on crusade. Louis arrived in Cyprus in 1248, where he gathered an army of his own men, including his brothers Robert of Artois, Charles of Anjou, and Alphonse of Poitiers, and those of Cyprus and Jerusalem, led by the Ibelin family John of Jaffa, Guy of Ibelin, and Balian of Beirut. Once again the target was Egypt. Damietta was captured without resistance when the Crusaders landed in June 1249, but the crusade halted there until November, by which time the Egyptian sultan Ayyub had died and had been succeeded by his son Turanshah. In February, the Crusaders were defeated at the Battle of al-Mansurah, where Robert of Artois was killed. The crusaders were unable to cross the Nile, and, suffering from disease and lack of supplies, retreated towards Damietta in April. They were defeated along the way at the Battle of Fariskur, with Louis being taken captive by Turanshah. During Louis' captivity, Turanshah was overthrown by his Mamluk soldiers, led by the general Aybak, who then released Louis in May in return for Damietta and a large ransom. For the next four years Louis resided in Acre, and helped refortify that city along with Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon. He also made truces with the Ayyubids in Syria, and sent embassies to negotiate with the Mongols, who were beginning to threaten the Muslim world, before returning home in 1254. He left behind a large garrison of French soldiers in Acre, under the command of Geoffrey of Sergines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In the midst of these events, Alice of Champagne had died in 1246 and had been replaced as regent by her son King Henry I of Cyprus, for whom John of Jaffa served as bailli in Acre. During Louis IX's stay in Acre, Henry I died in 1253, and was succeeded in Cyprus by his infant son Hugh II. Hugh was technically regent of Jerusalem as well, both for Conrad and for Conrad's son Conradin after Conrad died in 1254. Both Cyprus and Jerusalem were governed by Hugh's mother Plaisance of Antioch, but John remained bailli for Hugh in Acre. John made peace with Damascus and attempted to regain Ascalon; the Egyptians, now ruled by the Mamluk sultanate, besieged Jaffa in 1256 in response. John defeated them, and afterwards gave up the bailliage to his cousin John of Arsuf.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1256 the commercial rivalry between the Venetian and Genoese merchant colonies broke out into open warfare. In Acre, the two colonies disputed possession of the monastery of Saint Sabas. The Genoese, assisted by the Pisan merchants, attacked the Venetian quarter and burned their ships, but the Venetians drove them out. The Venetians were then expelled from Tyre by Philip of Monfort. John of Arsuf, John of Jaffa, John II of Beirut, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights supported the Venetians, who also convinced the Pisans to join them, while the Hospitallers supported the Genoese. In 1257 the Venetians conquered the monastery and destroyed its fortifications, although they were unable to expel the Genoese completely. They blockaded the Genoese quarter, but the Genoese were supplied by the Hospitallers, whose complex was nearby, and by Philip of Montfort who sent food from Tyre. In August 1257, John of Arsuf tried to end the war by granting commercial rights in Acre to the Republic of Ancona, an Italian ally of Genoa, but aside from Philip of Montfort and the Hospitallers, the rest of the nobles continued to support Venice. In June 1258, Philip and the Hospitallers marched on Acre while a Genoese fleet attacked the city by sea. The naval battle was won by Venice, and the Genoese were forced to abandon their quarter and flee to Tyre with Philip. The war also spread to Tripoli and Antioch, where the Embriaco family, descended from Genoese crusaders, was pitted against Bohemond VI of Antioch, who supported the Venetians. In 1261 the Patriarch, Jacques Pantaleon, organised a council to re-establish order in the kingdom, though the Genoese did not return to Acre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "It was during this period that the Mongols arrived in the Near East. Their presence further east had already displaced the Khwarazmians, and emissaries had been sent by various popes as well as Louis IX to ally or negotiate with them, but they were uninterested in alliances. They sacked Baghdad in 1258, and Aleppo and Damascus in 1260, destroying both the Abbasid caliphate and the last vestiges of the Ayyubid dynasty. Hethum I of Armenia and Bohemond VI of Antioch had already submitted to the Mongols as vassals. Some of the Mongols were Nestorian Christians, including Kitbuqa, one of the generals at the sieges of Baghdad and Damascus, but despite this, the nobles of Acre refused to submit. As the kingdom was by now a relatively unimportant state, the Mongols paid little attention to it, but there were a few skirmishes in 1260: the forces of Julian of Sidon killed the nephew of Kitbuqa, who responded by sacking Sidon, and John II of Beirut was also captured by the Mongols during another raid. The apparently inevitable Mongol conquest was stalled when Hulagu, the Mongol commander in Syria, returned home after the death of his brother Möngke Khan, leaving Kitbuqa with a small garrison. The Mamluks of Egypt then sought, and were granted, permission to advance through Frankish territory, and defeated the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in September 1260. Kitbuqa was killed and all of Syria fell under Mamluk control. On the way back to Egypt, the Mamluk sultan Qutuz was assassinated by the general Baibars, who was far less favourable than his predecessor to alliances with the Franks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "John of Arsuf had died in 1258 and was replaced as bailli by Geoffrey of Sergines, Louis IX's lieutenant in Acre. Plaisance died in 1261, but as her son Hugh II was still underage, Cyprus passed to his cousin Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan, whose mother Isabella of Cyprus, Alice of Champagne and Hugh I of Cyprus' daughter and Hugh II's aunt, took over the regency in Acre. She appointed, as bailli, her husband Henry of Antioch (who was also Plaisance's uncle), but died in 1264. The regency in Acre was then claimed by Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan and his cousin Hugh of Brienne, and Hugh II died in 1267 before he reached the age of majority. Hugh of Antioch-Lusignan won the dispute and succeeded Hugh II on Cyprus as Hugh III. When Conradin was executed in Sicily in 1268, there was no other Hohenstaufen heir to succeed him, and Hugh III inherited the Kingdom of Jerusalem as well in 1269. This was disputed by another branch of the Lusignan family: Maria of Antioch, daughter of Bohemond IV of Antioch and Melisende of Lusignan (herself a daughter of Isabella I and Amalric II), claimed the throne as the oldest living relative of Isabella I, but for the moment her claim was ignored. By this time, the Mamluks under Baibars were taking advantage of the kingdom's constant disputes, and began conquering the remaining crusader cities along the coast. In 1265, Baibars took Caesarea, Haifa and Arsuf, and Safad and Toron in 1266. In 1268 he captured Jaffa and Beaufort, and then besieged and destroyed Antioch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Hugh III and Baibars made a one-year truce after these conquests; Baibars knew that Louis IX was planning another crusade from Europe, and assumed that the target would once again be Egypt. But instead the crusade was diverted to Tunis, where Louis died. Baibars was free to continue his campaigns: in 1270 he had the Assassins kill Philip of Montfort, and in 1271 he captured the Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights strongholds of Krak des Chevaliers and Montfort Castle. He also besieged Tripoli, but abandoned it in May when Prince Edward of England arrived, the only part of Louis IX's crusade to arrive in the east. Edward could do nothing except arrange a ten-year truce with Baibars, who nevertheless attempted to have him assassinated as well. Edward left in 1272, and despite the Second Council of Lyon's plans for another crusade in 1274, no further large-scale expedition ever arrived. Hugh III's authority on the mainland began to break down; he was an unpopular king, and Beirut, the only territory left outside of Acre and Tyre, started to act independently. Its heiress, Isabella of Ibelin (widow of Hugh II), actually placed it under Baibars' protection. Finding the mainland ungovernable, Hugh III left for Cyprus, leaving Balian of Arsuf as bailli. Then in 1277, Maria of Antioch sold her claim to the kingdom to Charles of Anjou, who sent Roger of San Severino to represent him. The Venetians and Templars supported the claim, and Balian was powerless to oppose him. Baibars died in 1277 and was succeeded by Qalawun. In 1281 the ten-year truce expired and was renewed by Roger. Roger returned to Europe after the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, and was replaced by Odo Poilechien. Hugh III attempted to re-assert his authority on the mainland by landing at Beirut in 1283, but this was ineffective and he died in Tyre in 1284. He was succeeded briefly by his son John II, who died soon after in 1285, and was succeeded by his brother, Hugh III's other son Henry II. That year Qalawun captured the Hospitaller fortress of Marqab. Charles of Anjou also died in 1285, and the military orders and the commune of Acre accepted Henry II as king; Odo Poilechen refused to recognize him, but was allowed to hand Acre over to the Templars rather than Henry directly, and the Templars then handed it to the king. War broke out between the Venetians and Genoese again in 1287, and Tripoli fell to Qalawun in 1289. Although it was only a matter of time before Acre also fell, the end of the crusader kingdom was actually instigated in 1290 by newly arrived Crusaders, who rioted in Acre and attacked the city's Muslim merchants. Qalawun died before he could retaliate, but his son al-Ashraf Khalil arrived to besiege Acre in April 1291. Acre was defended by Henry II's brother Amalric of Tyre, the Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights, the Venetians and Pisans, the French garrison led by Jean I de Grailly, and the English garrison led by Otton de Grandson, but they were vastly outnumbered. Henry II himself arrived in May during the siege, but the city fell on May 18. Henry, Amalric, Otton, and Jean escaped, as did a young Templar named Roger de Flor, but most of the other defenders did not, including the master of the Templars Guillaume de Beaujeu. Tyre fell without a fight the next day, Sidon fell in June, and Beirut in July.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The Crusaders moved their headquarters north to cities such as Tortosa, but lost that too, and were forced to relocate their headquarters offshore to Cyprus. Some naval raids and attempts to retake territory were made over the next ten years, but with the loss of the island of Arwad in 1302–1303, the Kingdom of Jerusalem ceased to exist on the mainland. The kings of Cyprus for many decades hatched plans to regain the Holy Land, but without success. For the next seven centuries, up to today, a veritable multitude of European monarchs have used the title of King of Jerusalem.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Latin population of the kingdom was always small; although a steady stream of settlers and new crusaders continually arrived, most of the original crusaders who fought in the First Crusade simply went home. According to William of Tyre, \"barely three hundred knights and two thousand foot soldiers could be found\" in the kingdom in 1100 during Godfrey's siege of Arsuf. From the very beginning, the Latins were little more than a colonial frontier exercising rule over the native Jewish, Samaritan, Muslim, Greek Orthodox, and Syriac populations.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "As new generations grew up in the kingdom, they began to think of themselves as natives. Although they never gave up their core identity as Western Europeans or Franks, their clothing, diet, and commercialism integrated much oriental, particularly Byzantine, influence. As the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres wrote around 1124,",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or Frank has in this land been made into a Galilaean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. He who was of Rheims or Chartres has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The crusaders and their descendants often learned to speak Greek, Arabic, and other eastern languages, and intermarried with the native Christians (whether Greek, Syriac, or Armenian) and sometimes with converted Muslims. Nonetheless, the Frankish principalities remained a distinctive Occidental colony in the heart of Islam.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Fulcher, a participant in the First Crusade and chaplain of Baldwin I, continued his chronicle up to 1127. Fulcher's chronicle was very popular and was used as a source by other historians in the West, such as Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Almost as soon as Jerusalem had been captured, and continuing throughout the 12th century, many pilgrims arrived and left accounts of the new kingdom; among them are the English Sæwulf, the Kievan Abbot Daniel, the Frank Fretellus, the Byzantine Johannes Phocas, and the Germans John of Würzburg and Theoderich. Aside from these, thereafter there is no eyewitness to events in Jerusalem until William of Tyre, archbishop of Tyre and chancellor of Jerusalem, who began writing around 1167 and died around 1184, although he includes much information about the First Crusade and the intervening years from the death of Fulcher to his own time, drawn mainly from the writings of Albert of Aix and Fulcher himself. From the Muslim perspective, a chief source of information is Usamah ibn Munqidh, a soldier and frequent ambassador from Damascus to Jerusalem and Egypt, whose memoirs, Kitab al i'tibar, include lively accounts of crusader society in the east. Further information can be gathered from travellers such as Benjamin of Tudela and Ibn Jubayr.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Kingdom at first was virtually bereft of a loyal subject population and had few knights to implement the laws and orders of the realm. With the arrival of Italian trading firms, the creation of the military orders, and immigration by European knights, artisans, and farmers, the affairs of the Kingdom improved and a feudal society developed, similar to but distinct from the society the crusaders knew in Europe. The nature of this society has long been a subject of debate among crusade historians.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In the 19th and early 20th centuries, French scholars, such as E. G. Rey, Gaston Dodu, and René Grousset believed that the Crusaders, Muslims and Christians lived in a totally integrated society. Ronnie Ellenblum claims this view was influenced by French imperialism and colonialism; if medieval French crusaders could integrate themselves into local society, then certainly modern French colonies in the Levant could thrive. In the mid-20th century, scholars such as Joshua Prawer, R. C. Smail, Meron Benvenisti, and Claude Cahen argued instead that the Crusaders lived totally segregated from the native inhabitants, who were thoroughly Arabicized and/or Islamicized and were a constant threat to the foreign crusaders. Prawer argued further that the kingdom was an early attempt at colonization, in which the Crusaders were a small ruling class, who were dependent on the native population for survival but made no attempt to integrate with them. For this reason, the rural European society to which the Crusaders were accustomed was replaced by a more secure urban society in the pre-existing cities of the Levant.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "According to Ellenblum's interpretation, the inhabitants of the Kingdom (Latin Christians living alongside native Greek and Syriac Christians, Shia and Sunni Arabs, Sufis, Bedouin, Druze, Jews, and Samaritans) all had major differences between each other as well as with the crusaders. Relations between eastern Christians and the Latin Crusaders were \"complex and ambiguous\", not simply friendly or hostile. He argues that Eastern Christians probably felt closer ties to their fellow Christian crusaders than Muslim Arabs.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Although the Crusaders came upon an ancient urban society, Ellenblum argues that they never completely abandoned their rural European lifestyle, nor was European society completely rural to begin with. Crusader settlement in the Levant resembled the types of colonization and settlement that were already being practised in Europe, a mixture of urban and rural civilization centred around fortresses. The Crusaders were neither totally integrated with the native population, nor segregated in the cities away from the rural natives; rather they settled in both urban and rural areas; specifically, in areas traditionally inhabited by Eastern Christians. Areas that were traditionally Muslim had very little crusader settlement, just as they already had very few native Christian inhabitants.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Into this mixed society the crusaders adapted existing institutions and introduced their familiar customs from Europe. As in Europe the nobles had vassals and were themselves vassals to the king. Agricultural production was regulated by the iqta, a Muslim system of land ownership and payments roughly (though far from exactly) equivalent to the feudal system of Europe, and this system was not heavily disrupted by the Crusaders.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "As Hans Mayer says, \"the Muslim inhabitants of the Latin Kingdom hardly ever appear in the Latin chronicles\", so information on their role in society is difficult to find. The Crusaders \"had a natural tendency to ignore these matters as simply without interest and certainly not worthy of record.\" Although Muslims, as well as Jews and Eastern Christians, had virtually no rights in the countryside, where they were essentially the property of the crusader lord who owned the land, Tolerance for other faiths was, in general, no higher or lower than that found elsewhere in the Middle East. Greeks, Syriacs, and Jews continued to live as they had before, subject to their own laws and courts, with their former Muslim overlords simply replaced by the Crusaders; Muslims now joined them at the lowest level of society. The ra'is, the leader of a Muslim or Syriac community, was a kind of vassal to whatever noble owned his land, but as the crusader nobles were absentee landlords the ra'is and their communities had a high degree of autonomy.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Arab-Andalusian geographer and traveller Ibn Jubayr, who was hostile to the Franks, described the Muslims living under the Christian crusaders' Kingdom of Jerusalem in the late 12th-century:",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "We left Tibnin by a road running past farms where Muslims live who do very well under the Franks-may Allah preserve us from such a temptation! The regulations imposed on them are the handing over of half of the grain crop at the time of harvest and the payment of a poll tax of one dinar and seven qirats, together with a light duty on their fruit trees. The Muslims own their own houses and rule themselves in their own way. This is the way the farms and big villages are organized in Frankish territory. Many Muslims are sorely tempted to settle here when they see the far from comfortable conditions in which their brethren live in the districts under Muslim rule. Unfortunately for the Muslims, they always have reason for complaint about the injustices of their chiefs in the lands governed by their coreligionists, whereas they can have nothing but praise for the conduct of the Franks, whose justice they can always rely on.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In the cities, Muslims and Eastern Christians were free, although no Muslims were permitted to live in Jerusalem itself. They were second-class citizens and played no part in politics or law, and owed no military service to the crown, although in some cities they may have been the majority of the population. Likewise, citizens of the Italian city-states owed nothing as they lived in autonomous quarters in the port cities.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "21st century positions on the question of cultural integration or cultural apartheid remain divergent. Interactions between the Franks and the native Muslims and Christians, though muddled, exhibited a practical coexistence. Though likely overstated, the accounts of Usamah Ibn-Munqidh of Shaizar's travels through Antioch and Jerusalem described a level of aristocratic exchange elevated above ethnic prejudice. Contact between Muslims and Christians came on the administrative or personal level (on the basis of taxes or translation), not communal or cultural, representative of a hierarchical lord over subject relationship. Evidence of inter-cultural integration remains scarce, but evidence of inter-cultural cooperation and complex social interaction proves more common. Key use of the word dragoman, literally translator, with Syriac administrators and Arabic headsmen represented the direct need for negotiation of interests on both sides. Comments on households with Arabic-speaking Christians and a few Arabized Jews and Muslims represent a less dichotomous relationship than the mid-20th-century historians depicted. Rather, the commonality of Frankish Christians having non-Frankish priests, doctors, and other roles within households and inter-cultural communities presents the lack of standardized discrimination. Jerusalemite William of Tyre complained about a trend to hire Jewish or Muslim medical practitioners over their Latin and Frankish counterparts. Evidence even indicates alterations to Frankish cultural and social customs regarding hygiene (notorious amongst Arabs for their lack of washing and knowledge of bathhouse culture), going so far as to ensure water supplies for domestic use in addition to irrigation.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "It is impossible to give an accurate estimate of the population of the kingdom. Josiah Russell calculates that all of Syria had about 2.3 million people at the time of the crusades, with perhaps eleven thousand villages; most of these, of course, were outside of crusader rule even at the greatest extent of all four crusader states. It has been estimated by scholars such as Joshua Prawer and Meron Benvenisti that there were at most 120,000 Franks and 100,000 Muslims living in the cities, with another 250,000 Muslim and Eastern Christian peasants in the countryside. The Crusaders accounted for 15–25% of the total population. Benjamin Z. Kedar estimates that there were between 300,000 and 360,000 non-Franks in the Kingdom, 250,000 of whom were villagers in the countryside, and \"one may assume that Muslims were in the majority in some, possibly most parts of the kingdom of Jerusalem…\" As Ronnie Ellenblum points out, there simply is not enough existing evidence to accurately count the population and any estimate is inherently unreliable. Contemporary chronicler William of Tyre recorded the census of 1183, which was intended to determine the number of men available to defend against an invasion, and to determine the amount of tax money that could be obtained from the inhabitants, Muslim or Christian. If the population was actually counted, William did not record the number. In the 13th century, John of Ibelin drew up a list of fiefs and the number of knights owed by each, but this gives no indication of the non-noble, non-Latin population.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The Mamluks, led by Baibars, eventually made good their pledge to cleanse the entire Middle East of the Franks. With the fall of Antioch (1268), Tripoli (1289), and Acre (1291), those Christians unable to leave the cities were massacred or enslaved and the last traces of Christian rule in the Levant disappeared.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "An unknown number of Muslim slaves lived in the Kingdom. There was a very large slave market in Acre that functioned throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Italian merchants were sometimes accused of selling Southeastern European Christians as slaves along with Muslim slaves. Slavery was less common than ransom, especially for prisoners of war; the large numbers of prisoners taken during raids and battles every year ensured that ransom money flowed freely between the Christian and Muslim states. Escape for prisoners and slaves was probably not difficult, as the inhabitants of the countryside were majority Muslim, and fugitive slaves were always a problem. The only legal means of manumission was conversion to (Catholic) Christianity. No Christian, whether Western or Eastern, was permitted by law to be sold into slavery.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The assizes of Jerusalem provided a legal framework for slavery in the Kingdom. The document stipulated that « villeins, animals or some other chattel » could be traded. « Villeins » were rural semi-free laborers akin to serfs. There were also multiple ways to become chattel slaves. People could be slaves by birth, enslaved by being captured in a raid, or as a penalty for debt or for helping a runaway slave.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The nomadic Bedouin tribes were considered to be the property of the king and under his protection. They could be sold or alienated just like any other property, and later in the 12th century, they were often under the protection of a lesser noble or one of the military orders.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The urban composition of the area, combined with the presence of the Italian merchants, led to the development of an economy that was much more commercial than it was agricultural. Palestine had always been a crossroads for trade; now, this trade extended to Europe as well. European goods, such as the woolen textiles of northern Europe, made their way to the Middle East and Asia, while Asian goods were transported back to Europe. Jerusalem was especially involved in the silk, cotton and spice trade; other items that first appeared in Europe through trade with crusader Jerusalem included oranges and sugar, the latter of which chronicler William of Tyre called \"very necessary for the use and health of mankind.\" In the countryside, wheat, barley, legumes, olives, grapes, and dates were grown. The Italian city-states made enormous profits from this trade, thanks to commercial treaties like the Pactum Warmundi, and it influenced their Renaissance in later centuries.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Colonies of Genoa and Venice in Palestine also took on agricultural ventures in their concessions. They especially cultivated Sugar for export to Europe. Sugar cane had been introduced in Palestine by the Arabs. To work on the sugar fields, Italian colonists utilized slaves or serfs of Arab or Syrian origin, or local serfs. Sugar manufacturing began in Tyre. In the 13th century, sugar production continued to increase in Palestine, and merchants could export it duty-free through the port of Acre until its conquest in 1291. The sugar exploitation system pioneered in the Kingdom of Jerusalem is seen as a precursor to the sugar plantations in the Americas.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Jerusalem collected money through tribute payments, first from the coastal cities which had not yet been captured, and later from other neighbouring states such as Damascus and Egypt, which the Crusaders could not conquer directly. After Baldwin I extended his rule over Oultrejordain, Jerusalem gained revenue from the taxation of Muslim caravans passing from Syria to Egypt or Arabia. The money economy of Jerusalem meant that their manpower problem could be partially solved by paying for mercenaries, an uncommon occurrence in medieval Europe. Mercenaries could be fellow European crusaders, or, perhaps more often, Muslim soldiers, including the famous Turcopoles.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Jerusalem was the centre of education in the kingdom. There was a school in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the basic skills of reading and writing Latin were taught; The relative wealth of the merchant class meant that their children could be educated there along with the children of nobles – it is likely that William of Tyre was a classmate of future king Baldwin III. Higher education had to be undertaken at one of the universities in Europe; the development of a university was impossible in the culture of crusader Jerusalem, where warfare was far more important than philosophy or theology. Nonetheless, the nobility and general Frankish population were noted for their high literacy: lawyers and clerks were in abundance, and the study of law, history, and other academic subjects was a beloved pastime of the royal family and the nobility. Jerusalem had an extensive library not only of ancient and medieval Latin works but of Arabic literature, much of which was apparently captured from Usamah ibn Munqidh and his entourage after a shipwreck in 1154. The Holy Sepulchre contained the kingdom's scriptorium and the city had a chancery where royal charters and other documents were produced. Aside from Latin, the standard written language of medieval Europe, the populace of crusader Jerusalem communicated in vernacular forms of French and Italian; Greek, Armenian, and even Arabic were used by Frankish settlers.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "In Jerusalem itself, the greatest architectural endeavour was the expansion of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in western Gothic style. This expansion consolidated all the separate shrines on the site into one building, and was completed by 1149. Outside of Jerusalem, castles and fortresses were the major focus of construction: Kerak and Montreal in Oultrejordain and Ibelin near Jaffa are among the numerous examples of crusader castles.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Crusader art was a mix of Western, Byzantine, and Islamic styles. The major cities featured baths, interior plumbing, and other advanced hygienic tools which were lacking in most other cities and towns throughout the world. The foremost examples of crusader art are perhaps the Melisende Psalter, an illuminated manuscript commissioned between 1135 and 1143 and now located in the British Library, and the sculpted Nazareth Capitals. Paintings and mosaics were popular forms of art in the kingdom, but many of these were destroyed by the Mamluks in the 13th century; only the most durable fortresses survived the reconquest.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Immediately after the First Crusade, land was distributed to loyal vassals of Godfrey, forming numerous feudal lordships within the kingdom. This was continued by Godfrey's successors. The number and importance of the lordships varied throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and many cities were part of the royal domain. The king was assisted by a number of officers of state. The king and the royal court were normally located in Jerusalem, but due to the prohibition on Muslim inhabitants, the capital was small and underpopulated. The king just as often held court at Acre, Nablus, Tyre, or wherever else he happened to be. In Jerusalem, the royal family lived firstly on the Temple Mount, before the foundation of the Knights Templar, and later in the palace complex surrounding the Tower of David; there was another palace complex in Acre.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Because the nobles tended to live in Jerusalem rather than on estates in the countryside, they had a larger influence on the king than they would have had in Europe. The nobles, along with the bishops, formed the haute cour (high court), which was responsible for confirming the election of a new king (or a regent if necessary), collecting taxes, minting coins, allotting money to the king, and raising armies. The haute cour was the only judicial body for the nobles of the kingdom, hearing criminal cases such as murder, rape, and treason, and simpler feudal disputes such as the recovery of slaves, sales and purchases of fiefs, and default of service. Punishments included forfeiture of land and exile, or in extreme cases death. The first laws of the kingdom were, according to tradition, established during Godfrey of Bouillon's short reign, but were more probably established by Baldwin II at the Council of Nablus in 1120. Benjamin Z. Kedar argued that the canons of the Council of Nablus were in force in the 12th century but had fallen out of use by the thirteenth. Marwan Nader questions this and suggests that the canons may not have applied to the whole kingdom at all times. The most extensive collection of laws, together known as the Assizes of Jerusalem, were written in the mid-13th century, although many of them are purported to be twelfth-century in origin.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "There were other, lesser courts for non-nobles and non-Latins; the Cour des Bourgeois provided justice for non-noble Latins, dealing with minor criminal offences such as assault and theft, and provided rules for disputes between non-Latins, who had fewer legal rights. Special courts such as the Cour de la Fond (for commercial disputes in the markets) and the Cour de la Mer (an admiralty court) existed in the coastal cities. The extent to which native Islamic and Eastern Christian courts continued to function is unknown, but the ra'is probably exercised some legal authority on a local level. The Cour des Syriens judged non-criminal matters among the native Christians (the \"Syriacs\"). For criminal matters, non-Latins were to be tried in the Cour des Bourgeois (or even the Haute Cour if the crime was sufficiently severe).",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "The Italian communes were granted almost complete autonomy from the very early days of the Kingdom, thanks to their military and naval support in the years following the First Crusade. This autonomy included the right to administer their own justice, although the kinds of cases that fell under their jurisdiction varied at different times.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The king was recognised as head of the Haute Cour, although he was legally only primus inter pares.",
"title": "Life in the early kingdom"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "After the loss of all territory in the Levant in 1291, there were late attempts at further crusades, nominally proposing to recapture Jerusalem, but with the rise of the Ottoman Empire their character was more and more that of a desperate defensive war rarely reaching beyond the Balkans (Alexandrian Crusade, Smyrniote crusades). Henry IV of England made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1393–4, and he later vowed to lead a crusade to recapture the city, but he did not undertake such a campaign before his death in 1413. The Levant remained under Ottoman control from 1517 until the Partition of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "With the Fall of Ruad in 1302, the Kingdom of Jerusalem lost its final outpost on the Levantine coast, its possession closest to the Holy Land now being Cyprus. Henry II of Jerusalem retained the title of king of Jerusalem until his death in 1324, and the title continued to be claimed by his successors, the kings of Cyprus. The title of \"king of Jerusalem\" was also continuously used by the Angevin kings of Naples, whose founder, Charles of Anjou, had in 1277 bought a claim to the throne from Mary of Antioch. Thereafter, this claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem was treated as a tributary of the crown of Naples, which often changed hands by testament or conquest rather than direct inheritance. As Naples was a papal fief, the Popes often endorsed the title of King of Jerusalem as well as of Naples, and the history of these claims is that of the Neapolitan Kingdom. In 1441, control of the Kingdom of Naples was lost to Alfonso V of Aragon and the title thus was claimed by the kings of Spain, and after the War of the Spanish Succession both by the House of Bourbon and the House of Habsburg. The title is still in de facto use by the Spanish Crown, currently held by Felipe VI of Spain. It was also claimed by Otto von Habsburg as Habsburg pretender until 1958, and by the kings of Italy until 1946.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
] |
The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as the Latin Kingdom, was a Crusader state that was established in the Levant immediately after the First Crusade. It lasted for almost two hundred years, from the accession of Godfrey of Bouillon in 1099 until the siege of Acre in 1291. Its history is divided into two periods with a brief interruption in its existence, beginning with its collapse after the siege of Jerusalem in 1187 and its restoration after the Third Crusade in 1192. The original Kingdom of Jerusalem lasted from 1099 to 1187 before being almost entirely overrun by the Ayyubid Sultanate under Saladin. Following the Third Crusade, it was re-established in Acre in 1192. The re-established state is commonly known as the "Second Kingdom of Jerusalem" or alternatively as the "Kingdom of Acre" after its new capital city. Acre remained the capital for the rest of its existence excluding the two decades that followed the Crusaders' establishment of partial control over Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade, through the diplomacy of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen vis-à-vis the Ayyubids. The vast majority of the Crusaders who established and settled the Kingdom of Jerusalem were from the Kingdom of France, as were the knights and soldiers who made up the bulk of the steady flow of reinforcements throughout the two-hundred-year span of its existence; its rulers and elite were therefore predominantly French. French Crusaders also brought their language to the Levant, thus establishing Old French as the lingua franca of the Crusader states, in which Latin served as the official language. While the majority of the population in the countryside comprised Christians and Muslims from local Levantine ethnicities, many Europeans also arrived to settle in villages across the region.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Jerusalem
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16,824 |
Korfball
|
Korfball (Dutch: korfbal) is a ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players with four female players and four male players in each team. The objective is to throw a ball into a netless basket that is mounted on a 3.5 m (11.5 feet) high pole.
The sport was invented by Dutch school teacher Nico Broekhuysen in 1902. In the Netherlands there are approximately 500 clubs and more than 90,000 people playing korfball. The sport is also played in Belgium and Taiwan, and in nearly 70 other countries.
In 1902, Nico Broekhuysen, a Dutch school teacher from Amsterdam, was sent to Nääs, a town in Sweden, to follow an educational course about teaching gymnastics to children. This is where he was introduced to the Swedish game "ringboll". In ringboll one could score points by throwing the ball through a ring that was attached to a 3 m pole. Men and women played together, and the field was divided into three zones. Players could not leave their zone.
When Broekhuysen returned to Amsterdam he decided to teach his students a similar game. He replaced the ring with a basket (for which the Dutch word is korf or mand), so it was easier to see whether or not a player had scored. Broekhuysen also simplified the rules so that children could understand and play the game. Thus korfball was born. The main idea was the same as ringboll, but the new sport now stood on its own.
The oldest still existing korfball club never to have merged with any other club is a Dutch korfball club H.K.C. ALO from The Hague, Netherlands. H.K.C. ALO was founded on 1 February 1906.
Korfball was featured as a demonstration sport in the Summer Olympics of 1920 and 1928.
The International Korfball Federation was founded in 1933 in Antwerp, Belgium.
Korfball is played in 69 countries including the United States, China, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, Serbia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, The Netherlands, Belgium, Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Turkey, Hong Kong, Portugal, Pakistan, India, Sweden, Hungary, Philippines, Indonesia, Italy, Spain, France and Romania.
In response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, on March 1, 2022, the International Korfball Federation announced that the Russian Korfball Federation would not be invited until further notice to any international korfball competition. This implied effectively that no Russian athletes shall take part in any international korfball event. Furthermore, the Russian Korfball Federation shall not be eligible to bid for the hosting of any IKF event until further notice, and no IKF events were planned in Russia.
It is growing in popularity in the U.K., and is referenced in a song by the band Half Man Half Biscuit entitled "Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready)" on their 2011 album 90 Bisodol (Crimond).
Korfball has been played in the World Games since 1985. IKF World Korfball Championships have been held every four years since 1978. The leading nations are the Netherlands, Chinese Taipei, and Belgium.
Hong Kong hosted its first international tournament, the IKF Asia Oceania Korfball Championship, in 2006. New Zealand hosted the IKF Asia Oceania Youth Korfball Championships in 2007.
Korfball is played inside in winter and outdoors in spring, summer and autumn.
The size of the indoor court is 20 m × 40 m (22 yd × 44 yd), as are most outdoor courts. The court is divided into halves called zones. In each zone is a 3.5 m (11 ft) tall post with a basket at the top. This is positioned two-thirds of the distance between the center line and the back of the zone.
The ball is very similar to the one used in association football, with a circumference of 68.0-70.5 cm (or diameter of 21.75-22.45 cm), a weight of 445-475 grams, and a bounce height of 1.10-1.30 meters when dropped from a height of 1.80 meters.
A korfball team consists of eight players: four female and four male.
An international korfball match typically consists of two halves or four periods, with the length varying depending on the competition. When the match consists of halves, the duration is typically 25 minutes, with periods typically between 7 and 10 minutes, with a one-minute break between the first and second periods and between the third and fourth periods. At half time the break is five or ten minutes.
Four players of each team are in one zone and the other four are in the other zone. Within each zone, a player may only defend a member of the opposite team of the same gender.
At the beginning of the match, one team chooses a particular half of the court. That half will be that team's defending zone, with "their" basket in it. Players score by throwing the ball through the opposing team's basket. After two goals, the teams change zones: defenders become attackers and attackers become defenders. In between those zone-changes, attackers cannot set foot on their defending zone or vice versa. At half time the teams swap halves of the court.
The rules prevent physical strength dominating the game. Blocking, tackling, and holding are not allowed, nor is kicking the ball.
Once a player has the ball, that player cannot dribble or walk with it; however, the player can move one foot as long as the foot on which the player landed when catching the ball stays in the same spot. Therefore, tactical and efficient teamwork is required, because players need each other in order to keep the ball moving.
A player may not attempt to score when defended, which occurs when the defender is in between the opponent and the basket, is facing his/her opponent, or is within arm's length and attempting to block the ball. This rule encourages fast movement while also limiting the impact of players' height compared to their opponents.
The national teams competition organized by the International World Games Association has been played roughly every four years since 1981.
The national teams competition organized by the International Korfball Federation has been played roughly every four years since 1978.
IKF promotes four continental championships: European Korfball Championship, All-Africa Korfball Championship, Pan-American Korfball Championship and Asia-Oceania Korfball Championship.
Every year the IKF organises the Europa Cup for national champions (clubs). The Europa Cup was organized for the first time in 1967, and was won by Ons Eibernest from the Netherlands. The winner of the last edition was Fortuna/Delta Logistiek, which won the 2020 edition.
PKC from Papendrecht, the Netherlands, have won the championship the most times, a record 12 wins in total.
Until now, the winning team was either from the Netherlands or Belgium, with respectively 45 and 6 Europa Cups. The only club from the United Kingdom to reach the final was Mitcham Korfball Club from London. Mitcham lost the final against Catbavrienden from Belgium in 1998.
For beach korfball, the rules of the game differ slightly from those of regular korfball. Each team has 4 starting players and up to 4 substitutes. The field of play is 20 metres by 10 metres, and goals are to be placed 4 metres from the end line. Matches consist of two halves of 6 minutes with a 1-minute rest.
Each team has 4 players in the field, two men and two women. Players can be substituted at any time. Furthermore, if a goal is scored from a 2-point zone, a two-point goal is awarded. Free shots can both be executed at the standard Free Shot line, or at the spot where the fault was made by the opponent.
The current Beach Korfball World Champion is Poland, who won the World Beach Korfball Championship in Nador, Morocco in 2022. 13 teams were represented with Portugal taking silver and Belgium bronze.
IKF Beach Korfball World Cup (Regional)
Korfball is the theme of the song "Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready)" on the album 90 Bisodol (Crimond) by Half Man Half Biscuit.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Korfball (Dutch: korfbal) is a ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players with four female players and four male players in each team. The objective is to throw a ball into a netless basket that is mounted on a 3.5 m (11.5 feet) high pole.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The sport was invented by Dutch school teacher Nico Broekhuysen in 1902. In the Netherlands there are approximately 500 clubs and more than 90,000 people playing korfball. The sport is also played in Belgium and Taiwan, and in nearly 70 other countries.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1902, Nico Broekhuysen, a Dutch school teacher from Amsterdam, was sent to Nääs, a town in Sweden, to follow an educational course about teaching gymnastics to children. This is where he was introduced to the Swedish game \"ringboll\". In ringboll one could score points by throwing the ball through a ring that was attached to a 3 m pole. Men and women played together, and the field was divided into three zones. Players could not leave their zone.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "When Broekhuysen returned to Amsterdam he decided to teach his students a similar game. He replaced the ring with a basket (for which the Dutch word is korf or mand), so it was easier to see whether or not a player had scored. Broekhuysen also simplified the rules so that children could understand and play the game. Thus korfball was born. The main idea was the same as ringboll, but the new sport now stood on its own.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The oldest still existing korfball club never to have merged with any other club is a Dutch korfball club H.K.C. ALO from The Hague, Netherlands. H.K.C. ALO was founded on 1 February 1906.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Korfball was featured as a demonstration sport in the Summer Olympics of 1920 and 1928.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The International Korfball Federation was founded in 1933 in Antwerp, Belgium.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Korfball is played in 69 countries including the United States, China, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, Serbia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, The Netherlands, Belgium, Nigeria, Morocco, Ghana, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Turkey, Hong Kong, Portugal, Pakistan, India, Sweden, Hungary, Philippines, Indonesia, Italy, Spain, France and Romania.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, on March 1, 2022, the International Korfball Federation announced that the Russian Korfball Federation would not be invited until further notice to any international korfball competition. This implied effectively that no Russian athletes shall take part in any international korfball event. Furthermore, the Russian Korfball Federation shall not be eligible to bid for the hosting of any IKF event until further notice, and no IKF events were planned in Russia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "It is growing in popularity in the U.K., and is referenced in a song by the band Half Man Half Biscuit entitled \"Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready)\" on their 2011 album 90 Bisodol (Crimond).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Korfball has been played in the World Games since 1985. IKF World Korfball Championships have been held every four years since 1978. The leading nations are the Netherlands, Chinese Taipei, and Belgium.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hong Kong hosted its first international tournament, the IKF Asia Oceania Korfball Championship, in 2006. New Zealand hosted the IKF Asia Oceania Youth Korfball Championships in 2007.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Korfball is played inside in winter and outdoors in spring, summer and autumn.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The size of the indoor court is 20 m × 40 m (22 yd × 44 yd), as are most outdoor courts. The court is divided into halves called zones. In each zone is a 3.5 m (11 ft) tall post with a basket at the top. This is positioned two-thirds of the distance between the center line and the back of the zone.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The ball is very similar to the one used in association football, with a circumference of 68.0-70.5 cm (or diameter of 21.75-22.45 cm), a weight of 445-475 grams, and a bounce height of 1.10-1.30 meters when dropped from a height of 1.80 meters.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A korfball team consists of eight players: four female and four male.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "An international korfball match typically consists of two halves or four periods, with the length varying depending on the competition. When the match consists of halves, the duration is typically 25 minutes, with periods typically between 7 and 10 minutes, with a one-minute break between the first and second periods and between the third and fourth periods. At half time the break is five or ten minutes.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Four players of each team are in one zone and the other four are in the other zone. Within each zone, a player may only defend a member of the opposite team of the same gender.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "At the beginning of the match, one team chooses a particular half of the court. That half will be that team's defending zone, with \"their\" basket in it. Players score by throwing the ball through the opposing team's basket. After two goals, the teams change zones: defenders become attackers and attackers become defenders. In between those zone-changes, attackers cannot set foot on their defending zone or vice versa. At half time the teams swap halves of the court.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The rules prevent physical strength dominating the game. Blocking, tackling, and holding are not allowed, nor is kicking the ball.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Once a player has the ball, that player cannot dribble or walk with it; however, the player can move one foot as long as the foot on which the player landed when catching the ball stays in the same spot. Therefore, tactical and efficient teamwork is required, because players need each other in order to keep the ball moving.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A player may not attempt to score when defended, which occurs when the defender is in between the opponent and the basket, is facing his/her opponent, or is within arm's length and attempting to block the ball. This rule encourages fast movement while also limiting the impact of players' height compared to their opponents.",
"title": "Rules and regulations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The national teams competition organized by the International World Games Association has been played roughly every four years since 1981.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The national teams competition organized by the International Korfball Federation has been played roughly every four years since 1978.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "IKF promotes four continental championships: European Korfball Championship, All-Africa Korfball Championship, Pan-American Korfball Championship and Asia-Oceania Korfball Championship.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Every year the IKF organises the Europa Cup for national champions (clubs). The Europa Cup was organized for the first time in 1967, and was won by Ons Eibernest from the Netherlands. The winner of the last edition was Fortuna/Delta Logistiek, which won the 2020 edition.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "PKC from Papendrecht, the Netherlands, have won the championship the most times, a record 12 wins in total.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Until now, the winning team was either from the Netherlands or Belgium, with respectively 45 and 6 Europa Cups. The only club from the United Kingdom to reach the final was Mitcham Korfball Club from London. Mitcham lost the final against Catbavrienden from Belgium in 1998.",
"title": "International tournaments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "For beach korfball, the rules of the game differ slightly from those of regular korfball. Each team has 4 starting players and up to 4 substitutes. The field of play is 20 metres by 10 metres, and goals are to be placed 4 metres from the end line. Matches consist of two halves of 6 minutes with a 1-minute rest.",
"title": "Beach korfball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Each team has 4 players in the field, two men and two women. Players can be substituted at any time. Furthermore, if a goal is scored from a 2-point zone, a two-point goal is awarded. Free shots can both be executed at the standard Free Shot line, or at the spot where the fault was made by the opponent.",
"title": "Beach korfball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The current Beach Korfball World Champion is Poland, who won the World Beach Korfball Championship in Nador, Morocco in 2022. 13 teams were represented with Portugal taking silver and Belgium bronze.",
"title": "Beach korfball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "IKF Beach Korfball World Cup (Regional)",
"title": "Beach korfball"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Korfball is the theme of the song \"Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready)\" on the album 90 Bisodol (Crimond) by Half Man Half Biscuit.",
"title": "Cultural references"
}
] |
Korfball is a ball sport, with similarities to netball and basketball. It is played by two teams of eight players with four female players and four male players in each team. The objective is to throw a ball into a netless basket that is mounted on a 3.5 m high pole. The sport was invented by Dutch school teacher Nico Broekhuysen in 1902. In the Netherlands there are approximately 500 clubs and more than 90,000 people playing korfball. The sport is also played in Belgium and Taiwan, and in nearly 70 other countries.
|
2001-09-12T13:44:09Z
|
2023-10-29T08:37:29Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korfball
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Kabul
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Kabul (/ˈkɑːbʊl, kəˈbʊl/; (Persian: کابل; Pashto: کابل); Pashto: [kɑˈbəl]; Dari: [kɑːˈbʊl]) is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into 22 municipal districts. According to 2023 estimates, the population of Kabul was 4.95 million people. In contemporary times, the city has served as Afghanistan's political, cultural, and economical center, and rapid urbanisation has made Kabul the 75th-largest city in the world and the country's primate city.
The modern-day city of Kabul is located high up in a narrow valley in the Hindu Kush, and is bounded by the Kabul River. At an elevation of 1,790 metres (5,873 ft), it is one of the highest capital cities in the world. The center of this city includes its old neighborhoods, which include the areas of Khashti Bridge, Khabgah, Kahforoshi, Deh-Afghanan, Chandavel, Shorbazar, Saraji, Zana-Khan and Baghe Alimardan. Kabul is said to be over 3,500 years old, mentioned since at least the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Located at a crossroads in Asia—roughly halfway between Istanbul, Turkey, in the west and Hanoi, Vietnam, in the east—it is situated in a strategic location along the trade routes of Central Asia and South Asia, and was a key destination on the ancient Silk Road; It was traditionally seen as the meeting point between Tartary, India, and Persia. Kabul has also been under the rule of various other dynasties and empires, including the Seleucids, the Kushans, the Hindu Shahis, Western Turks, the Turk Shahis, the Samanids, the Khwarazmians, the Timurids, and the Mongols, among others such as the Arman Rayamajhis. In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire used Kabul as a summer capital, during which time it prospered and increased in significance. It briefly came under the control of the Afsharids following Nader Shah's invasion of India, until finally coming under local rule by the Afghan Empire in 1747; Kabul became the capital of Afghanistan in 1776, during the reign of Timur Shah Durrani (a son of Ahmad Shah Durrani). In the 19th century, the city was occupied by the British, but after establishing foreign relations and agreements, they were compelled to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan and return to British India.
Kabul is known for its historical gardens, bazaars, and palaces; well-known examples are the Gardens of Babur and Darul Aman Palace, as well as the Arg. In the second half of the 20th century, it became a stop on the hippie trail undertaken by many Europeans, and the city also gained the nickname "Paris of Central Asia" during this time. However, this period of tranquility ended in 1978 with the Saur Revolution and subsequent Soviet military intervention in 1979, which sparked the protracted Soviet–Afghan War until 1989. The 1990s were marked by continuous civil wars between various splinter factions of the disbanded Afghan mujahideen, which destroyed much of the city. In 1996, Kabul was captured by the Taliban after four years of intermittent fighting with other Afghan factions. However, the Taliban-ruled city soon fell to the United States after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in 2001. In 2021, Kabul was re-captured by the Taliban following the withdrawal of American-led military forces from Afghanistan.
Kabul (/ˈkɑːbuːl/, /ˈkɑːbəl/; Pashto: کابل Kâbəl, IPA: [kɑˈbəl]; Dari: کابل Kābul, IPA: [kɑːˈbʊl]) is also spelled as Cabool, Cabol, Kabol, or Cabul.
Kabul was known by different names throughout history. Its meaning is unknown, but "certainly pre-dates the advent of Islam when it was an important centre on the route between India and the Hellenic world". In Sanskrit, it was known as Kubha, whereas Greek authors of classical antiquity referred to it as Kophen, Kophes or Koa. The Chinese traveler Xuanzang (fl. 7th century CE) recorded the city as Kaofu (高附). The name "Kabul" was first applied to the Kabul river before being applied to the area situated between the Hindu Kush and Sindh (present-day Pakistan). This area was also known as Kabulistan. Alexander Cunningham (died 1893) noted in the 19th century that Kaofu as recorded by the Chinese was in all likelihood the name of "one of the five Yuchi or Tukhari tribes". Cunningam added that this tribe gave its name to the city after it was occupied by them in the 2nd century BCE. This "supposition seems likely" as the Afghan historian Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar (1898–1978) wrote that in the Avesta (sacred book of Zoroastrianism), Kabul was known as Vaekereta, whereas the Greeks of antiquity referred to it as Ortospana ("High Place"), which corresponds to the Sanskrit word Urddhastana, which was applied to Kabul. The Greek geographer Ptolemy (died c. 170 CE) recorded Kabul as Καβουρα (Kabura).
According to a legend, one could find a lake in Kabul, in the middle of which the so-called "Island of Happiness" could be found, where a joyous family of musicians lived. According to this same legend, the island became accessible by the order of a king through the construction of a bridge (i.e. "pul" in Persian) made out of straw (i.e. "kah" in Persian). According to this legend the name Kabul was thus formed as a result of these two words combined, i.e. kah + pul. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names argues that the "suggestion that the name is derived from the Arabic root qbl 'meeting' or 'receiving' is unlikely".
It remains unknown when the name "Kabul" was first applied to the city. However, it "came into prominence" following the destruction of Kapisa and other cities in what is present-day Afghanistan by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) in the thirteenth century. Due to the centrality of the city within the region, as well as its cultural importance as a nexus of ethnic groups in the region, Kabul became known as the Paris of Central Asia in the late 20th century.
The origin of Kabul, who built it and when, is largely unknown. The Hindu Rigveda, composed between 2000 and 1500 BC and one of the four canonical texts of Hinduism, and the Avesta, the primary canon of texts of Zoroastrianism, refer to the Kabul River and to a settlement called Kubha.
The Kabul valley was part of the Median Empire (c. 678–549 BC). In 549 BC, the Median Empire was annexed by Cyrus The Great and Kabul became part the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC). During that period, Kabul became a center of learning for Zoroastrianism, followed by Buddhism and Hinduism. An inscription on Darius the Great's tombstone lists Kabul as one of the 29 countries of the Achaemenid Empire.
When Alexander annexed the Achaemenid Empire, the Kabul region came under his control. After his death, his empire was seized by his general Seleucus, becoming part of the Seleucid Empire. In 305 BCE, the Seleucid Empire was extended to the Indus River which led to friction with the neighbouring Mauryan Empire.
During the Mauryan period, trade flourished because of uniform weights and measures. Irrigation facilities for public use were developed leading to an increased harvest of crops. People were also employed as artisans, jewellers, and carpenters.
The Greco-Bactrians took control of Kabul from the Mauryans in the early 2nd century BC, then lost the city to their subordinates in the Indo-Greek Kingdom around the mid-2nd century BC. Buddhism was greatly patronised by these rulers and the majority of people of the city were adherents of the religion. Indo-Scythians expelled the Indo-Greeks by the mid 1st century BC, but lost the city to the Kushan Empire about 100 years later.
It is mentioned as Kophes or Kophene in some classical writings. Hsuan Tsang refers to the city as Kaofu in the 7th century AD, which is the appellation of one of the five tribes of the Yuezhi who had migrated from across the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley around the beginning of the Christian era. It was conquered by Kushan Emperor Kujula Kadphises in about 45 AD and remained Kushan territory until at least the 3rd century AD. The Kushans were Indo-European-speaking peoples based in Bactria.
Around 230 AD, the Kushans were defeated by the Sassanid Empire and replaced by Sassanid vassals known as the Indo-Sassanids. During the Sassanian period, the city was referred to as "Kapul" in Pahlavi scripts. Kapol in the Persian language means Royal (ka) Bridge (pol), which is due to the main bridge on the Kabul River that connected the east and west of the city. In 420 AD, the Indo-Sassanids were driven out of Afghanistan by the Xionite tribe known as the Kidarites, who were then replaced in the 460s by the Hephthalites. It became part of the surviving Turk Shahi Kingdom of Kapisa, also known as Kabul-Shahan. According to Táríkhu-l Hind by Al-Biruni, Kabul was governed by princes of Turkic lineage.|Abu Rayhan Biruni|978–1048 AD}} It was briefly held by the Tibetan Empire between 801 and 815.
The Islamic conquest reached modern-day Afghanistan in 642 AD, at a time when Kabul was independent. Till then, Kabul was considered politically and culturally part of Indian world. A number of failed expeditions were made to Islamise the region. In one of them, Abdur Rahman bin Samara arrived in Kabul from Zaranj in the late 600s and converted 12,000 inhabitants to Islam before abandoning the city. Muslims were a minority until Ya'qub bin Laith as-Saffar of Zaranj conquered Kabul in 870 from the Hindu Shahis and established the first Islamic dynasty in the region. It was reported that the rulers of Kabul were Muslims with non-Muslims living close by. Iranian traveller and geographer Istakhri described it in 921:
Kábul has a castle celebrated for its strength, accessible only by one road. In it there are Musulmáns, and it has a town, in which are infidels from Hind.
Over the following centuries, the city was successively controlled by the Samanids, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Khwarazmshahs, Qarlughids, and Khaljis. In the 13th century, the invading Mongols caused major destruction in the region. Report of a massacre in the close by Bamiyan is recorded around this period, where the entire population of the valley was annihilated by the Mongol troops as revenge for the death of Genghis Khan's grandson. As a result, many natives of Afghanistan fled south toward the Indian subcontinent where some established dynasties in Delhi. The Chagatai Khanate and Kartids were vassals of Ilkhanate until the dissolution of the latter in 1335.
Following the era of the Khalji dynasty in 1333, the famous Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta was visiting Kabul and wrote:
We travelled on to Kabul, formerly a vast town, the site of which is now occupied by a village inhabited by a tribe of Persians called Afghans. They hold mountains and defiles and possess considerable strength, and are mostly highwaymen. Their principal mountain is called Kuh Sulayman.
In the 14th century, Kabul became a major trading centre under the kingdom of Timur (Tamerlane). In 1504, the city fell to Babur from the north and made into his headquarters, which became one of the principal cities of his later Mughal Empire. In 1525, Babur described Kabulistan in his memoirs by writing that:
There are many differing tribes in the Kābul country; in its dales and plains are Turks and clansmen and 'Arabs; and in its town and in many villages, Sārts; out in the districts and also in villages are the Pashāi, Parājī, Tājik, Bīrkī and Afghān tribes. In the western mountains are the Hazāra and Nikdīrī tribes, some of whom speak the Mughūlī tongue. In the north-eastern mountains are the places of the Kāfirs, such as Kitūr and Gibrik. To the south are the places of the Afghān tribes.
Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, a poet from Hindustan who visited at the time wrote: "Dine and drink in Kabul: it is mountain, desert, city, river and all else." It was from here that Babur began his 1526 conquest of Hindustan, which was ruled by the Afghan Lodi dynasty and began east of the Indus River in what is present-day Pakistan. Babur loved Kabul due to the fact that he lived in it for 20 years and the people were loyal to him, including the weather that he was used to. His wish to be buried in Kabul was finally granted. The inscription on his tomb contains the famous Persian couplet, which states:
اگرفردوس روی زمین است همین است و همین است و همین است
Transliteration:
Agar fardus rui zamayn ast', hameen ast', o hameen ast', o hameen ast'.
(If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, and it is this, and it is this!)
Kabul remained in Mughal control for the next 200 years. Though Mughal power became centred within the Indian subcontinent, Kabul retained importance as a frontier city for the empire; Abul Fazl, Emperor Akbar's chronicler, described it as one of the two gates to Hindustan (the other being Kandahar). As part of administrative reforms under Akbar, the city was made capital of the eponymous Mughal province, Kabul Subah. Under Mughal governance, Kabul became a prosperous urban centre, endowed with bazaars such as the non-extant Char Chatta. For the first time in its history, Kabul served as a mint centre, producing gold and silver Mughal coins up to the reign of Alamgir II. It acted as a military base for Shah Jahan's campaigns in Balkh and Badakhshan. Kabul was also a recreational retreat for the Mughals, who hunted here and constructed several gardens. Most of the Mughals' architectural contributions to the city (such as gardens, fortifications, and mosques) have not survived. During this time, the population was about 60,000.
Under later Mughal Emperors, Kabul became neglected. The empire lost the city when it was captured in 1738 by Nader Shah, who was en route to invade the Indian subcontinent.
Nine years after Nader Shah and his forces invaded and occupied the city as part of the more easternmost parts of his Empire, he was assassinated by his own officers, causing its rapid disintegration. Ahmad Shah Durrani, commander of 4,000 Abdali Afghans, asserted Pashtun rule in 1747 and further expanded his new Afghan Empire. His ascension to power marked the beginning of Afghanistan. By this time, Kabul had lost its status as a metropolitan city, and its population had decreased to 10,000. Interest in the city was renewed when Ahmad Shah's son Timur Shah Durrani, after inheriting power, transferred the capital of the Durrani Empire from Kandahar to Kabul in 1776. Kabul experienced considerable urban development during the reigns of Timur Shah and his successor Zaman Shah; several religious and public buildings were constructed, and diverse groups of Sufis, jurists, and literary families were encouraged to settle the city through land grants and stipends. Kabul's first visitor from Europe was Englishman George Forster, who described 18th-century Kabul as "the best and cleanest city in Asia".
In 1826, the kingdom was claimed by Dost Mohammad Khan, but in 1839 Shujah Shah Durrani was re-installed with the help of the British Empire during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In 1841 a local uprising resulted in the killing of the British resident and loss of mission in Kabul and the 1842 retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. In 1842 the British returned to Kabul, demolishing the city's main bazaar in revenge before returning to British India (now Pakistan). Akbar Khan took to the throne from 1842 to 1845 and was followed by Dost Mohammad Khan.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War broke out in 1879 when Kabul was under Sher Ali Khan's rule, as the Afghan king initially refused to accept British diplomatic missions and later the British residents were again massacred. During the war, Bala Hissar was partially destroyed by a fire and an explosion.
Having become an established bazaar city, leather and textile industries developed by 1916. The majority of the population was concentrated on the south side of the river.
Kabul modernised throughout the regime of King Habibullah Khan, with the introduction of electricity, telephone, and a postal service. The first modern high school, Habibia, was established in 1903. In 1919, after the Third Anglo-Afghan War, King Amanullah Khan announced Afghanistan's independence in foreign affairs at Eidgah Mosque in Kabul. Amanullah was reform-minded and he had a plan to build a new capital city on land about 6 km away from Kabul. This area was named Darulaman and it consisted of the famous Darul Aman Palace, where he later resided. Many educational institutions were founded in Kabul during the 1920s. In 1929 King Amanullah left Kabul due to a local uprising orchestrated by Habibullah Kalakani, but he himself was imprisoned and executed after nine months in power by King Nader Khan. Three years later, in 1933, the new king was assassinated during an award ceremony inside a school in Kabul. The throne was left to his 19-year-old son, Zahir Shah, who became the last King of Afghanistan. Unlike Amanullah Khan, Nader Khan and Zahir Shah had no plans to create a new capital city, and thus Kabul remained the country's seat of government.
During the inter-war period France and Germany helped develop the country and maintained high schools and lycees in the capital, providing education for the children of the city's elite families. Kabul University opened in 1932 and by the 1960s western educated Afghans made up the majority of teachers. By the 1960s the majority of instructors at the university had degrees from Western universities.
Kabul's only railway service, the Kabul–Darulaman Tramway, operated for six years from 1923 to 1929.
When Zahir Shah took power in 1933 Kabul had the only 10 kilometers (6 miles) of rail in the country and the country had few internal telegraphs, phone lines or roads. Zahir turned to the Japanese, Germans and Italians for help developing a modern transportation and communication network. A radio tower built by the Germans in 1937 in Kabul allowed instant communication with outlying villages. A national bank and state cartels were organised to allow for economic modernisation. Textile mills, power plants, carpet and furniture factories were also built in Kabul, providing much-needed manufacturing and infrastructure.
During the 1940s and 1950s, urbanisation accelerated and the built-up area was increased to 68 km by 1962, an almost fourteen-fold increase compared to 1925. The Serena Hotel opened in 1945 as the first Western style luxury hotel. Under the premiership of Mohammad Daoud Khan in the 1950s, foreign investment and development increased. In 1955, the Soviet Union forwarded $100 million in credit to Afghanistan, which financed public transportation, airports, a cement factory, mechanised bakery, a five-lane highway from Kabul to the Soviet border and dams, including the Salang Pass to the north of Kabul. During the 1960s, Soviet-style microrayon housing estates were built, containing sixty blocks. The government also built many ministry buildings in the brutalist architecture style. In the 1960s the first Marks & Spencer store in Central Asia was built in the city. Kabul Zoo was inaugurated in 1967, which was maintained with the help of visiting German zoologists. During this time, Kabul experimented with liberalisation, notably the loosening of restrictions on speech and assembly which led to student politics in the capital and various demonstrations by Socialist, Maoist, liberal or Islamist factions.
Foreigners flocked to Kabul and the nation's tourism industry picked up speed. To accompany the city with newfound tourism, western-style accommodations were opened in the 1960s, notably the Spinzar Hotel. Western, American and Japanese tourists were visiting the city's attractions including the "celebrated" Chicken Street and the National Museum that used to have some of Asia's finest cultural artifacts. Lonely Planet called it an upcoming "tourist trap" in 1973. Additionally, Pakistanis were also visiting to watch Indian movies in cinemas that were banned in their own country. During this time, Kabul had been nicknamed the Paris of Central Asia. According to J. Bruce Amstutz, an American diplomat in Kabul:
[Before the 1978 Marxist coup d'etat] Kabul was a pleasant city [..] Though poor economically, it was spared the eyesore slums so visible in other Asian cities. The Afghans themselves were an imposing people, the men tall and self-assured and the women attractive.
Until the late 1970s, Kabul was a major stop on the famous Hippie trail, coming from Bamyan to the west on towards Peshawar. At the time, Kabul became known for its street sales of hashish and became a major tourist attraction for western hippies.
On 28 April 1978, President Daoud and most of his family were assassinated in Kabul's Presidential Palace in what is called the Saur Revolution. Pro-Soviet PDPA under Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power and slowly began to institute reforms. Private businesses were nationalised in the Soviet manner. Education was modified into the Soviet model, with lessons focusing on teaching Russian, Marxism–Leninism and learning of other countries belonging to the Soviet bloc.
Amid growing internal chaos and heightened cold war tensions, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped on his way to work at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on 14 February 1979 and killed during a rescue attempt at the Serena Hotel. There were conflicting reports of who abducted Dubs and what demands were made for his release. Several senior Soviet officials were in the lobby of the hotel during a standoff with the kidnappers, who were holding Dubs in room 117. Afghan police, acting on the advice of Soviet advisors and over the objections of U.S. officials, launched a rescue attempt, during which Dubs was shot in the head from a distance of six inches and killed. Many questions about the killing remain unanswered.
On 24 December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Kabul was heavily occupied by Soviet Armed Forces. In Pakistan, Director-General of the ISI Akhtar Abdur Rahman advocated for the idea of covert operation in Afghanistan by arming Islamic extremists who formed the mujahideen. General Rahman was heard loudly saying: "Kabul must burn! Kabul must burn!", and mastered the idea of proxy war in Afghanistan. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq authorised this operation under General Rahman, which was later merged with Operation Cyclone, a programme funded by the United States and carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Soviets turned the city of Kabul into their command centre during the Soviet–Afghan War, and while fighting was mostly taking place in the countryside, Kabul was widely disturbed. Political crime and guerrilla attacks on military and government targets were common, and the sound of gunfire became commonplace at night in the outskirts. Large numbers of PDPA party members and Soviet troops were kidnapped or assassinated, sometimes in broad daylight, with acts of terrorism committed by civilians, anti-regime militias and also Khalqists. By July 1980, as much as twelve party members were being assassinated on a daily basis, and the Soviet Army stopped patrolling the city in January 1981. A major uprising against the Soviet presence broke out in Kabul in February 1980 in what is called the 3 Hut uprising. It led to a night curfew in the city that would remain in place for seven years. The Soviet Embassy also, was attacked four times with arms fire in the first five years of the war. A Western correspondent revisiting Kabul in December 1983 after a year, said that the city was "converted into a fortress bristling with weapons". Contrastingly, that same year American diplomat Charles Dunbar commented that the Soviet troops' presence was "surprisingly modest", and an author in a 1983 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article thought that the Soviet soldiers had a "friendly" atmosphere.
The city's population increased from around 500,000 in 1978 to 1.5 million in 1988. The large influx were mostly internal refugees who fled other parts of the country for safety in Kabul. During this time, women made up 40% of the workforce. Soviet men and women were very common in the city's shopping roads, with the large availability of Western products. Most Soviet civilians (numbering between 8,000 and 10,000) lived in the northeastern Soviet-style Mikrorayon (microraion) housing complex that was surrounded by barbed-wire and armed tanks. They sometimes received abuse from anti-Soviet civilians on the streets. The mujahideen rebels managed to strike at the city a few times—on 9 October 1987, a car bomb planted by a mujahideen group killed 27 people, and on 27 April 1988, in celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the Saur Revolution, a truck bomb killed six people.
After the fall of Mohammad Najibullah's government in April 1992, different mujahideen factions entered the city and formed a government under the Peshawar Accords, but Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's party refused to sign the accords and started shelling the city for power, which soon escalated into a full-scale conflict. This marked the start of a dark period of the city: at least 30,000 civilians were killed in a period known locally as the "Kabul Wars." About 80 percent of the city was devastated and destroyed by 1996. The old city and western areas were among the worst-hit. A New York Times analyst said in 1996 that the city was more devastated than Sarajevo, which was similarly damaged during the Bosnian War at the time.
The city suffered heavily under a bombardment campaign between rival militias which intensified during the summer of 1992. Its geographic location in a narrow valley made it an easy target from rockets fired by militias who based themselves in the surrounding mountains. Within two years' time, the majority of infrastructure was destroyed, a massive exodus of the population left to the countryside or abroad, and electricity and water was completely out. In late 1994, bombardment of the capital came to a temporary halt. These forces took steps to restore law and order. Courts started to work again, convicting individuals inside government troops who had committed crimes. On 27 September 1996, the hardline Taliban militia seized Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They imposed a strict form of Sharia (Islamic law), restricting women from work and education, conducting amputations against common thieves, and hit-squads from the infamous "Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice" watching public beatings of people.
In November 2001, the Northern Alliance captured Kabul after the Taliban had abandoned it following the American invasion. A month later a new government under President Hamid Karzai began to assemble. In the meantime, a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was deployed in Afghanistan. The war-torn city began to see some positive development as many expatriate Afghans returned to the country. The city's population grew from about 500,000 in 2001 to over 3 million in recent years. Many foreign embassies re-opened. In 2008 the process started to gradually hand over security responsibilities from NATO to Afghan forces. From late 2001 the city has been continuously rebuilt - many of the damaged landmarks were rebuilt or renovated, for example the Gardens of Babur in 2005, the arch of Paghman, the Mahmoud Khan Bridge clock tower in 2013, and the Taj Beg Palace in 2021. Local community efforts have also managed to restore war-ravaged local homes and dwellings.
The city has experienced rapid urbanisation with an increasing population. Many informal settlements have been built. Since the late 2000s, numerous modern housing complexes have been built, many of which are gated and secured, to serve a growing Afghan middle class. Some of these include the Aria City (in District 10) and Golden City (District 8). Some complexes have been built out-of-town, such as the Omid-e-Sabz township (District 13), Qasaba/Khwaja Rawash township (District 15), and Sayed Jamaludin township (District 12).
Throughout the years, a high-security "Green Zone" was formed in the centre of the city. In 2010, a series of manned checkpoints called the Ring of Steel was put into operation. Concrete blast walls also appeared throughout Kabul in the 2000s for security reasons.
Despite frequent terrorist attacks in the city, mainly by Taliban insurgents, the city continued to develop and was the fifth fastest-growing city in the world as of 2012. Until August 2021, the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) had been in charge of security in and around the city. Kabul was periodically the scene of deadly bombings carried out mostly by the Taliban and its wing the Haqqani network. Government employees, soldiers and ordinary civilians have all been targets of attacks. The Afghan government called the actions of the terrorists war crimes. The deadliest attack yet was a truck bombing in May 2017. The city was seized during the 2021 Taliban offensive on August 15, 2021; under Taliban rule the city and the country has experienced some relative calm, although a number of terrorist attacks have since been committed by the regional ISIL branch.
Kabul was situated in the eastern part of the country, 1,791 meters (5,876 feet) above sea level in a narrow valley, wedged between the Hindu Kush mountains along the Kabul River. Immediately to the south of the old city are the ancient city walls and the Sher Darwaza mountain, with the Shuhadayi Salihin cemetery behind it. A bit further east is the ancient Bala Hissar fortress with the Kol-e Hasmat Khan lake behind it.
Its location has been described as a "bowl surrounded by mountains". Some of the mountains (which are called koh) include: Khair Khana-e Shamali, Khwaja Rawash, Shakhi Baran Tey, Chihil Sutun, Qurugh, Khwaja Razaq and Sher Darwaza. There are also two mountains in between urban areas to the west: Koh-e Asamai (locally known as the Television hill) and Ali Abad. Hills within the city (which are called tapa) include Bibi Mahro and Maranjan.
The Logar River flows into Kabul from the south, joining the Kabul River not far from the city centre.
The city covers an area size of 1,023 square kilometres (395 sq mi), making it by far the largest in the country. The closest foreign capital cities as the crow flies are Islamabad, Dushanbe, Tashkent, New Delhi and Bishkek. Kabul is roughly equidistant between Istanbul (western Asia) and Hanoi (eastern Asia).
Kabul has a continental, cold semi-arid climate (BSk), with precipitation concentrated in the winter (almost exclusively falling as snow) and spring months. Summers have very low humidity, providing some relief from the heat. Autumns feature warm afternoons and sharply cooler evenings. Winters are very cold by South Asian standards, with a subzero January daily average temperature of −2.3 °C (27.9 °F), mainly due to the high elevation of the city. Spring is the wettest time of the year. Sunny conditions dominate year-round, and the annual mean temperature is only 12.1 °C (53.8 °F), much lower than that of Afghanistan's other large cities.
The Kabul River flowed through the heart of the city, dividing the central bazaars. There are several bridges (pul) crossing the river, the major ones being Pul-e Shah-Do Shamshira, Pul-e Bagh-e Omomi, Pul-e Khishti, and Pul-e Mahmoud. Due to climate change, since the 21st century, the river runs dry most of the year, only filling up in the wetter winter and spring seasons.
A large lake and wetland was located just to the southeast from the old city called Kol-e Hashmat Khan. The marsh provides a critical resting place to thousands of birds who fly between the Indian subcontinent and Siberia. In 2017 the government declared the lake a protected area. Some rare species of birds have been spotted at the lake, such as the Eastern imperial eagle and the Dalmatian pelican. Kabul's other large lake is Qargha, located some 9 km northwest from the centre. It is a major attraction for locals as well as foreigners.
Air pollution is a major problem in the city during the winter season, when many residents burn low-quality fuels.
The city of Kabul located within Kabul District, one of the 15 districts of Kabul Province. As the provincial capital, it forms a municipality (shārwāli) which is further divided into 22 administrative districts called municipal districts or city districts (nāhia), which coincide with the official Police Districts (PD). The number of city districts increased from 11 to 18 in 2005, and then to 22 by 2010 after the incorporation of Districts 14 and 19–22 which were annexed by Kabul Municipality from surrounding rural districts. The city limits have thus substantially increased. Due to demarcation disputes with the provincial administration, some of these new districts are more administered by the provincial districts than the municipality.
District 1 contains most of the old city. Downtown Kabul mostly consist of Districts 2, 4 and 10. In addition, Districts 3 and 6 house many commercial and governmental points of interests. The city's north and west are the most urbanised, as opposed to the south and east.
The table below show the 22 city districts and their settlements, with information about its land size and usage, accurate as of 2011.
Kabul's population was estimated in 2023 at about 4.95 million. The city's population has long fluctuated due to the wars. The lack of an up-to-date census means that there are various estimates of the population.
Kabul's population was estimated to have been about 10,000 in 1700, 65,000 by 1878, and 120,000 by 1940. More recently, the population was around 500,000 in 1979, whilst another source claims 337,715 as of 1976. This figure rose to about 1.5 million by 1988, before dramatically dropping in the 1990s. Kabul became one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with its population growing fourfold from 2001 to 2014. This was partly due to the return of refugees after the fall of the Taliban regime, and partly due to Afghans moving from other provinces mainly due to war between Taliban insurgents and Afghan government forces in their native areas as well as looking for labor. This resulting rapid urbanisation means that many residents today live in informal settlements. Shanty mud-brick homes on the mountainsides and steep hills have been built by them and these are usually poverty-stricken, not connected to the water and electricity grid. Although the settlements are illegal, they have been tolerated by authorities. In 2017 Kabul Municipality started a project to paint the homes in these settlements in bright colors in an effort to "cheer up" residents.
Kabul is and has historically been the most ethnically diverse city in the country, with the population including Afghans from all over the country. Approximately 40% of Kabul's population is Tajik, 25% Hazara, another 25% is Pashtun, and minority ethnic groups include Qizilbash, Baloch, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Afghan Hindu. Almost three-quarters of the population of Kabul follow Sunni Islam, and around Twenty-five percent of residents are Shiites. Other religions in the city include Sikhism and Hinduism.
In 1525, Babur described the region in his memoirs by writing that:
Eleven or twelve tongues are spoken in Kābul,—‘Arabī, Persian, Turkī, Mughūlī, Hindī, Afghānī, Pashāī, Parājī, Gibrī, Bīrkī, and Lamghānī. If there be another country with so many differing tribes and such a diversity of tongues, it is not known.
Along with Pashtun, Tajik and Hazara communities, who make up the majority of the population of the city, there was a significant population of Uzbek, Turkmen, Kuchi, Qizilbash, Hindu, Sikh and other groups. The broader province of Kabul however, is dominated by Pashtun and Tajik groups. The Dari (Persian) and Pashto languages are widely used in the region, although Dari serves as the lingua franca. Multilingualism is common throughout the area, particularly among the Pashtun people.
The term "Kabuli" (کابلی) is referred to the urbanites of the city. They were ethnic-neutral, typically speak Dari (Persian), were generally secularly educated, and favor Western fashion. Many Kabulites (especially elites and the upper class) left the country during the civil war and are now outnumbered by rural people who moved in from the countryside, mostly refugees but also labor-seekers.
About 68% of the city's population follow Sunni Islam while 30% are Shiites (mainly the Hazaras and Qizilbash). The remaining 2% are followers of Sikhism and Hinduism, as well as one known Christian resident (First Lady Rula Ghani) and one Jewish resident (Zablon Simintov) in the 2010s. It is estimated that there were 500–8,000 Afghan Christians in the country as a whole; due to restrictions on religious freedom, they often worship in secret, rendering it difficult to estimate the number of Christians in Kabul specifically. Hundreds of non-Muslims still remain after the Taliban retakeover Afghanistan. Kabul also has small Indian (which the Sikhs and Hindus belong to) and Turkish communities (mostly business-owners and investors), and in the 1980s had a sizable Russian community during the Soviet campaign in the country.
Cricket has historically been the dominant sport in Kabul, with 2 of 3 sports stadiums reserved for it.
The municipality's administrative structure consisted of 17 departments under a mayor. Like other provincial municipalities in Afghanistan, the municipality of Kabul dealt with city affairs such as construction and infrastructure. The city districts (nāhia) collected certain taxes and issued building licenses. Each city district had a district head appointed by the mayor, and lead six major departments in the district office. The neighbourhood organisation structure at the nahia level was called a gozar. Kabul has been Divided in to 630 Gozars. A wakil-e gozar was a person chosen to represent a community within a city district.
Kabul's Chief of Police was Lt. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi. The police were part of the Afghan National Police (ANP) under the Ministry of Interior and were arranged by city districts. The Police Chief was selected by the Interior Minister and is responsible for all law enforcement activities throughout the Kabul province.
Kabul's main products included fresh and dried fruit, nuts, beverages, Afghan rugs, leather and sheep skin products, furniture, antique replicas, and domestic clothes. The World Bank authorised US$25 million for the Kabul Urban Reconstruction Project which closed in 2011. Over the last decade, the United States has invested approximately $9.1 billion into urban infrastructure in Afghanistan. The wars since 1978 have limited the city's economic productivity but after the establishment of the Karzai administration since late 2001, local economic developments have included a number of indoor shopping malls. The first of these was the Kabul City Center, opened 2005. Others have also opened in recent years including Gulbahar Center, City Walk Mall and Majid Mall.
Mandawi Road on the south side of the river, located between Murad Khani and Shur Bazaar neighbourhoods, is one of the main bazaars of Kabul. This wholesale market is very popular amongst locals. Nearby is the Sarai Shahzada money exchange market. Chicken Street is perhaps best known to foreigners.
Kabul's largest industrial hub was located in District 9, on the north banks of the River Kabul and near the airport. About 6 km (4 mi) from downtown Kabul, in Bagrami, a 9-hectare (22-acre) industrial complex had been completed with modern facilities, which allowed companies to operate businesses there. The park had professional management for the daily maintenance of public roads, internal streets, common areas, parking areas, 24 hours perimeter security, access control for vehicles and people. A number of factories operated there, including the $25 million Coca-Cola bottling plant and the Omaid Bahar juice factory.
According to Transparency International, the government of Afghanistan was the third most-corrupt in the world, as of 2010. Experts believe that the poor decisions of Afghan politicians contributed to the unrest in the region. This also prevented foreign investment in Afghanistan, especially by Western countries. In 2012, there were reportedly $3.9 billion paid to public officials in bribes which contributed to these issues.
Da Afghanistan Bank, the nation's central bank, was headquartered in Kabul. In addition, there are several commercial banks in the city.
Each year about 20,000 foreign tourists visited Afghanistan.
A US$1 billion contract was signed in 2013 to commence work on the "New Kabul City", which is a major residential scheme that would accommodate 1.5 million people. Another development is the Qatar Township in Kabul.
As of November 2015, there were more than 24 television stations based out of Kabul. Terrestrial TV transmitters were located at the summit of the Koh-e Asamai.
GSM/GPRS mobile phone services are provided by Afghan Wireless, Etisalat, Roshan, MTN and Salaam. They provide 4G and 3G services. In November 2006, the Afghan Ministry of Communications signed a US$64.5 million deal with ZTE on the establishment of a countrywide fibre optical cable network to help improve telephone, internet, television and radio broadcast services not just in Kabul but throughout the country.
Mail and delivery services are provided by Afghan Post, FedEx, TNT N.V., and DHL.
Kabul has many hotels for domestic and foreign travelers. Guest houses are also found in the city. The better and safer ones are located in the Shahr-e Naw and Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhoods (the Green Zone). The following are some of the hotels in Kabul (in alphabetical order).
The old part of Kabul was filled with bazaars nestled along its narrow, crooked streets, examples being the Mandawi and the Bird Market (Ka Foroshi). Cultural sites included: the National Museum of Afghanistan, notably displaying an impressive statue of Surya excavated at Khair Khana, the ruined Darul Aman Palace, the tomb of Mughal Emperor Babur at Bagh-e Babur, and Chihil Sutun Park, the Minar-i-Istiqlal (Column of Independence) built in 1919 after the Third Afghan War, the tomb of Timur Shah Durrani, the Bagh-e Bala Palace and the imposing Id Gah Mosque (founded 1893). Bala Hissar was a fort which was partially destroyed during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, then restored as a military college. There was also the Kolola Pushta fort, which was garrisoned by the Afghan Army, and the nearby 19th-century Shahrara Tower fort, which was ruined in 1928. The Koh-e Asamai mountain had a temple that was considered important to Hinduism.
Other places of interest include Kabul City Center, which was Kabul's first shopping mall, the shops around Flower Street and Chicken Street, Wazir Akbar Khan district, Kabul Golf Club, Kabul Zoo, Abdul Rahman Mosque, Shah-Do Shamshira and other famous mosques, the National Gallery of Afghanistan, the National Archives of Afghanistan, Afghan Royal Family Mausoleum, the OMAR Mine Museum, Bibi Mahro Hill, Kabul Cemetery, and Paghman Gardens best known for the famous Taq-e Zafar arch. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was also involved in the restoration of the Bagh-e Babur (Babur Gardens).
Maranjan Hill (Tappe-i-Maranjan) was a nearby hill where Buddhist statues and Graeco-Bactrian coins from the 2nd century BC have been found. Outside the city proper lied the Buddhist Guldara stupa and another stupa at Shewaki. Paghman and Jalalabad were interesting valleys west and east of the city. On the latter road, about 16 miles east of the city, was the Tang-e Gharu gorge.
Kabul used to have as many as 23 cinemas, but currently only had four, including the state owned Ariana Cinema. The decline of cinema of Afghanistan since the 1990s, both due to war and oppressive regimes, had meant many of these have closed. The Nandari, or Kabul National Theater, was one of the largest theaters in Asia before it was destroyed in the civil war and has not been restored. The lack of investment meant that the sector did not recover after 2001, and notably the rundown Park Cinema was controversially demolished in 2020.
Kabul's various architectural designs reflected the various links it has had with empires and civilisations, particularly being on the ancient trade route connecting India and China with Persia and the West.
The Buddhist Chakari minaret was likely built in the Kushan era and had traces of Greco-Bactrian and Gandhara Art. It had Buddhist swastika and both Mahayana and Theravada qualities. Following the Islamic conquest, a new age of architectural realms appeared in the Kabul region. The Gardens of Babur was perhaps the best preserved example of Islamic and Mughal architecture. Emperor Babur had also built seven other big gardens in Kabul at the time. The present Gardens of Babur also reflect Afghanistan's traditional architecture by the wooden carving, pressed stucco, decorative stone masonry and other features. Another fine example of the Babur era is the Id Gah Mosque, using stones from the Punjab and Sindh and designed by Persians.
Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise as the Afghan ruler brought changes to Kabul and the nation, with a more inward-looking and self-protecting society reflecting the architecture that were no different between the rich and poor peoples. mausoleum of Timur Shah Durrani, the Afghan ruler until his death in 1793, was another example of Islamic design, built in an octagonal structure. It followed Central Asian traditions of decorative brick masonries along with a colorless appearance. After the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the country's emir Abdur Rahman Khan brought European styles for the first time. The Bagh-e Bala Palace was designed in a mixed Mughal and British Indian style, the first significant change from traditional Afghan and Islamic styles. However palaces were still built with Central Asian Islamic design at heart. Numerous lavish buildings were created during this time, combined with large gardens. The Dilkusha Palace within the Arg was the first created by a British architect. Its accompanying clock tower, c. 1911, was also a British creation.
Houses in Kabul during this time were generally made up of walled compounds, built around courtyards and having narrow passageways to places.
In the 1920s, new styles were strongly influenced by European architectural styles due to king Amanullah Khan's visits to Europe, particularly Berlin and Paris. Darul Aman Palace was the best known example of modern Western design. The Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque was built in an unusual style for a mosque in Western and Italian style baroque. The Taq-e Zafar in Paghman and other landmarks there were also based on European designs. Houses also became more open, without having many of the walls. Later in the century, several Soviet inspired designs made its way into Kabul. Most notable of these were the various microraions built in the city in the 1960s and afterwards. A different flavor of modern style was seen on the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul and Serena Hotel.
In the 21st century, modern designs based on glass facades became popular. Examples of this modern Western style were the Kabul City Center and Golbahar Center. The National Assembly building opened in 2015 had elements of modern Islamic Mughal architecture, considered to have the largest dome in Asia. The Indian architecture could also be influenced by the fact it was built by the government of India, but its carving and large porch represent Afghan traditional architectural forms. The new Ministry of Defense building followed traditional, Islamic and Western designs inspired by the Pentagon. Another mix of these designs appeared on the Paghman Hill Castle completed in 2014. Increasing numbers of high rises have been built in this period, with the Kabul Markaz tower in 2020 becoming the city's first to break the 100 metres (330 ft) tall barrier. The construction boom with modern high-rises throughout the 2010s had led to a major change in the city's skyline.
Kabul has no train service.
Kabul International Airport is located 25 km (16 mi) from the centre of Kabul. It is a hub to Ariana Afghan Airlines, the national carrier of Afghanistan, as well as private airlines such as Afghan Jet International, East Horizon Airlines, Kam Air, Pamir Airways, and Safi Airways. Regional airlines such as Air India, SpiceJet, flydubai, Emirates, Gulf Air, Mahan Air, Pakistan International Airlines, Turkish Airlines and others also had regularly scheduled flights to the airport.
The AH76 highway (or Kabul-Charikar Highway) connected Kabul north towards Charikar, Pol-e Khomri and Mazar-i-Sharif (310 km (190 mi) away), with leading roads to Kunduz (250 km (160 mi) away). The AH77 highway went west towards Bamiyan Province (150 km (93 mi) away) and Chaghcharan in the central mountains of Afghanistan. To the south-west, the Kabul-Ghazni Highway went to Ghazni (130 km (81 mi) away) and Kandahar (460 km (290 mi) away). To the south, the Kabul-Gardez Highway connected it to Gardez (100 km (62 mi) away) and Khost. To the east, the Kabul-Jalalabad Highway went to Jalalabad (120 km (75 mi) away) and across the border to Peshawar.
Much of the road network in downtown Kabul consisted of square or circle intersections (char-rahi). The main square in the city was Pashtunistan Square (named after Pashtunistan), which had a large fountain in it and was located adjacent to the presidential palace, the Central Bank, and other landmarks. The Massoud Circle was located by the U.S. Embassy and had the road leading to the airport. In the old city, Sar-e Chawk roundabout was at the center of Maiwand Road (Jadayi Maiwand). Once all roads led to it, and in the 16th century was called the "navel of Kabul". In the Shahr-e Naw district there were several major intersections: Ansari, Haji Yaqub, Quwayi Markaz, Sedarat, and Turabaz Khan. The latter, named after Turabaz Khan, connected Flower Street and Chicken Street. There were also two major intersections in western Kabul: the Deh Mazang Circle and Kote Sangi. Salang Watt was the main road to the north-west, whereas Asamayi Watt and Seh Aqrab (also called Sevom Aqrab) was the main road to western Kabul.
The steep population rise in the 21st century had caused major congestion problems for the city's roads. In efforts to tackle this issue, a 95 km outer ring road costing $110 million was approved in 2017. Construction would have taken five years and it will run from Char Asiab via Ahmad Shah Baba Mina, Deh Sabz ("Kabul New City" development area), the AH76 highway, Paghman and back to Char Asyab. A new bus public transport service was also planned to be opened in 2018 (see below). In September 2017, the head of the Kabul Municipality announced that 286 meters of pedestrian overpass footbridges will be built in eight busy areas "in the near future".
Under the Kabul Urban Transport Efficiency Improvement Project that was signed in 2014 and backed by the World Bank, the city has seen widespread improvements in road conditions, including the building of new pedestrian sidewalks, drainage systems, lighting and asphalted road surfaces. The project runs until 31 December 2019.
Private vehicles had been on the rise in Kabul since 2002, with about 700,000 cars registered as of 2013 and up to 80% of the cars reported to be Toyota Corollas. The number of dealerships had also increased from 77 in 2003 to over 550 by 2010. Gas stations were mainly private-owned. Bicycles on the road were a common sight in the city.
The taxicabs in Kabul were painted in a white and yellow livery. The majority of these were older model Toyota Corollas. A few Soviet-era Russian cabs were also still in operation.
Long-distance road journeys were made by private Mercedes-Benz coach buses or vans, trucks and cars. Although a nationwide bus service was available from Kabul, flying was safer, especially for foreigners. The city's public bus service (Millie Bus / "National Bus") was established in the 1960s to take commuters on daily routes to many destinations. The service had about 800 buses. The Kabul bus system had discovered a new source of revenue in whole-bus advertising from MTN similar to "bus wrap" advertising on public transit in more developed nations. There was also an express bus that runs from downtown to Hamid Karzai International Airport for Safi Airways passengers.
An electric trolleybus system operated in Kabul from February 1979 to 1992 using Škoda fleet built by a Czechoslovak company (see Trolleybuses in Kabul for more). The trolleybus service was highly popular mainly due to its low price compared to the Millie Bus conventional bus service. The last trolleybus came to a halt in late 1992 due to warfare – much of the copper overhead wires were later looted but a few of them, including the steel poles, can still be seen in Kabul today.
In June 2017 Kabul Municipality unveiled plans for a new bus rapid transit system, the first major urban public transportation scheme. It was expected to open by 2018, but its construction had been hampered. In March 2021, a new city bus service was launched in Kabul using American vehicles built by IC Bus, and accompanied by newly built bus stops throughout the city. Five buses entered service on one route which is expected to be expanded to a fleet of 200 buses on 16 different routes.
In 2019, the Nagoya Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Kabul city Municipality, jointly agreed to deploy a digital platform, called D-Agree in urban planning to provide support for stakeholders to promote meaningful public participation and help reach consensus in Kabul city planning process.
From September 2019 until the Fall of Kabul (2021) in August 2021, the platform was used on behalf of Kabul Municipality to moderate more than 300 Kabul city-related planning discussions. In these discussions, more than 15,000 citizens participated in planning activities hosted by D-Agree and generated more than 71,000 opinions which catalogued into issue-based information system regarding urban-related thematic areas. Despite the Taliban take-over, D-Agree will continue to play an important role in facilitating urban planning and infrastructure-related consultations.
In 2022, United Nations reported that D-Agree Afghanistan is used as a digital and smart city solutions in Afghanistan.
D-Agree, is a discussion support platform with artificial intelligence–based facilitation. The discussion trees in D-Agree, inspired by issue-based information system, contain a combination of four types of elements: issues, ideas, pros, and cons. The software extracts a discussion's structure in real time based on IBIS, automatically classifying all the sentences.
The Ministry of Education led by Ghulam Farooq Wardak was responsible for the education system in Afghanistan. Public and private schools in the city have reopened since 2002 after they were shut down or destroyed during fighting in the 1980s to the late 1990s. Boys and girls were strongly encouraged to attend school under the Karzai administration but many more schools were needed not only in Kabul but throughout the country. The Afghan Ministry of Education had plans to build more schools in the coming years so that education was provided to all citizens of the country. High schools in Kabul included:
Universities included:
Health care in Afghanistan has improved in the last two decades. There are over 5,000 hospitals and clinics in the country, with the major ones being in Kabul.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kabul (/ˈkɑːbʊl, kəˈbʊl/; (Persian: کابل; Pashto: کابل); Pashto: [kɑˈbəl]; Dari: [kɑːˈbʊl]) is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into 22 municipal districts. According to 2023 estimates, the population of Kabul was 4.95 million people. In contemporary times, the city has served as Afghanistan's political, cultural, and economical center, and rapid urbanisation has made Kabul the 75th-largest city in the world and the country's primate city.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The modern-day city of Kabul is located high up in a narrow valley in the Hindu Kush, and is bounded by the Kabul River. At an elevation of 1,790 metres (5,873 ft), it is one of the highest capital cities in the world. The center of this city includes its old neighborhoods, which include the areas of Khashti Bridge, Khabgah, Kahforoshi, Deh-Afghanan, Chandavel, Shorbazar, Saraji, Zana-Khan and Baghe Alimardan. Kabul is said to be over 3,500 years old, mentioned since at least the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Located at a crossroads in Asia—roughly halfway between Istanbul, Turkey, in the west and Hanoi, Vietnam, in the east—it is situated in a strategic location along the trade routes of Central Asia and South Asia, and was a key destination on the ancient Silk Road; It was traditionally seen as the meeting point between Tartary, India, and Persia. Kabul has also been under the rule of various other dynasties and empires, including the Seleucids, the Kushans, the Hindu Shahis, Western Turks, the Turk Shahis, the Samanids, the Khwarazmians, the Timurids, and the Mongols, among others such as the Arman Rayamajhis. In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire used Kabul as a summer capital, during which time it prospered and increased in significance. It briefly came under the control of the Afsharids following Nader Shah's invasion of India, until finally coming under local rule by the Afghan Empire in 1747; Kabul became the capital of Afghanistan in 1776, during the reign of Timur Shah Durrani (a son of Ahmad Shah Durrani). In the 19th century, the city was occupied by the British, but after establishing foreign relations and agreements, they were compelled to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan and return to British India.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kabul is known for its historical gardens, bazaars, and palaces; well-known examples are the Gardens of Babur and Darul Aman Palace, as well as the Arg. In the second half of the 20th century, it became a stop on the hippie trail undertaken by many Europeans, and the city also gained the nickname \"Paris of Central Asia\" during this time. However, this period of tranquility ended in 1978 with the Saur Revolution and subsequent Soviet military intervention in 1979, which sparked the protracted Soviet–Afghan War until 1989. The 1990s were marked by continuous civil wars between various splinter factions of the disbanded Afghan mujahideen, which destroyed much of the city. In 1996, Kabul was captured by the Taliban after four years of intermittent fighting with other Afghan factions. However, the Taliban-ruled city soon fell to the United States after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in 2001. In 2021, Kabul was re-captured by the Taliban following the withdrawal of American-led military forces from Afghanistan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kabul (/ˈkɑːbuːl/, /ˈkɑːbəl/; Pashto: کابل Kâbəl, IPA: [kɑˈbəl]; Dari: کابل Kābul, IPA: [kɑːˈbʊl]) is also spelled as Cabool, Cabol, Kabol, or Cabul.",
"title": "Toponymy and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kabul was known by different names throughout history. Its meaning is unknown, but \"certainly pre-dates the advent of Islam when it was an important centre on the route between India and the Hellenic world\". In Sanskrit, it was known as Kubha, whereas Greek authors of classical antiquity referred to it as Kophen, Kophes or Koa. The Chinese traveler Xuanzang (fl. 7th century CE) recorded the city as Kaofu (高附). The name \"Kabul\" was first applied to the Kabul river before being applied to the area situated between the Hindu Kush and Sindh (present-day Pakistan). This area was also known as Kabulistan. Alexander Cunningham (died 1893) noted in the 19th century that Kaofu as recorded by the Chinese was in all likelihood the name of \"one of the five Yuchi or Tukhari tribes\". Cunningam added that this tribe gave its name to the city after it was occupied by them in the 2nd century BCE. This \"supposition seems likely\" as the Afghan historian Mir Ghulam Mohammad Ghobar (1898–1978) wrote that in the Avesta (sacred book of Zoroastrianism), Kabul was known as Vaekereta, whereas the Greeks of antiquity referred to it as Ortospana (\"High Place\"), which corresponds to the Sanskrit word Urddhastana, which was applied to Kabul. The Greek geographer Ptolemy (died c. 170 CE) recorded Kabul as Καβουρα (Kabura).",
"title": "Toponymy and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "According to a legend, one could find a lake in Kabul, in the middle of which the so-called \"Island of Happiness\" could be found, where a joyous family of musicians lived. According to this same legend, the island became accessible by the order of a king through the construction of a bridge (i.e. \"pul\" in Persian) made out of straw (i.e. \"kah\" in Persian). According to this legend the name Kabul was thus formed as a result of these two words combined, i.e. kah + pul. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names argues that the \"suggestion that the name is derived from the Arabic root qbl 'meeting' or 'receiving' is unlikely\".",
"title": "Toponymy and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "It remains unknown when the name \"Kabul\" was first applied to the city. However, it \"came into prominence\" following the destruction of Kapisa and other cities in what is present-day Afghanistan by Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227) in the thirteenth century. Due to the centrality of the city within the region, as well as its cultural importance as a nexus of ethnic groups in the region, Kabul became known as the Paris of Central Asia in the late 20th century.",
"title": "Toponymy and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The origin of Kabul, who built it and when, is largely unknown. The Hindu Rigveda, composed between 2000 and 1500 BC and one of the four canonical texts of Hinduism, and the Avesta, the primary canon of texts of Zoroastrianism, refer to the Kabul River and to a settlement called Kubha.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Kabul valley was part of the Median Empire (c. 678–549 BC). In 549 BC, the Median Empire was annexed by Cyrus The Great and Kabul became part the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550–330 BC). During that period, Kabul became a center of learning for Zoroastrianism, followed by Buddhism and Hinduism. An inscription on Darius the Great's tombstone lists Kabul as one of the 29 countries of the Achaemenid Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "When Alexander annexed the Achaemenid Empire, the Kabul region came under his control. After his death, his empire was seized by his general Seleucus, becoming part of the Seleucid Empire. In 305 BCE, the Seleucid Empire was extended to the Indus River which led to friction with the neighbouring Mauryan Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During the Mauryan period, trade flourished because of uniform weights and measures. Irrigation facilities for public use were developed leading to an increased harvest of crops. People were also employed as artisans, jewellers, and carpenters.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Greco-Bactrians took control of Kabul from the Mauryans in the early 2nd century BC, then lost the city to their subordinates in the Indo-Greek Kingdom around the mid-2nd century BC. Buddhism was greatly patronised by these rulers and the majority of people of the city were adherents of the religion. Indo-Scythians expelled the Indo-Greeks by the mid 1st century BC, but lost the city to the Kushan Empire about 100 years later.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "It is mentioned as Kophes or Kophene in some classical writings. Hsuan Tsang refers to the city as Kaofu in the 7th century AD, which is the appellation of one of the five tribes of the Yuezhi who had migrated from across the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley around the beginning of the Christian era. It was conquered by Kushan Emperor Kujula Kadphises in about 45 AD and remained Kushan territory until at least the 3rd century AD. The Kushans were Indo-European-speaking peoples based in Bactria.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Around 230 AD, the Kushans were defeated by the Sassanid Empire and replaced by Sassanid vassals known as the Indo-Sassanids. During the Sassanian period, the city was referred to as \"Kapul\" in Pahlavi scripts. Kapol in the Persian language means Royal (ka) Bridge (pol), which is due to the main bridge on the Kabul River that connected the east and west of the city. In 420 AD, the Indo-Sassanids were driven out of Afghanistan by the Xionite tribe known as the Kidarites, who were then replaced in the 460s by the Hephthalites. It became part of the surviving Turk Shahi Kingdom of Kapisa, also known as Kabul-Shahan. According to Táríkhu-l Hind by Al-Biruni, Kabul was governed by princes of Turkic lineage.|Abu Rayhan Biruni|978–1048 AD}} It was briefly held by the Tibetan Empire between 801 and 815.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Islamic conquest reached modern-day Afghanistan in 642 AD, at a time when Kabul was independent. Till then, Kabul was considered politically and culturally part of Indian world. A number of failed expeditions were made to Islamise the region. In one of them, Abdur Rahman bin Samara arrived in Kabul from Zaranj in the late 600s and converted 12,000 inhabitants to Islam before abandoning the city. Muslims were a minority until Ya'qub bin Laith as-Saffar of Zaranj conquered Kabul in 870 from the Hindu Shahis and established the first Islamic dynasty in the region. It was reported that the rulers of Kabul were Muslims with non-Muslims living close by. Iranian traveller and geographer Istakhri described it in 921:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kábul has a castle celebrated for its strength, accessible only by one road. In it there are Musulmáns, and it has a town, in which are infidels from Hind.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Over the following centuries, the city was successively controlled by the Samanids, Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Khwarazmshahs, Qarlughids, and Khaljis. In the 13th century, the invading Mongols caused major destruction in the region. Report of a massacre in the close by Bamiyan is recorded around this period, where the entire population of the valley was annihilated by the Mongol troops as revenge for the death of Genghis Khan's grandson. As a result, many natives of Afghanistan fled south toward the Indian subcontinent where some established dynasties in Delhi. The Chagatai Khanate and Kartids were vassals of Ilkhanate until the dissolution of the latter in 1335.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Following the era of the Khalji dynasty in 1333, the famous Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta was visiting Kabul and wrote:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "We travelled on to Kabul, formerly a vast town, the site of which is now occupied by a village inhabited by a tribe of Persians called Afghans. They hold mountains and defiles and possess considerable strength, and are mostly highwaymen. Their principal mountain is called Kuh Sulayman.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In the 14th century, Kabul became a major trading centre under the kingdom of Timur (Tamerlane). In 1504, the city fell to Babur from the north and made into his headquarters, which became one of the principal cities of his later Mughal Empire. In 1525, Babur described Kabulistan in his memoirs by writing that:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "There are many differing tribes in the Kābul country; in its dales and plains are Turks and clansmen and 'Arabs; and in its town and in many villages, Sārts; out in the districts and also in villages are the Pashāi, Parājī, Tājik, Bīrkī and Afghān tribes. In the western mountains are the Hazāra and Nikdīrī tribes, some of whom speak the Mughūlī tongue. In the north-eastern mountains are the places of the Kāfirs, such as Kitūr and Gibrik. To the south are the places of the Afghān tribes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, a poet from Hindustan who visited at the time wrote: \"Dine and drink in Kabul: it is mountain, desert, city, river and all else.\" It was from here that Babur began his 1526 conquest of Hindustan, which was ruled by the Afghan Lodi dynasty and began east of the Indus River in what is present-day Pakistan. Babur loved Kabul due to the fact that he lived in it for 20 years and the people were loyal to him, including the weather that he was used to. His wish to be buried in Kabul was finally granted. The inscription on his tomb contains the famous Persian couplet, which states:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "اگرفردوس روی زمین است همین است و همین است و همین است",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Transliteration:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Agar fardus rui zamayn ast', hameen ast', o hameen ast', o hameen ast'.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "(If there is a paradise on earth, it is this, and it is this, and it is this!)",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Kabul remained in Mughal control for the next 200 years. Though Mughal power became centred within the Indian subcontinent, Kabul retained importance as a frontier city for the empire; Abul Fazl, Emperor Akbar's chronicler, described it as one of the two gates to Hindustan (the other being Kandahar). As part of administrative reforms under Akbar, the city was made capital of the eponymous Mughal province, Kabul Subah. Under Mughal governance, Kabul became a prosperous urban centre, endowed with bazaars such as the non-extant Char Chatta. For the first time in its history, Kabul served as a mint centre, producing gold and silver Mughal coins up to the reign of Alamgir II. It acted as a military base for Shah Jahan's campaigns in Balkh and Badakhshan. Kabul was also a recreational retreat for the Mughals, who hunted here and constructed several gardens. Most of the Mughals' architectural contributions to the city (such as gardens, fortifications, and mosques) have not survived. During this time, the population was about 60,000.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Under later Mughal Emperors, Kabul became neglected. The empire lost the city when it was captured in 1738 by Nader Shah, who was en route to invade the Indian subcontinent.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Nine years after Nader Shah and his forces invaded and occupied the city as part of the more easternmost parts of his Empire, he was assassinated by his own officers, causing its rapid disintegration. Ahmad Shah Durrani, commander of 4,000 Abdali Afghans, asserted Pashtun rule in 1747 and further expanded his new Afghan Empire. His ascension to power marked the beginning of Afghanistan. By this time, Kabul had lost its status as a metropolitan city, and its population had decreased to 10,000. Interest in the city was renewed when Ahmad Shah's son Timur Shah Durrani, after inheriting power, transferred the capital of the Durrani Empire from Kandahar to Kabul in 1776. Kabul experienced considerable urban development during the reigns of Timur Shah and his successor Zaman Shah; several religious and public buildings were constructed, and diverse groups of Sufis, jurists, and literary families were encouraged to settle the city through land grants and stipends. Kabul's first visitor from Europe was Englishman George Forster, who described 18th-century Kabul as \"the best and cleanest city in Asia\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1826, the kingdom was claimed by Dost Mohammad Khan, but in 1839 Shujah Shah Durrani was re-installed with the help of the British Empire during the First Anglo-Afghan War. In 1841 a local uprising resulted in the killing of the British resident and loss of mission in Kabul and the 1842 retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. In 1842 the British returned to Kabul, demolishing the city's main bazaar in revenge before returning to British India (now Pakistan). Akbar Khan took to the throne from 1842 to 1845 and was followed by Dost Mohammad Khan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The Second Anglo-Afghan War broke out in 1879 when Kabul was under Sher Ali Khan's rule, as the Afghan king initially refused to accept British diplomatic missions and later the British residents were again massacred. During the war, Bala Hissar was partially destroyed by a fire and an explosion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Having become an established bazaar city, leather and textile industries developed by 1916. The majority of the population was concentrated on the south side of the river.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kabul modernised throughout the regime of King Habibullah Khan, with the introduction of electricity, telephone, and a postal service. The first modern high school, Habibia, was established in 1903. In 1919, after the Third Anglo-Afghan War, King Amanullah Khan announced Afghanistan's independence in foreign affairs at Eidgah Mosque in Kabul. Amanullah was reform-minded and he had a plan to build a new capital city on land about 6 km away from Kabul. This area was named Darulaman and it consisted of the famous Darul Aman Palace, where he later resided. Many educational institutions were founded in Kabul during the 1920s. In 1929 King Amanullah left Kabul due to a local uprising orchestrated by Habibullah Kalakani, but he himself was imprisoned and executed after nine months in power by King Nader Khan. Three years later, in 1933, the new king was assassinated during an award ceremony inside a school in Kabul. The throne was left to his 19-year-old son, Zahir Shah, who became the last King of Afghanistan. Unlike Amanullah Khan, Nader Khan and Zahir Shah had no plans to create a new capital city, and thus Kabul remained the country's seat of government.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During the inter-war period France and Germany helped develop the country and maintained high schools and lycees in the capital, providing education for the children of the city's elite families. Kabul University opened in 1932 and by the 1960s western educated Afghans made up the majority of teachers. By the 1960s the majority of instructors at the university had degrees from Western universities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Kabul's only railway service, the Kabul–Darulaman Tramway, operated for six years from 1923 to 1929.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "When Zahir Shah took power in 1933 Kabul had the only 10 kilometers (6 miles) of rail in the country and the country had few internal telegraphs, phone lines or roads. Zahir turned to the Japanese, Germans and Italians for help developing a modern transportation and communication network. A radio tower built by the Germans in 1937 in Kabul allowed instant communication with outlying villages. A national bank and state cartels were organised to allow for economic modernisation. Textile mills, power plants, carpet and furniture factories were also built in Kabul, providing much-needed manufacturing and infrastructure.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "During the 1940s and 1950s, urbanisation accelerated and the built-up area was increased to 68 km by 1962, an almost fourteen-fold increase compared to 1925. The Serena Hotel opened in 1945 as the first Western style luxury hotel. Under the premiership of Mohammad Daoud Khan in the 1950s, foreign investment and development increased. In 1955, the Soviet Union forwarded $100 million in credit to Afghanistan, which financed public transportation, airports, a cement factory, mechanised bakery, a five-lane highway from Kabul to the Soviet border and dams, including the Salang Pass to the north of Kabul. During the 1960s, Soviet-style microrayon housing estates were built, containing sixty blocks. The government also built many ministry buildings in the brutalist architecture style. In the 1960s the first Marks & Spencer store in Central Asia was built in the city. Kabul Zoo was inaugurated in 1967, which was maintained with the help of visiting German zoologists. During this time, Kabul experimented with liberalisation, notably the loosening of restrictions on speech and assembly which led to student politics in the capital and various demonstrations by Socialist, Maoist, liberal or Islamist factions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Foreigners flocked to Kabul and the nation's tourism industry picked up speed. To accompany the city with newfound tourism, western-style accommodations were opened in the 1960s, notably the Spinzar Hotel. Western, American and Japanese tourists were visiting the city's attractions including the \"celebrated\" Chicken Street and the National Museum that used to have some of Asia's finest cultural artifacts. Lonely Planet called it an upcoming \"tourist trap\" in 1973. Additionally, Pakistanis were also visiting to watch Indian movies in cinemas that were banned in their own country. During this time, Kabul had been nicknamed the Paris of Central Asia. According to J. Bruce Amstutz, an American diplomat in Kabul:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "[Before the 1978 Marxist coup d'etat] Kabul was a pleasant city [..] Though poor economically, it was spared the eyesore slums so visible in other Asian cities. The Afghans themselves were an imposing people, the men tall and self-assured and the women attractive.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Until the late 1970s, Kabul was a major stop on the famous Hippie trail, coming from Bamyan to the west on towards Peshawar. At the time, Kabul became known for its street sales of hashish and became a major tourist attraction for western hippies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "On 28 April 1978, President Daoud and most of his family were assassinated in Kabul's Presidential Palace in what is called the Saur Revolution. Pro-Soviet PDPA under Nur Muhammad Taraki seized power and slowly began to institute reforms. Private businesses were nationalised in the Soviet manner. Education was modified into the Soviet model, with lessons focusing on teaching Russian, Marxism–Leninism and learning of other countries belonging to the Soviet bloc.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Amid growing internal chaos and heightened cold war tensions, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, was kidnapped on his way to work at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on 14 February 1979 and killed during a rescue attempt at the Serena Hotel. There were conflicting reports of who abducted Dubs and what demands were made for his release. Several senior Soviet officials were in the lobby of the hotel during a standoff with the kidnappers, who were holding Dubs in room 117. Afghan police, acting on the advice of Soviet advisors and over the objections of U.S. officials, launched a rescue attempt, during which Dubs was shot in the head from a distance of six inches and killed. Many questions about the killing remain unanswered.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On 24 December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Kabul was heavily occupied by Soviet Armed Forces. In Pakistan, Director-General of the ISI Akhtar Abdur Rahman advocated for the idea of covert operation in Afghanistan by arming Islamic extremists who formed the mujahideen. General Rahman was heard loudly saying: \"Kabul must burn! Kabul must burn!\", and mastered the idea of proxy war in Afghanistan. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq authorised this operation under General Rahman, which was later merged with Operation Cyclone, a programme funded by the United States and carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Soviets turned the city of Kabul into their command centre during the Soviet–Afghan War, and while fighting was mostly taking place in the countryside, Kabul was widely disturbed. Political crime and guerrilla attacks on military and government targets were common, and the sound of gunfire became commonplace at night in the outskirts. Large numbers of PDPA party members and Soviet troops were kidnapped or assassinated, sometimes in broad daylight, with acts of terrorism committed by civilians, anti-regime militias and also Khalqists. By July 1980, as much as twelve party members were being assassinated on a daily basis, and the Soviet Army stopped patrolling the city in January 1981. A major uprising against the Soviet presence broke out in Kabul in February 1980 in what is called the 3 Hut uprising. It led to a night curfew in the city that would remain in place for seven years. The Soviet Embassy also, was attacked four times with arms fire in the first five years of the war. A Western correspondent revisiting Kabul in December 1983 after a year, said that the city was \"converted into a fortress bristling with weapons\". Contrastingly, that same year American diplomat Charles Dunbar commented that the Soviet troops' presence was \"surprisingly modest\", and an author in a 1983 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article thought that the Soviet soldiers had a \"friendly\" atmosphere.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The city's population increased from around 500,000 in 1978 to 1.5 million in 1988. The large influx were mostly internal refugees who fled other parts of the country for safety in Kabul. During this time, women made up 40% of the workforce. Soviet men and women were very common in the city's shopping roads, with the large availability of Western products. Most Soviet civilians (numbering between 8,000 and 10,000) lived in the northeastern Soviet-style Mikrorayon (microraion) housing complex that was surrounded by barbed-wire and armed tanks. They sometimes received abuse from anti-Soviet civilians on the streets. The mujahideen rebels managed to strike at the city a few times—on 9 October 1987, a car bomb planted by a mujahideen group killed 27 people, and on 27 April 1988, in celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the Saur Revolution, a truck bomb killed six people.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "After the fall of Mohammad Najibullah's government in April 1992, different mujahideen factions entered the city and formed a government under the Peshawar Accords, but Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's party refused to sign the accords and started shelling the city for power, which soon escalated into a full-scale conflict. This marked the start of a dark period of the city: at least 30,000 civilians were killed in a period known locally as the \"Kabul Wars.\" About 80 percent of the city was devastated and destroyed by 1996. The old city and western areas were among the worst-hit. A New York Times analyst said in 1996 that the city was more devastated than Sarajevo, which was similarly damaged during the Bosnian War at the time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The city suffered heavily under a bombardment campaign between rival militias which intensified during the summer of 1992. Its geographic location in a narrow valley made it an easy target from rockets fired by militias who based themselves in the surrounding mountains. Within two years' time, the majority of infrastructure was destroyed, a massive exodus of the population left to the countryside or abroad, and electricity and water was completely out. In late 1994, bombardment of the capital came to a temporary halt. These forces took steps to restore law and order. Courts started to work again, convicting individuals inside government troops who had committed crimes. On 27 September 1996, the hardline Taliban militia seized Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They imposed a strict form of Sharia (Islamic law), restricting women from work and education, conducting amputations against common thieves, and hit-squads from the infamous \"Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice\" watching public beatings of people.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In November 2001, the Northern Alliance captured Kabul after the Taliban had abandoned it following the American invasion. A month later a new government under President Hamid Karzai began to assemble. In the meantime, a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was deployed in Afghanistan. The war-torn city began to see some positive development as many expatriate Afghans returned to the country. The city's population grew from about 500,000 in 2001 to over 3 million in recent years. Many foreign embassies re-opened. In 2008 the process started to gradually hand over security responsibilities from NATO to Afghan forces. From late 2001 the city has been continuously rebuilt - many of the damaged landmarks were rebuilt or renovated, for example the Gardens of Babur in 2005, the arch of Paghman, the Mahmoud Khan Bridge clock tower in 2013, and the Taj Beg Palace in 2021. Local community efforts have also managed to restore war-ravaged local homes and dwellings.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The city has experienced rapid urbanisation with an increasing population. Many informal settlements have been built. Since the late 2000s, numerous modern housing complexes have been built, many of which are gated and secured, to serve a growing Afghan middle class. Some of these include the Aria City (in District 10) and Golden City (District 8). Some complexes have been built out-of-town, such as the Omid-e-Sabz township (District 13), Qasaba/Khwaja Rawash township (District 15), and Sayed Jamaludin township (District 12).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Throughout the years, a high-security \"Green Zone\" was formed in the centre of the city. In 2010, a series of manned checkpoints called the Ring of Steel was put into operation. Concrete blast walls also appeared throughout Kabul in the 2000s for security reasons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Despite frequent terrorist attacks in the city, mainly by Taliban insurgents, the city continued to develop and was the fifth fastest-growing city in the world as of 2012. Until August 2021, the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) had been in charge of security in and around the city. Kabul was periodically the scene of deadly bombings carried out mostly by the Taliban and its wing the Haqqani network. Government employees, soldiers and ordinary civilians have all been targets of attacks. The Afghan government called the actions of the terrorists war crimes. The deadliest attack yet was a truck bombing in May 2017. The city was seized during the 2021 Taliban offensive on August 15, 2021; under Taliban rule the city and the country has experienced some relative calm, although a number of terrorist attacks have since been committed by the regional ISIL branch.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kabul was situated in the eastern part of the country, 1,791 meters (5,876 feet) above sea level in a narrow valley, wedged between the Hindu Kush mountains along the Kabul River. Immediately to the south of the old city are the ancient city walls and the Sher Darwaza mountain, with the Shuhadayi Salihin cemetery behind it. A bit further east is the ancient Bala Hissar fortress with the Kol-e Hasmat Khan lake behind it.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Its location has been described as a \"bowl surrounded by mountains\". Some of the mountains (which are called koh) include: Khair Khana-e Shamali, Khwaja Rawash, Shakhi Baran Tey, Chihil Sutun, Qurugh, Khwaja Razaq and Sher Darwaza. There are also two mountains in between urban areas to the west: Koh-e Asamai (locally known as the Television hill) and Ali Abad. Hills within the city (which are called tapa) include Bibi Mahro and Maranjan.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Logar River flows into Kabul from the south, joining the Kabul River not far from the city centre.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The city covers an area size of 1,023 square kilometres (395 sq mi), making it by far the largest in the country. The closest foreign capital cities as the crow flies are Islamabad, Dushanbe, Tashkent, New Delhi and Bishkek. Kabul is roughly equidistant between Istanbul (western Asia) and Hanoi (eastern Asia).",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Kabul has a continental, cold semi-arid climate (BSk), with precipitation concentrated in the winter (almost exclusively falling as snow) and spring months. Summers have very low humidity, providing some relief from the heat. Autumns feature warm afternoons and sharply cooler evenings. Winters are very cold by South Asian standards, with a subzero January daily average temperature of −2.3 °C (27.9 °F), mainly due to the high elevation of the city. Spring is the wettest time of the year. Sunny conditions dominate year-round, and the annual mean temperature is only 12.1 °C (53.8 °F), much lower than that of Afghanistan's other large cities.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Kabul River flowed through the heart of the city, dividing the central bazaars. There are several bridges (pul) crossing the river, the major ones being Pul-e Shah-Do Shamshira, Pul-e Bagh-e Omomi, Pul-e Khishti, and Pul-e Mahmoud. Due to climate change, since the 21st century, the river runs dry most of the year, only filling up in the wetter winter and spring seasons.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "A large lake and wetland was located just to the southeast from the old city called Kol-e Hashmat Khan. The marsh provides a critical resting place to thousands of birds who fly between the Indian subcontinent and Siberia. In 2017 the government declared the lake a protected area. Some rare species of birds have been spotted at the lake, such as the Eastern imperial eagle and the Dalmatian pelican. Kabul's other large lake is Qargha, located some 9 km northwest from the centre. It is a major attraction for locals as well as foreigners.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Air pollution is a major problem in the city during the winter season, when many residents burn low-quality fuels.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The city of Kabul located within Kabul District, one of the 15 districts of Kabul Province. As the provincial capital, it forms a municipality (shārwāli) which is further divided into 22 administrative districts called municipal districts or city districts (nāhia), which coincide with the official Police Districts (PD). The number of city districts increased from 11 to 18 in 2005, and then to 22 by 2010 after the incorporation of Districts 14 and 19–22 which were annexed by Kabul Municipality from surrounding rural districts. The city limits have thus substantially increased. Due to demarcation disputes with the provincial administration, some of these new districts are more administered by the provincial districts than the municipality.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "District 1 contains most of the old city. Downtown Kabul mostly consist of Districts 2, 4 and 10. In addition, Districts 3 and 6 house many commercial and governmental points of interests. The city's north and west are the most urbanised, as opposed to the south and east.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The table below show the 22 city districts and their settlements, with information about its land size and usage, accurate as of 2011.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Kabul's population was estimated in 2023 at about 4.95 million. The city's population has long fluctuated due to the wars. The lack of an up-to-date census means that there are various estimates of the population.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Kabul's population was estimated to have been about 10,000 in 1700, 65,000 by 1878, and 120,000 by 1940. More recently, the population was around 500,000 in 1979, whilst another source claims 337,715 as of 1976. This figure rose to about 1.5 million by 1988, before dramatically dropping in the 1990s. Kabul became one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, with its population growing fourfold from 2001 to 2014. This was partly due to the return of refugees after the fall of the Taliban regime, and partly due to Afghans moving from other provinces mainly due to war between Taliban insurgents and Afghan government forces in their native areas as well as looking for labor. This resulting rapid urbanisation means that many residents today live in informal settlements. Shanty mud-brick homes on the mountainsides and steep hills have been built by them and these are usually poverty-stricken, not connected to the water and electricity grid. Although the settlements are illegal, they have been tolerated by authorities. In 2017 Kabul Municipality started a project to paint the homes in these settlements in bright colors in an effort to \"cheer up\" residents.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Kabul is and has historically been the most ethnically diverse city in the country, with the population including Afghans from all over the country. Approximately 40% of Kabul's population is Tajik, 25% Hazara, another 25% is Pashtun, and minority ethnic groups include Qizilbash, Baloch, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Afghan Hindu. Almost three-quarters of the population of Kabul follow Sunni Islam, and around Twenty-five percent of residents are Shiites. Other religions in the city include Sikhism and Hinduism.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 1525, Babur described the region in his memoirs by writing that:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Eleven or twelve tongues are spoken in Kābul,—‘Arabī, Persian, Turkī, Mughūlī, Hindī, Afghānī, Pashāī, Parājī, Gibrī, Bīrkī, and Lamghānī. If there be another country with so many differing tribes and such a diversity of tongues, it is not known.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Along with Pashtun, Tajik and Hazara communities, who make up the majority of the population of the city, there was a significant population of Uzbek, Turkmen, Kuchi, Qizilbash, Hindu, Sikh and other groups. The broader province of Kabul however, is dominated by Pashtun and Tajik groups. The Dari (Persian) and Pashto languages are widely used in the region, although Dari serves as the lingua franca. Multilingualism is common throughout the area, particularly among the Pashtun people.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The term \"Kabuli\" (کابلی) is referred to the urbanites of the city. They were ethnic-neutral, typically speak Dari (Persian), were generally secularly educated, and favor Western fashion. Many Kabulites (especially elites and the upper class) left the country during the civil war and are now outnumbered by rural people who moved in from the countryside, mostly refugees but also labor-seekers.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "About 68% of the city's population follow Sunni Islam while 30% are Shiites (mainly the Hazaras and Qizilbash). The remaining 2% are followers of Sikhism and Hinduism, as well as one known Christian resident (First Lady Rula Ghani) and one Jewish resident (Zablon Simintov) in the 2010s. It is estimated that there were 500–8,000 Afghan Christians in the country as a whole; due to restrictions on religious freedom, they often worship in secret, rendering it difficult to estimate the number of Christians in Kabul specifically. Hundreds of non-Muslims still remain after the Taliban retakeover Afghanistan. Kabul also has small Indian (which the Sikhs and Hindus belong to) and Turkish communities (mostly business-owners and investors), and in the 1980s had a sizable Russian community during the Soviet campaign in the country.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Cricket has historically been the dominant sport in Kabul, with 2 of 3 sports stadiums reserved for it.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The municipality's administrative structure consisted of 17 departments under a mayor. Like other provincial municipalities in Afghanistan, the municipality of Kabul dealt with city affairs such as construction and infrastructure. The city districts (nāhia) collected certain taxes and issued building licenses. Each city district had a district head appointed by the mayor, and lead six major departments in the district office. The neighbourhood organisation structure at the nahia level was called a gozar. Kabul has been Divided in to 630 Gozars. A wakil-e gozar was a person chosen to represent a community within a city district.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Kabul's Chief of Police was Lt. Gen. Abdul Rahman Rahimi. The police were part of the Afghan National Police (ANP) under the Ministry of Interior and were arranged by city districts. The Police Chief was selected by the Interior Minister and is responsible for all law enforcement activities throughout the Kabul province.",
"title": "Government and politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Kabul's main products included fresh and dried fruit, nuts, beverages, Afghan rugs, leather and sheep skin products, furniture, antique replicas, and domestic clothes. The World Bank authorised US$25 million for the Kabul Urban Reconstruction Project which closed in 2011. Over the last decade, the United States has invested approximately $9.1 billion into urban infrastructure in Afghanistan. The wars since 1978 have limited the city's economic productivity but after the establishment of the Karzai administration since late 2001, local economic developments have included a number of indoor shopping malls. The first of these was the Kabul City Center, opened 2005. Others have also opened in recent years including Gulbahar Center, City Walk Mall and Majid Mall.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Mandawi Road on the south side of the river, located between Murad Khani and Shur Bazaar neighbourhoods, is one of the main bazaars of Kabul. This wholesale market is very popular amongst locals. Nearby is the Sarai Shahzada money exchange market. Chicken Street is perhaps best known to foreigners.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Kabul's largest industrial hub was located in District 9, on the north banks of the River Kabul and near the airport. About 6 km (4 mi) from downtown Kabul, in Bagrami, a 9-hectare (22-acre) industrial complex had been completed with modern facilities, which allowed companies to operate businesses there. The park had professional management for the daily maintenance of public roads, internal streets, common areas, parking areas, 24 hours perimeter security, access control for vehicles and people. A number of factories operated there, including the $25 million Coca-Cola bottling plant and the Omaid Bahar juice factory.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "According to Transparency International, the government of Afghanistan was the third most-corrupt in the world, as of 2010. Experts believe that the poor decisions of Afghan politicians contributed to the unrest in the region. This also prevented foreign investment in Afghanistan, especially by Western countries. In 2012, there were reportedly $3.9 billion paid to public officials in bribes which contributed to these issues.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Da Afghanistan Bank, the nation's central bank, was headquartered in Kabul. In addition, there are several commercial banks in the city.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Each year about 20,000 foreign tourists visited Afghanistan.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "A US$1 billion contract was signed in 2013 to commence work on the \"New Kabul City\", which is a major residential scheme that would accommodate 1.5 million people. Another development is the Qatar Township in Kabul.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "As of November 2015, there were more than 24 television stations based out of Kabul. Terrestrial TV transmitters were located at the summit of the Koh-e Asamai.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "GSM/GPRS mobile phone services are provided by Afghan Wireless, Etisalat, Roshan, MTN and Salaam. They provide 4G and 3G services. In November 2006, the Afghan Ministry of Communications signed a US$64.5 million deal with ZTE on the establishment of a countrywide fibre optical cable network to help improve telephone, internet, television and radio broadcast services not just in Kabul but throughout the country.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Mail and delivery services are provided by Afghan Post, FedEx, TNT N.V., and DHL.",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Kabul has many hotels for domestic and foreign travelers. Guest houses are also found in the city. The better and safer ones are located in the Shahr-e Naw and Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhoods (the Green Zone). The following are some of the hotels in Kabul (in alphabetical order).",
"title": "Economy and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The old part of Kabul was filled with bazaars nestled along its narrow, crooked streets, examples being the Mandawi and the Bird Market (Ka Foroshi). Cultural sites included: the National Museum of Afghanistan, notably displaying an impressive statue of Surya excavated at Khair Khana, the ruined Darul Aman Palace, the tomb of Mughal Emperor Babur at Bagh-e Babur, and Chihil Sutun Park, the Minar-i-Istiqlal (Column of Independence) built in 1919 after the Third Afghan War, the tomb of Timur Shah Durrani, the Bagh-e Bala Palace and the imposing Id Gah Mosque (founded 1893). Bala Hissar was a fort which was partially destroyed during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, then restored as a military college. There was also the Kolola Pushta fort, which was garrisoned by the Afghan Army, and the nearby 19th-century Shahrara Tower fort, which was ruined in 1928. The Koh-e Asamai mountain had a temple that was considered important to Hinduism.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Other places of interest include Kabul City Center, which was Kabul's first shopping mall, the shops around Flower Street and Chicken Street, Wazir Akbar Khan district, Kabul Golf Club, Kabul Zoo, Abdul Rahman Mosque, Shah-Do Shamshira and other famous mosques, the National Gallery of Afghanistan, the National Archives of Afghanistan, Afghan Royal Family Mausoleum, the OMAR Mine Museum, Bibi Mahro Hill, Kabul Cemetery, and Paghman Gardens best known for the famous Taq-e Zafar arch. The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) was also involved in the restoration of the Bagh-e Babur (Babur Gardens).",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Maranjan Hill (Tappe-i-Maranjan) was a nearby hill where Buddhist statues and Graeco-Bactrian coins from the 2nd century BC have been found. Outside the city proper lied the Buddhist Guldara stupa and another stupa at Shewaki. Paghman and Jalalabad were interesting valleys west and east of the city. On the latter road, about 16 miles east of the city, was the Tang-e Gharu gorge.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Kabul used to have as many as 23 cinemas, but currently only had four, including the state owned Ariana Cinema. The decline of cinema of Afghanistan since the 1990s, both due to war and oppressive regimes, had meant many of these have closed. The Nandari, or Kabul National Theater, was one of the largest theaters in Asia before it was destroyed in the civil war and has not been restored. The lack of investment meant that the sector did not recover after 2001, and notably the rundown Park Cinema was controversially demolished in 2020.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Kabul's various architectural designs reflected the various links it has had with empires and civilisations, particularly being on the ancient trade route connecting India and China with Persia and the West.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The Buddhist Chakari minaret was likely built in the Kushan era and had traces of Greco-Bactrian and Gandhara Art. It had Buddhist swastika and both Mahayana and Theravada qualities. Following the Islamic conquest, a new age of architectural realms appeared in the Kabul region. The Gardens of Babur was perhaps the best preserved example of Islamic and Mughal architecture. Emperor Babur had also built seven other big gardens in Kabul at the time. The present Gardens of Babur also reflect Afghanistan's traditional architecture by the wooden carving, pressed stucco, decorative stone masonry and other features. Another fine example of the Babur era is the Id Gah Mosque, using stones from the Punjab and Sindh and designed by Persians.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Ahmad Shah Durrani's rise as the Afghan ruler brought changes to Kabul and the nation, with a more inward-looking and self-protecting society reflecting the architecture that were no different between the rich and poor peoples. mausoleum of Timur Shah Durrani, the Afghan ruler until his death in 1793, was another example of Islamic design, built in an octagonal structure. It followed Central Asian traditions of decorative brick masonries along with a colorless appearance. After the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the country's emir Abdur Rahman Khan brought European styles for the first time. The Bagh-e Bala Palace was designed in a mixed Mughal and British Indian style, the first significant change from traditional Afghan and Islamic styles. However palaces were still built with Central Asian Islamic design at heart. Numerous lavish buildings were created during this time, combined with large gardens. The Dilkusha Palace within the Arg was the first created by a British architect. Its accompanying clock tower, c. 1911, was also a British creation.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Houses in Kabul during this time were generally made up of walled compounds, built around courtyards and having narrow passageways to places.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "In the 1920s, new styles were strongly influenced by European architectural styles due to king Amanullah Khan's visits to Europe, particularly Berlin and Paris. Darul Aman Palace was the best known example of modern Western design. The Shah-Do Shamshira Mosque was built in an unusual style for a mosque in Western and Italian style baroque. The Taq-e Zafar in Paghman and other landmarks there were also based on European designs. Houses also became more open, without having many of the walls. Later in the century, several Soviet inspired designs made its way into Kabul. Most notable of these were the various microraions built in the city in the 1960s and afterwards. A different flavor of modern style was seen on the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul and Serena Hotel.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In the 21st century, modern designs based on glass facades became popular. Examples of this modern Western style were the Kabul City Center and Golbahar Center. The National Assembly building opened in 2015 had elements of modern Islamic Mughal architecture, considered to have the largest dome in Asia. The Indian architecture could also be influenced by the fact it was built by the government of India, but its carving and large porch represent Afghan traditional architectural forms. The new Ministry of Defense building followed traditional, Islamic and Western designs inspired by the Pentagon. Another mix of these designs appeared on the Paghman Hill Castle completed in 2014. Increasing numbers of high rises have been built in this period, with the Kabul Markaz tower in 2020 becoming the city's first to break the 100 metres (330 ft) tall barrier. The construction boom with modern high-rises throughout the 2010s had led to a major change in the city's skyline.",
"title": "Culture and landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Kabul has no train service.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Kabul International Airport is located 25 km (16 mi) from the centre of Kabul. It is a hub to Ariana Afghan Airlines, the national carrier of Afghanistan, as well as private airlines such as Afghan Jet International, East Horizon Airlines, Kam Air, Pamir Airways, and Safi Airways. Regional airlines such as Air India, SpiceJet, flydubai, Emirates, Gulf Air, Mahan Air, Pakistan International Airlines, Turkish Airlines and others also had regularly scheduled flights to the airport.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The AH76 highway (or Kabul-Charikar Highway) connected Kabul north towards Charikar, Pol-e Khomri and Mazar-i-Sharif (310 km (190 mi) away), with leading roads to Kunduz (250 km (160 mi) away). The AH77 highway went west towards Bamiyan Province (150 km (93 mi) away) and Chaghcharan in the central mountains of Afghanistan. To the south-west, the Kabul-Ghazni Highway went to Ghazni (130 km (81 mi) away) and Kandahar (460 km (290 mi) away). To the south, the Kabul-Gardez Highway connected it to Gardez (100 km (62 mi) away) and Khost. To the east, the Kabul-Jalalabad Highway went to Jalalabad (120 km (75 mi) away) and across the border to Peshawar.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Much of the road network in downtown Kabul consisted of square or circle intersections (char-rahi). The main square in the city was Pashtunistan Square (named after Pashtunistan), which had a large fountain in it and was located adjacent to the presidential palace, the Central Bank, and other landmarks. The Massoud Circle was located by the U.S. Embassy and had the road leading to the airport. In the old city, Sar-e Chawk roundabout was at the center of Maiwand Road (Jadayi Maiwand). Once all roads led to it, and in the 16th century was called the \"navel of Kabul\". In the Shahr-e Naw district there were several major intersections: Ansari, Haji Yaqub, Quwayi Markaz, Sedarat, and Turabaz Khan. The latter, named after Turabaz Khan, connected Flower Street and Chicken Street. There were also two major intersections in western Kabul: the Deh Mazang Circle and Kote Sangi. Salang Watt was the main road to the north-west, whereas Asamayi Watt and Seh Aqrab (also called Sevom Aqrab) was the main road to western Kabul.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The steep population rise in the 21st century had caused major congestion problems for the city's roads. In efforts to tackle this issue, a 95 km outer ring road costing $110 million was approved in 2017. Construction would have taken five years and it will run from Char Asiab via Ahmad Shah Baba Mina, Deh Sabz (\"Kabul New City\" development area), the AH76 highway, Paghman and back to Char Asyab. A new bus public transport service was also planned to be opened in 2018 (see below). In September 2017, the head of the Kabul Municipality announced that 286 meters of pedestrian overpass footbridges will be built in eight busy areas \"in the near future\".",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Under the Kabul Urban Transport Efficiency Improvement Project that was signed in 2014 and backed by the World Bank, the city has seen widespread improvements in road conditions, including the building of new pedestrian sidewalks, drainage systems, lighting and asphalted road surfaces. The project runs until 31 December 2019.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Private vehicles had been on the rise in Kabul since 2002, with about 700,000 cars registered as of 2013 and up to 80% of the cars reported to be Toyota Corollas. The number of dealerships had also increased from 77 in 2003 to over 550 by 2010. Gas stations were mainly private-owned. Bicycles on the road were a common sight in the city.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The taxicabs in Kabul were painted in a white and yellow livery. The majority of these were older model Toyota Corollas. A few Soviet-era Russian cabs were also still in operation.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Long-distance road journeys were made by private Mercedes-Benz coach buses or vans, trucks and cars. Although a nationwide bus service was available from Kabul, flying was safer, especially for foreigners. The city's public bus service (Millie Bus / \"National Bus\") was established in the 1960s to take commuters on daily routes to many destinations. The service had about 800 buses. The Kabul bus system had discovered a new source of revenue in whole-bus advertising from MTN similar to \"bus wrap\" advertising on public transit in more developed nations. There was also an express bus that runs from downtown to Hamid Karzai International Airport for Safi Airways passengers.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "An electric trolleybus system operated in Kabul from February 1979 to 1992 using Škoda fleet built by a Czechoslovak company (see Trolleybuses in Kabul for more). The trolleybus service was highly popular mainly due to its low price compared to the Millie Bus conventional bus service. The last trolleybus came to a halt in late 1992 due to warfare – much of the copper overhead wires were later looted but a few of them, including the steel poles, can still be seen in Kabul today.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "In June 2017 Kabul Municipality unveiled plans for a new bus rapid transit system, the first major urban public transportation scheme. It was expected to open by 2018, but its construction had been hampered. In March 2021, a new city bus service was launched in Kabul using American vehicles built by IC Bus, and accompanied by newly built bus stops throughout the city. Five buses entered service on one route which is expected to be expanded to a fleet of 200 buses on 16 different routes.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "In 2019, the Nagoya Institute of Technology, in partnership with the Kabul city Municipality, jointly agreed to deploy a digital platform, called D-Agree in urban planning to provide support for stakeholders to promote meaningful public participation and help reach consensus in Kabul city planning process.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "From September 2019 until the Fall of Kabul (2021) in August 2021, the platform was used on behalf of Kabul Municipality to moderate more than 300 Kabul city-related planning discussions. In these discussions, more than 15,000 citizens participated in planning activities hosted by D-Agree and generated more than 71,000 opinions which catalogued into issue-based information system regarding urban-related thematic areas. Despite the Taliban take-over, D-Agree will continue to play an important role in facilitating urban planning and infrastructure-related consultations.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In 2022, United Nations reported that D-Agree Afghanistan is used as a digital and smart city solutions in Afghanistan.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "D-Agree, is a discussion support platform with artificial intelligence–based facilitation. The discussion trees in D-Agree, inspired by issue-based information system, contain a combination of four types of elements: issues, ideas, pros, and cons. The software extracts a discussion's structure in real time based on IBIS, automatically classifying all the sentences.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The Ministry of Education led by Ghulam Farooq Wardak was responsible for the education system in Afghanistan. Public and private schools in the city have reopened since 2002 after they were shut down or destroyed during fighting in the 1980s to the late 1990s. Boys and girls were strongly encouraged to attend school under the Karzai administration but many more schools were needed not only in Kabul but throughout the country. The Afghan Ministry of Education had plans to build more schools in the coming years so that education was provided to all citizens of the country. High schools in Kabul included:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Universities included:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Health care in Afghanistan has improved in the last two decades. There are over 5,000 hospitals and clinics in the country, with the major ones being in Kabul.",
"title": "Health care"
}
] |
Kabul is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Located in the eastern half of the country, it is also a municipality, forming part of the Kabul Province; it is administratively divided into 22 municipal districts. According to 2023 estimates, the population of Kabul was 4.95 million people. In contemporary times, the city has served as Afghanistan's political, cultural, and economical center, and rapid urbanisation has made Kabul the 75th-largest city in the world and the country's primate city. The modern-day city of Kabul is located high up in a narrow valley in the Hindu Kush, and is bounded by the Kabul River. At an elevation of 1,790 metres (5,873 ft), it is one of the highest capital cities in the world. The center of this city includes its old neighborhoods, which include the areas of Khashti Bridge, Khabgah, Kahforoshi, Deh-Afghanan, Chandavel, Shorbazar, Saraji, Zana-Khan and Baghe Alimardan. Kabul is said to be over 3,500 years old, mentioned since at least the time of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Located at a crossroads in Asia—roughly halfway between Istanbul, Turkey, in the west and Hanoi, Vietnam, in the east—it is situated in a strategic location along the trade routes of Central Asia and South Asia, and was a key destination on the ancient Silk Road; It was traditionally seen as the meeting point between Tartary, India, and Persia. Kabul has also been under the rule of various other dynasties and empires, including the Seleucids, the Kushans, the Hindu Shahis, Western Turks, the Turk Shahis, the Samanids, the Khwarazmians, the Timurids, and the Mongols, among others such as the Arman Rayamajhis. In the 16th century, the Mughal Empire used Kabul as a summer capital, during which time it prospered and increased in significance. It briefly came under the control of the Afsharids following Nader Shah's invasion of India, until finally coming under local rule by the Afghan Empire in 1747; Kabul became the capital of Afghanistan in 1776, during the reign of Timur Shah Durrani. In the 19th century, the city was occupied by the British, but after establishing foreign relations and agreements, they were compelled to withdraw all forces from Afghanistan and return to British India. Kabul is known for its historical gardens, bazaars, and palaces; well-known examples are the Gardens of Babur and Darul Aman Palace, as well as the Arg. In the second half of the 20th century, it became a stop on the hippie trail undertaken by many Europeans, and the city also gained the nickname "Paris of Central Asia" during this time. However, this period of tranquility ended in 1978 with the Saur Revolution and subsequent Soviet military intervention in 1979, which sparked the protracted Soviet–Afghan War until 1989. The 1990s were marked by continuous civil wars between various splinter factions of the disbanded Afghan mujahideen, which destroyed much of the city. In 1996, Kabul was captured by the Taliban after four years of intermittent fighting with other Afghan factions. However, the Taliban-ruled city soon fell to the United States after the American-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks in 2001. In 2021, Kabul was re-captured by the Taliban following the withdrawal of American-led military forces from Afghanistan.
|
2001-11-13T21:02:24Z
|
2023-12-20T18:00:41Z
|
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] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabul
|
16,827 |
Kevin Bacon
|
Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor. Known for his leading man and character roles, Bacon has received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award.
Bacon made his feature film debut in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) before his breakthrough role in the musical-drama film Footloose (1984). Since then, he has starred in critically acclaimed films such as Diner (1982), JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), Mystic River (2003), and Frost/Nixon (2008). Other notable credits include Friday the 13th (1980), Tremors (1990), The River Wild (1994), The Woodsman (2004), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Patriots Day (2016). Bacon has also directed the films Losing Chase (1996) and Loverboy (2005).
On television, Bacon received a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in the HBO original film Taking Chance (2009). He starred in the Fox drama series The Following from 2013 to 2015. Bacon played the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017; he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show. From 2019 to 2022, he starred in the Showtime series City on a Hill.
The Guardian named Bacon one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bacon's prolific career in a variety of genres has led him to become associated with the concept of interconnectedness among people, as evidenced by the trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". He is a brand ambassador for British mobile network operator EE and has been featured in several ads for the company. Bacon is married to fellow actor Kyra Sedgwick.
Bacon was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. He is the youngest of six children. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), was an urban planner who served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and authored the seminal text Design of Cities.
Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman School in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia for both middle and high school.
At age 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full state-funded scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a five-week arts program where he studied theater under Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.
Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York City, where he appeared in a production at the Circle in the Square Theater School. "I wanted life, man, the real thing", he later recalled to Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan. "The message I got was 'The arts are it. Business is the devil's work. Art and creative expression are next to godliness.' Combine that with an immense ego and you wind up with an actor." Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) did not lead to the fame he had sought, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York.
In 1980, he appeared in the slasher film Friday the 13th. Some of his early stage work included Getting Out, performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux, at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season.
In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, and soon afterward he made his Broadway debut in Slab Boys, with then-unknowns Sean Penn and Val Kilmer. However, it was not until he portrayed Timothy Fenwick that same year in Barry Levinson's film Diner – costarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, and Ellen Barkin – that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike.
Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in Footloose (1984). Richard Corliss of TIME likened Footloose to the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause and the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, commenting that the film includes "motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement, and Bible Belt vigilantism." To prepare for the role, Bacon enrolled at a high school as a transfer student named "Ren McCormick" and studied teenagers before leaving in the middle of the day. Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose. Bacon's critical and box office success led to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had difficulty shaking this on-screen image. For the next several years he chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own estimation, a career slump.
After a cameo in John Hughes's 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Bacon starred in John Hughes's 1988 comedy She's Having a Baby, and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture.
In 1990, Bacon had two successful roles. He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth "graboid" monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors, and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.
In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.
By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor. "The only way I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. "You can't afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don't have your star." He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men. Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.
In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild, opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a "grueling shoot", in which "every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved".
His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic's Association Award in 1995, the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13. Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996). This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).
Bacon made his debut as a director with the television film Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, and won one. Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America. As the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.
In 2000, he appeared in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man. Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois in their film, Where the Truth Lies. Bacon and director Atom Egoyan condemned the MPAA ratings board decision to rate the film "NC-17" rather than the preferable "R". Bacon commented: "I don't get it, when I see films (that) are extremely violent, extremely objectionable sometimes in terms of the roles that women play, slide by with an R, no problem, because the people happen to have more of their clothes on."
In 2003 he acted with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in Clint Eastwood's movie Mystic River.
Bacon was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in The Woodsman (2004), for which he was nominated for best actor and received the Independent Spirit Award. He appeared in the HBO Films production of Taking Chance, based on an eponymous story written by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, an American Desert Storm war veteran. The film premiered on HBO on February 21, 2009. Bacon won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for his role.
On July 15, 2010, it was confirmed that Bacon would appear in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class as mutant villain Sebastian Shaw.
In March 2012, Bacon was featured in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, 8 – a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage – as Attorney Charles J. Cooper. The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.
From 2013 to 2015, Bacon starred as Ryan Hardy in the FOX television series The Following. In 2013, he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television for that role.
In 2015, he said in a Huffington Post interview he would like to return to the Tremors franchise. However, Bacon did not appear in Tremors 5: Bloodline (2015).
In 1995, Kevin formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo has released seven albums. Bacon also sings in a variety of other media; he has serenaded his goats on Instagram, and sings with the band the Old 97's in his role as himself in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.
Beginning in 2012, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for the EE mobile network in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles. In 2015, he became a commercial spokesperson for the U.S. egg industry.
Bacon is the subject of the trivia game titled "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon", based on the idea that, due to his prolific screen career covering a diverse range of genres, any Hollywood actor can be linked to another in a handful of steps based on their association with Bacon. The name of the game derives from the idea of six degrees of separation. Although he was initially dismayed by the game, the meme stuck, and Bacon eventually embraced it, forming the charitable initiative SixDegrees.org, a social networking service intended to link people and charities to each other.
The measure of proximity to Bacon has been mathematically formalized as the Bacon number and can be referenced at websites including Oracle of Bacon, which is in turn based upon Wikipedia data (and formerly from Internet Movie Database data). In 2012, Google added a feature to their search engine, whereby searching for an actor's name followed by the words "Bacon Number" will show the ways in which that actor is connected to Kevin Bacon. This feature is no longer active.
A similar measurement exists in the mathematics community, where one measures how far one is removed from co-writing a mathematical paper with the prolific and itinerant mathematician Paul Erdős. This is done by means of the Erdős number, which is 0 for Paul Erdős himself, 1 for someone who co-wrote an article with him, 2 for someone who co-wrote with someone who co-wrote with him, etc. People have combined the Bacon number and the Erdős number to form the Erdős–Bacon number, which is the sum of the two.
Bacon has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 4, 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky. He has said: "The time I was hitting what I considered to be bottom was also the time I met my wife, our kids were born, good things were happening. And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength." Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Loverboy. They have two children, Travis Sedgwick (b. 1989) and Sosie Ruth (b. 1992). They reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon was previously in a five-year relationship with actress Tracy Pollan, in the 1980s.
Bacon has spoken out for the separation of church and state, and told The Times in 2005 that he did not "believe in God." He has also said that he is not anti-religion.
Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in will.i.am's video "It's a New Day", which was released following Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win.
The pair lost part of their savings in the Ponzi scheme of infamous swindler Bernie Madoff.
Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011, via their appearance on the PBS TV series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, that they are ninth cousins, once removed. They also appeared in a video promoting the "Bill of Reproductive Rights", supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and have access to birth control.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kevin Norwood Bacon (born July 8, 1958) is an American actor. Known for his leading man and character roles, Bacon has received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Bacon made his feature film debut in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) before his breakthrough role in the musical-drama film Footloose (1984). Since then, he has starred in critically acclaimed films such as Diner (1982), JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), Mystic River (2003), and Frost/Nixon (2008). Other notable credits include Friday the 13th (1980), Tremors (1990), The River Wild (1994), The Woodsman (2004), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Patriots Day (2016). Bacon has also directed the films Losing Chase (1996) and Loverboy (2005).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "On television, Bacon received a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in the HBO original film Taking Chance (2009). He starred in the Fox drama series The Following from 2013 to 2015. Bacon played the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017; he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show. From 2019 to 2022, he starred in the Showtime series City on a Hill.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Guardian named Bacon one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bacon's prolific career in a variety of genres has led him to become associated with the concept of interconnectedness among people, as evidenced by the trivia game \"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\". He is a brand ambassador for British mobile network operator EE and has been featured in several ads for the company. Bacon is married to fellow actor Kyra Sedgwick.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Bacon was born and raised in a close-knit family in Philadelphia. He is the youngest of six children. His mother, Ruth Hilda (née Holmes; 1916–1991), taught at an elementary school and was a liberal activist, while his father, Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), was an urban planner who served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and authored the seminal text Design of Cities.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Bacon attended Julia R. Masterman School in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia for both middle and high school.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "At age 16, in 1975, Bacon won a full state-funded scholarship to the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a five-week arts program where he studied theater under Glory Van Scott. The experience solidified Bacon's passion for the arts.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Bacon left home at age 17 to pursue a theater career in New York City, where he appeared in a production at the Circle in the Square Theater School. \"I wanted life, man, the real thing\", he later recalled to Nancy Mills of Cosmopolitan. \"The message I got was 'The arts are it. Business is the devil's work. Art and creative expression are next to godliness.' Combine that with an immense ego and you wind up with an actor.\" Bacon's debut in the fraternity comedy National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) did not lead to the fame he had sought, and Bacon returned to waiting tables and auditioning for small roles in theater. He briefly worked on the television soap operas Search for Tomorrow (1979) and Guiding Light (1980–81) in New York.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1980, he appeared in the slasher film Friday the 13th. Some of his early stage work included Getting Out, performed at New York's Phoenix Theater, and Flux, at Second Stage Theatre during their 1981–1982 season.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1982, he won an Obie Award for his role in Forty Deuce, and soon afterward he made his Broadway debut in Slab Boys, with then-unknowns Sean Penn and Val Kilmer. However, it was not until he portrayed Timothy Fenwick that same year in Barry Levinson's film Diner – costarring Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Tim Daly, and Ellen Barkin – that he made an indelible impression on film critics and moviegoers alike.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Bolstered by the attention garnered by his performance in Diner, Bacon starred in Footloose (1984). Richard Corliss of TIME likened Footloose to the James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause and the old Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, commenting that the film includes \"motifs on book burning, mid-life crisis, AWOL parents, fatal car crashes, drug enforcement, and Bible Belt vigilantism.\" To prepare for the role, Bacon enrolled at a high school as a transfer student named \"Ren McCormick\" and studied teenagers before leaving in the middle of the day. Bacon earned strong reviews for Footloose. Bacon's critical and box office success led to a period of typecasting in roles similar to the two he portrayed in Diner and Footloose, and he had difficulty shaking this on-screen image. For the next several years he chose films that cast him against either type and experienced, by his own estimation, a career slump.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After a cameo in John Hughes's 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Bacon starred in John Hughes's 1988 comedy She's Having a Baby, and the following year he was in another comedy called The Big Picture.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1990, Bacon had two successful roles. He played a character who saved his town from under-the-earth \"graboid\" monsters in the comedy/horror film Tremors, and he portrayed an earnest medical student experimenting with death in Joel Schumacher's Flatliners.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Bacon's next project he starred opposite Elizabeth Perkins in He Said, She Said. Despite lukewarm reviews and low audience turnout, He Said, She Said was illuminating for Bacon. Required to play a character with sexist attitudes, he admitted that the role was not that large a stretch for him.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "By 1991, Bacon began to give up the idea of playing leading men in big-budget films and to remake himself as a character actor. \"The only way I was going to be able to work on 'A' projects with really 'A' directors was if I wasn't the guy who was starring\", he confided to The New York Times writer Trip Gabriel. \"You can't afford to set up a $40 million movie if you don't have your star.\" He performed that year as gay prostitute Willie O'Keefe in Oliver Stone's JFK and went on to play a prosecuting attorney in the military courtroom drama A Few Good Men. Later that year he returned to the theater to play in Spike Heels, directed by Michael Greif.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1994, Bacon earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in The River Wild, opposite Meryl Streep. He described the film to Chase in Cosmopolitan as a \"grueling shoot\", in which \"every one of us fell out of the boat at one point or another and had to be saved\".",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "His next film, Murder in the First, earned him the Broadcast Film Critic's Association Award in 1995, the same year that he starred in the blockbuster hit Apollo 13. Bacon played a trademark dark role once again in Sleepers (1996). This part starkly contrasted with his appearance in the lighthearted romantic comedy, Picture Perfect (1997).",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Bacon made his debut as a director with the television film Losing Chase (1996), which was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards, and won one. Bacon again resurrected his oddball mystique that year as a mentally-challenged houseguest in Digging to China and as a disc jockey corrupted by payola in Telling Lies in America. As the executive producer of Wild Things (1998), Bacon reserved a supporting role for himself and went on to star in Stir of Echoes (1999), directed by David Koepp.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2000, he appeared in Paul Verhoeven's Hollow Man. Bacon, Colin Firth and Rachel Blanchard depict a ménage à trois in their film, Where the Truth Lies. Bacon and director Atom Egoyan condemned the MPAA ratings board decision to rate the film \"NC-17\" rather than the preferable \"R\". Bacon commented: \"I don't get it, when I see films (that) are extremely violent, extremely objectionable sometimes in terms of the roles that women play, slide by with an R, no problem, because the people happen to have more of their clothes on.\"",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 2003 he acted with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins in Clint Eastwood's movie Mystic River.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Bacon was again acclaimed for a dark starring role playing an offending pedophile on parole in The Woodsman (2004), for which he was nominated for best actor and received the Independent Spirit Award. He appeared in the HBO Films production of Taking Chance, based on an eponymous story written by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, an American Desert Storm war veteran. The film premiered on HBO on February 21, 2009. Bacon won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for his role.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "On July 15, 2010, it was confirmed that Bacon would appear in Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class as mutant villain Sebastian Shaw.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In March 2012, Bacon was featured in a performance of Dustin Lance Black's play, 8 – a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage – as Attorney Charles J. Cooper. The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "From 2013 to 2015, Bacon starred as Ryan Hardy in the FOX television series The Following. In 2013, he won a Saturn Award for Best Actor on Television for that role.",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2015, he said in a Huffington Post interview he would like to return to the Tremors franchise. However, Bacon did not appear in Tremors 5: Bloodline (2015).",
"title": "Acting career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 1995, Kevin formed a band called The Bacon Brothers with his brother, Michael. The duo has released seven albums. Bacon also sings in a variety of other media; he has serenaded his goats on Instagram, and sings with the band the Old 97's in his role as himself in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special.",
"title": "Other ventures"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Beginning in 2012, Bacon has appeared in a major advertising campaign for the EE mobile network in the United Kingdom, based on the Six Degrees concept and his various film roles. In 2015, he became a commercial spokesperson for the U.S. egg industry.",
"title": "Other ventures"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Bacon is the subject of the trivia game titled \"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon\", based on the idea that, due to his prolific screen career covering a diverse range of genres, any Hollywood actor can be linked to another in a handful of steps based on their association with Bacon. The name of the game derives from the idea of six degrees of separation. Although he was initially dismayed by the game, the meme stuck, and Bacon eventually embraced it, forming the charitable initiative SixDegrees.org, a social networking service intended to link people and charities to each other.",
"title": "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The measure of proximity to Bacon has been mathematically formalized as the Bacon number and can be referenced at websites including Oracle of Bacon, which is in turn based upon Wikipedia data (and formerly from Internet Movie Database data). In 2012, Google added a feature to their search engine, whereby searching for an actor's name followed by the words \"Bacon Number\" will show the ways in which that actor is connected to Kevin Bacon. This feature is no longer active.",
"title": "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A similar measurement exists in the mathematics community, where one measures how far one is removed from co-writing a mathematical paper with the prolific and itinerant mathematician Paul Erdős. This is done by means of the Erdős number, which is 0 for Paul Erdős himself, 1 for someone who co-wrote an article with him, 2 for someone who co-wrote with someone who co-wrote with him, etc. People have combined the Bacon number and the Erdős number to form the Erdős–Bacon number, which is the sum of the two.",
"title": "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Bacon has been married to actress Kyra Sedgwick since September 4, 1988; they met on the set of the PBS version of Lanford Wilson's play Lemon Sky. He has said: \"The time I was hitting what I considered to be bottom was also the time I met my wife, our kids were born, good things were happening. And I was able to keep supporting myself; that always gave me strength.\" Bacon and Sedgwick have starred together in Pyrates, Murder in the First, The Woodsman, and Loverboy. They have two children, Travis Sedgwick (b. 1989) and Sosie Ruth (b. 1992). They reside on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Bacon was previously in a five-year relationship with actress Tracy Pollan, in the 1980s.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Bacon has spoken out for the separation of church and state, and told The Times in 2005 that he did not \"believe in God.\" He has also said that he is not anti-religion.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Bacon and Sedgwick appeared in will.i.am's video \"It's a New Day\", which was released following Barack Obama's 2008 presidential win.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The pair lost part of their savings in the Ponzi scheme of infamous swindler Bernie Madoff.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Bacon and Sedgwick learned in 2011, via their appearance on the PBS TV series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, that they are ninth cousins, once removed. They also appeared in a video promoting the \"Bill of Reproductive Rights\", supporting among other things a woman's right to choose and have access to birth control.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
] |
Kevin Norwood Bacon is an American actor. Known for his leading man and character roles, Bacon has received numerous accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award. Bacon made his feature film debut in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) before his breakthrough role in the musical-drama film Footloose (1984). Since then, he has starred in critically acclaimed films such as Diner (1982), JFK (1991), A Few Good Men (1992), Apollo 13 (1995), Mystic River (2003), and Frost/Nixon (2008). Other notable credits include Friday the 13th (1980), Tremors (1990), The River Wild (1994), The Woodsman (2004), Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011), and Patriots Day (2016). Bacon has also directed the films Losing Chase (1996) and Loverboy (2005). On television, Bacon received a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role as Lt. Col. Michael Strobl in the HBO original film Taking Chance (2009). He starred in the Fox drama series The Following from 2013 to 2015. Bacon played the title role in Amazon Prime Video series I Love Dick from 2016 to 2017; he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his work on the show. From 2019 to 2022, he starred in the Showtime series City on a Hill. The Guardian named Bacon one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. In 2003, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bacon's prolific career in a variety of genres has led him to become associated with the concept of interconnectedness among people, as evidenced by the trivia game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". He is a brand ambassador for British mobile network operator EE and has been featured in several ads for the company. Bacon is married to fellow actor Kyra Sedgwick.
|
2001-09-13T05:37:58Z
|
2023-12-11T01:34:46Z
|
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"Template:Iobdb name",
"Template:Kevin Bacon",
"Template:Navboxes",
"Template:Use mdy dates"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Bacon
|
16,829 |
Kornilov
|
Kornilov (Russian: Корни́лов) and Kornilova (feminine; Корни́лова) is a common Russian surname derived from the baptismal name Kornil (Latin: Cornelius). Notable people with this surname include:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kornilov (Russian: Корни́лов) and Kornilova (feminine; Корни́лова) is a common Russian surname derived from the baptismal name Kornil (Latin: Cornelius). Notable people with this surname include:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kornilov and Kornilova is a common Russian surname derived from the baptismal name Kornil. Notable people with this surname include: Aleksandr Kornilov (1862–1925), Russian historian and politician
Aleksandr Kornilov, Russian Olympic rower
Boris Kornilov (1907–1938), Soviet poet
Denis Kornilov, Russian ski jumper
Ivan Kornilov (1899–1953), Soviet general
Konstantin Kornilov (1879–1957), Soviet psychologist
Lavr Kornilov (1870–1918), Russian general and one of the leaders of the White Movement
Lev Kornilov, Russian professional footballer
Roman Kornilov, Kyrgyzstani football player
Sergey Kornilov, Russian Olympic speedskater
Vladimir Alexeyevich Kornilov (1806–1854), Russian admiral, killed during the Battle of Malakoff
Yevgeni Kornilov, Russian football player
|
2001-09-13T23:29:17Z
|
2023-11-05T20:39:20Z
|
[
"Template:Lang-ru",
"Template:Lang",
"Template:Lang-la",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:Surname"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kornilov
|
16,830 |
Keyboard technology
|
The technology of computer keyboards includes many elements. Among the more important of these is the switch technology that they use. Computer alphanumeric keyboards typically have 80 to 110 durable switches, generally one for each key. The choice of switch technology affects key response (the positive feedback that a key has been pressed) and pre-travel (the distance needed to push the key to enter a character reliably). Virtual keyboards on touch screens have no physical switches and provide audio and haptic feedback instead. Some newer keyboard models use hybrids of various technologies to achieve greater cost savings or better ergonomics.
The modern keyboard also includes a control processor and indicator lights to provide feedback to the user (and to the central processor) about what state the keyboard is in. Plug-and-play technology means that its "out of the box" layout can be notified to the system, making the keyboard immediately ready to use without the need for further configuration, unless the user so desires.
There are two types of membrane-based keyboards, flat-panel membrane keyboards and full-travel membrane keyboards:
Flat-panel membrane keyboards are most often found on appliances like microwave ovens or photocopiers. A common design consists of three layers. The top layer has the labels printed on its front and conductive stripes printed on the back. Under this, it has a spacer layer, which holds the front and back layers apart so that they do not normally make electrical contact. The back layer has conductive stripes printed perpendicularly to those of the front layer. When placed together, the stripes form a grid. When the user pushes down at a particular position, their finger pushes the front layer down through the spacer layer to close a circuit at one of the intersections of the grid. This indicates to the computer or keyboard control processor that a particular button has been pressed.
Generally, flat-panel membrane keyboards do not produce noticeable physical feedback. Therefore, devices using these issue a beep or flash a light when the key is pressed. They are often used in harsh environments where water- or leak-proofing is desirable. Although used in the early days of the personal computer (on the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Atari 400), they have been supplanted by the more tactile dome and mechanical switch keyboards.
Full-travel membrane-based keyboards are the most common computer keyboards today. They have one-piece plastic keytop/switch plungers that press down on a membrane to actuate a contact in an electrical switch matrix.
Dome-switch keyboards are a hybrid of flat-panel membrane and mechanical-switch keyboards. They bring two circuit board traces together under a rubber or silicone keypad using either metal "dome" switches or polyurethane formed domes. The metal dome switches are formed pieces of stainless steel that, when compressed, give the user crisp, positive tactile feedback. These metal types of dome switches are very common, are usually reliable to over 5 million cycles, and can be plated in either nickel, silver or gold. The rubber dome switches, occasionally referred to as polydomes, are formed polyurethane domes where the inside bubble is coated in graphite.
While polydomes are typically cheaper than metal domes, they lack the crisp snap of the metal domes and usually have a lower life specification. Polydomes are considered very quiet, but purists tend to find them "mushy" because the collapsing dome does not provide as much crisp, positive response as metal domes. For either metal or polydomes, when a key is pressed, it collapses the dome, which connects the two circuit traces and completes the connection to enter the character. The pattern on the PC board is often gold-plated.
Both are common switch technologies used in mass-market keyboards today. This type of switch technology happens to be most commonly used in handheld controllers, mobile phones, automotive, consumer electronics and medical devices. Dome-switch keyboards are also called direct-switch keyboards.
A special case of the computer keyboard dome-switch is the scissor-switch. The keys are attached to the keyboard via two plastic pieces that interlock in a "scissor"-like fashion and snap to the keyboard and the key. It still uses rubber domes, but a special plastic 'scissors' mechanism links the keycap to a plunger that depresses the rubber dome with a much shorter travel than the typical rubber dome keyboard. Typically scissor-switch keyboards also employ 3-layer membranes as the electrical component of the switch. They also usually have a shorter total key travel distance (2 mm instead of 3.5–4 mm for standard dome-switch switches). This type of switch is often found on the built-in keyboards on laptops and keyboards marketed as 'low-profile'. These keyboards are generally quiet and the keys require little force to press. Scissor-switch keyboards are typically slightly more expensive. They are harder to clean (due to the limited movement of the keys and their multiple attachment points) but also less likely to get debris in them as the gaps between the keys are often smaller (as there is no need for extra room to allow for the 'wiggle' in the key, as typically found on a membrane keyboard).
Keyboards made of flexible silicone or polyurethane materials can roll up in a bundle. Tightly folding the keyboard may damage the internal membrane circuits. When they are completely sealed in rubber, they are water resistant. Roll-up keyboards provide relatively little tactile feedback, and silicone will tend to attract dirt, dust, and hair.
In this type of keyboard, pressing a key changes the capacitance of a pattern of capacitor pads. The pattern consists of two D-shaped capacitor pads for each switch, printed on a printed circuit board (PCB) and covered by a thin, insulating film of soldermask which acts as a dielectric.
Despite the sophistication of the concept, the mechanism of capacitive switching is physically simple. The movable part ends with a flat foam element about the size of an aspirin tablet, finished with aluminum foil. Opposite the switch is a PCB with the capacitor pads. When the key is pressed, the foil tightly clings to the surface of the PCB, forming a daisy chain of two capacitors between contact pads and itself separated with a thin soldermask, and thus "shorting" the contact pads with an easily detectable drop of capacitive reactance between them. Usually, this permits a pulse or pulse train to be sensed. Because the switch does not have an actual electrical contact, there is no debouncing necessary.
The keys do not need to be fully pressed to be actuated, which enables some people to type faster. The sensor tells enough about the position of the key to allow the user to adjust the actuation point (key sensitivity). This adjustment can be done with the help of the bundled software and individually for each key, if so implemented. A keyboard which utilizes these abilities include the Realforce RGB.
The IBM Model F keyboard is mechanical-key design consisting of a buckling spring over a capacitive PCB, similar to the later Model M keyboard that used a membrane in place of the PCB.
The Topre Corporation design for switches uses a conical spring below a rubber dome. The dome provides resistance, while the spring helps with the capacitive action.
Every keyboard of this kind contains a discrete, individual switch for each key. This type of switch is composed of a housing, a spring, and a slider, and sometimes other parts such as a separate tactile leaf or a clickbar. These switches come in three variants: "linear" with consistent resistance, "tactile" with a non-audible tactile bump, and "clicky" with both a tactile response and an audible click.
Depending on the mechanism, the switch requires different amounts of pressure to actuate (the activation point whereby the key is recognized by the keyboard) and to bottom out (the full travel distance). The shape of the slider as well as the design of the switch housing varies the actuation and travel distance of the switch.
The sound can be altered by the material of the plate, case, lubrication, the keycap profile, and even modifying the individual switch. These modifications, or "mods" include applying lubricant to reduce friction, inserting "switch films" to reduce wobble between the top and bottom housings, swapping out the spring inside to modify the resistance of the keypress and many more.
Mechanical keyboards typically have a longer lifespan than membrane or dome-switch keyboards.
A major producer of discrete switches is Cherry, who has manufactured the Cherry MX family of switches since the 1980s. Cherry's color-coding system of categorizing switches has been imitated by other switch manufacturers, such as Gateron and Kailh among many others.
Keyboards which utilize this technology are commonly referred to as "mechanical keyboards", but there isn't a universally agreed-upon clear-cut definition for this term.
Hot-swappable keyboards are keyboards in which switches can be pulled out and replaced without requiring the typical solder connection. Instead of the switch being soldered to the keyboard's PCB, hot-swap sockets are instead soldered on. Hot-swap sockets can allow users to try a variety of different switches without having the tools or knowledge required to solder.
The buckling spring mechanism (expired U.S. Patent 4,118,611) atop the switch is responsible for the clicky response of the keyboard. This mechanism controls a small hammer that strikes a capacitive or membrane switch.
In 1993, two years after spawning Lexmark, IBM transferred its keyboard operations to the daughter company. New Model M keyboards continued to be manufactured for IBM by Lexmark until 1996, when Unicomp was established and purchased the keyboard patents and tooling equipment to continue their production.
IBM continued to make Model M's in their Scotland factory until 1999.
Hall effect keyboards use magnets and Hall effect sensors instead of switches with mechanical contacts. When a key is depressed, it moves a magnet that is detected by a solid-state sensor. Because they require no physical contact for actuation, Hall-effect keyboards are extremely reliable and can accept millions of keystrokes before failing. They are used for ultra-high reliability applications such as nuclear power plants, aircraft cockpits, and critical industrial environments. They can easily be made totally waterproof, and can resist large amounts of dust and contaminants. Because a magnet and sensor are required for each key, as well as custom control electronics, they are expensive to manufacture.
A hall switch works through magnetic fields. Every switch has a small magnet fixed inside it. When the electricity passes through the main circuit, it creates a magnetic flux. So, every time you press a key, the magnetic intensity changes. This change is noted by the circuit and the sensors send the information to the motherboard.
A laser projection device approximately the size of a computer mouse projects the outline of keyboard keys onto a flat surface, such as a table or desk. This type of keyboard is portable enough to be easily used with PDAs and cellphones, and many models have retractable cords and wireless capabilities. However, sudden or accidental disruption of the laser will register unwanted keystrokes. Also, if the laser malfunctions, the whole unit becomes useless, unlike conventional keyboards which can be used even if a variety of parts (such as the keycaps) are removed. This type of keyboard can be frustrating to use since it is susceptible to errors, even in the course of normal typing, and its complete lack of tactile feedback makes it even less user-friendly than the lowest quality membrane keyboards.
Also known as photo-optical keyboard, light responsive keyboard, photo-electric keyboard, and optical key actuation detection technology.
Optical keyboard technology was introduced in 1962 by Harley E. Kelchner for use in a typewriter machine with the purpose of reducing the noise generating by actuating the typewriter keys.
An optical keyboard technology utilizes light-emitting devices and photo sensors to optically detect actuated keys. Most commonly the emitters and sensors are located at the perimeter, mounted on a small PCB. The light is directed from side to side of the keyboard interior, and it can only be blocked by the actuated keys. Most optical keyboards require at least two beams (most commonly a vertical beam and a horizontal beam) to determine the actuated key. Some optical keyboards use a special key structure that blocks the light in a certain pattern, allowing only one beam per row of keys (most commonly a horizontal beam).
The mechanism of the optical keyboard is very simple – a light beam is sent from the emitter to the receiving sensor, and the actuated key blocks, reflects, refracts or otherwise interacts with the beam, resulting in an identified key.
Some earlier optical keyboards were limited in their structure and required special casing to block external light, no multi-key functionality was supported and the design was very limited to a thick rectangular case.
The advantages of optical keyboard technology are that it offers a real waterproof keyboard, resilient to dust and liquids; and it uses about 20% PCB volume, compared with membrane or dome switch keyboards, significantly reducing electronic waste. Additional advantages of optical keyboard technology over other keyboard technologies such as Hall effect, laser, roll-up, and transparent keyboards lie in cost (Hall effect keyboard) and feel – optical keyboard technology does not require different key mechanisms, and the tactile feel of typing has remained the same for over 60 years.
The specialist DataHand keyboard uses optical technology to sense keypresses with a single light beam and sensor per key. The keys are held in their rest position by magnets; when the magnetic force is overcome to press a key, the optical path is unblocked and the keypress is registered.
When a key is pressed, it oscillates (bounces) against its contacts several times before settling. When released, it oscillates again until it comes to rest. Although it happens on a scale too small to be visible to the naked eye, it can be enough to register multiple keystrokes.
To resolve this, the processor in a keyboard debounces the keystrokes, by averaging the signal over time to produce one "confirmed" keystroke that (usually) corresponds to a single press or release. Early membrane keyboards had limited typing speed because they had to do significant debouncing. This was a noticeable problem on the ZX81.
Keycaps are used on full-travel keyboards. While modern keycaps are typically surface-printed, they can also be double-shot molded, laser marked, dye sublimation printed, engraved, or made of transparent material with printed paper inserts. There are also keycaps which utilize thin shells that are placed over key bases, which were used on several IBM PC keyboards.
Switches allow for the removal and replacement of keycaps with a common stem type.
Almost all keyboards which utilize keys 2 or more units in length (such as the typical space bar or enter key) use stabilizers. Various lubricants and padding techniques can be used to reduce the rattle of components.
A modern PC keyboard typically includes a control processor and indicator lights to provide feedback to the user about what state the keyboard is in. Depending on the sophistication of the controller's programming, the keyboard may also offer other special features. The processor is usually a single chip 8048 microcontroller variant. The keyboard switch matrix is wired to its inputs and it processes the incoming keystrokes and sends the results down a serial cable (the keyboard cord) to a receiver in the main computer box. It also controls the illumination of the "caps lock", "num lock" and "scroll lock" lights.
A common test for whether the computer has crashed is pressing the "caps lock" key. The keyboard sends the key code to the keyboard driver running in the main computer; if the main computer is operating, it commands the light to turn on. All the other indicator lights work in a similar way. The keyboard driver also tracks the shift, alt and control state of the keyboard.
The keyboard switch matrix is often drawn with horizontal wires and vertical wires in a grid which is called a matrix circuit. It has a switch at some or all intersections, much like a multiplexed display.
Almost all keyboards have only the switch (but no diode) at each intersection, which causes "ghost keys" and "key jamming" when multiple keys are pressed (rollover). Certain, often more expensive, keyboards have a diode between each intersection, allowing the keyboard microcontroller to accurately sense any number of simultaneous keys being pressed, without generating erroneous ghost keys.
Optical character recognition (OCR) is preferable to rekeying for converting existing text that is already written down but not in machine-readable format (for example, a Linotype-composed book from the 1940s). In other words, to convert the text from an image to editable text (that is, a string of character codes), a person could re-type it, or a computer could look at the image and deduce what each character is. OCR technology has already reached an impressive state (for example, Google Book Search) and promises more for the future.
Speech recognition converts speech into machine-readable text (that is, a string of character codes). This technology has also reached an advanced state and is implemented in various software products. For certain uses (e.g., transcription of medical or legal dictation; journalism; writing essays or novels) speech recognition is starting to replace the keyboard. However, the lack of privacy when issuing voice commands and dictation makes this kind of input unsuitable for many environments.
Pointing devices can be used to enter text or characters in contexts where using a physical keyboard would be inappropriate or impossible. These accessories typically present characters on a display, in a layout that provides fast access to the more frequently used characters or character combinations. Popular examples of this kind of input are Graffiti, Dasher and on-screen virtual keyboards.
Unencrypted Bluetooth keyboards are known to be vulnerable to signal theft for keylogging by other Bluetooth devices in range. Microsoft wireless keyboards 2011 and earlier are documented to have this vulnerability.
Keystroke logging (often called keylogging) is a method of capturing and recording user keystrokes. While it can be used legally to measure employee activity, or by law enforcement agencies to investigate suspicious activities, it is also used by hackers for illegal or malicious acts. Hackers use keyloggers to obtain passwords or encryption keys.
Keystroke logging can be achieved by both hardware and software means. Hardware key loggers are attached to the keyboard cable or installed inside standard keyboards. Software keyloggers work on the target computer's operating system and gain unauthorized access to the hardware, hook into the keyboard with functions provided by the OS, or use remote access software to transmit recorded data out of the target computer to a remote location. Some hackers also use wireless keylogger sniffers to collect packets of data being transferred from a wireless keyboard and its receiver, and then they crack the encryption key being used to secure wireless communications between the two devices.
Anti-spyware applications are able to detect many keyloggers and remove them. Responsible vendors of monitoring software support detection by anti-spyware programs, thus preventing abuse of the software. Enabling a firewall does not stop keyloggers per se, but can possibly prevent transmission of the logged material over the net if properly configured. Network monitors (also known as reverse-firewalls) can be used to alert the user whenever an application attempts to make a network connection. This gives the user the chance to prevent the keylogger from "phoning home" with his or her typed information. Automatic form-filling programs can prevent keylogging entirely by not using the keyboard at all. Most keyloggers can be fooled by alternating between typing the login credentials and typing characters somewhere else in the focus window.
Keyboards are also known to emit electromagnetic signatures that can be detected using special spying equipment to reconstruct the keys pressed on the keyboard. Neal O'Farrell, executive director of the Identity Theft Council, revealed to InformationWeek that "More than 25 years ago, a couple of former spooks showed me how they could capture a user's ATM PIN, from a van parked across the street, simply by capturing and decoding the electromagnetic signals generated by every keystroke," O'Farrell said. "They could even capture keystrokes from computers in nearby offices, but the technology wasn't sophisticated enough to focus in on any specific computer."
The use of any keyboard may cause serious injury (such as carpal tunnel syndrome or other repetitive strain injuries) to the hands, wrists, arms, neck or back. The risks of injuries can be reduced by taking frequent short breaks to get up and walk around a couple of times every hour. Users should also vary tasks throughout the day, to avoid overuse of the hands and wrists. When typing on a keyboard, a person should keep the shoulders relaxed with the elbows at the side, with the keyboard and mouse positioned so that reaching is not necessary. The chair height and keyboard tray should be adjusted so that the wrists are straight, and the wrists should not be rested on sharp table edges. Wrist or palm rests should not be used while typing.
Some adaptive technology ranging from special keyboards, mouse replacements and pen tablet interfaces to speech recognition software can reduce the risk of injury. Pause software reminds the user to pause frequently. Switching to a much more ergonomic mouse, such as a vertical mouse or joystick mouse may provide relief.
By using a touchpad or a stylus pen with a graphic tablet, in place of a mouse, one can lessen the repetitive strain on the arms and hands.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The technology of computer keyboards includes many elements. Among the more important of these is the switch technology that they use. Computer alphanumeric keyboards typically have 80 to 110 durable switches, generally one for each key. The choice of switch technology affects key response (the positive feedback that a key has been pressed) and pre-travel (the distance needed to push the key to enter a character reliably). Virtual keyboards on touch screens have no physical switches and provide audio and haptic feedback instead. Some newer keyboard models use hybrids of various technologies to achieve greater cost savings or better ergonomics.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The modern keyboard also includes a control processor and indicator lights to provide feedback to the user (and to the central processor) about what state the keyboard is in. Plug-and-play technology means that its \"out of the box\" layout can be notified to the system, making the keyboard immediately ready to use without the need for further configuration, unless the user so desires.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "There are two types of membrane-based keyboards, flat-panel membrane keyboards and full-travel membrane keyboards:",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Flat-panel membrane keyboards are most often found on appliances like microwave ovens or photocopiers. A common design consists of three layers. The top layer has the labels printed on its front and conductive stripes printed on the back. Under this, it has a spacer layer, which holds the front and back layers apart so that they do not normally make electrical contact. The back layer has conductive stripes printed perpendicularly to those of the front layer. When placed together, the stripes form a grid. When the user pushes down at a particular position, their finger pushes the front layer down through the spacer layer to close a circuit at one of the intersections of the grid. This indicates to the computer or keyboard control processor that a particular button has been pressed.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Generally, flat-panel membrane keyboards do not produce noticeable physical feedback. Therefore, devices using these issue a beep or flash a light when the key is pressed. They are often used in harsh environments where water- or leak-proofing is desirable. Although used in the early days of the personal computer (on the Sinclair ZX80, ZX81 and Atari 400), they have been supplanted by the more tactile dome and mechanical switch keyboards.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Full-travel membrane-based keyboards are the most common computer keyboards today. They have one-piece plastic keytop/switch plungers that press down on a membrane to actuate a contact in an electrical switch matrix.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Dome-switch keyboards are a hybrid of flat-panel membrane and mechanical-switch keyboards. They bring two circuit board traces together under a rubber or silicone keypad using either metal \"dome\" switches or polyurethane formed domes. The metal dome switches are formed pieces of stainless steel that, when compressed, give the user crisp, positive tactile feedback. These metal types of dome switches are very common, are usually reliable to over 5 million cycles, and can be plated in either nickel, silver or gold. The rubber dome switches, occasionally referred to as polydomes, are formed polyurethane domes where the inside bubble is coated in graphite.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "While polydomes are typically cheaper than metal domes, they lack the crisp snap of the metal domes and usually have a lower life specification. Polydomes are considered very quiet, but purists tend to find them \"mushy\" because the collapsing dome does not provide as much crisp, positive response as metal domes. For either metal or polydomes, when a key is pressed, it collapses the dome, which connects the two circuit traces and completes the connection to enter the character. The pattern on the PC board is often gold-plated.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Both are common switch technologies used in mass-market keyboards today. This type of switch technology happens to be most commonly used in handheld controllers, mobile phones, automotive, consumer electronics and medical devices. Dome-switch keyboards are also called direct-switch keyboards.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "A special case of the computer keyboard dome-switch is the scissor-switch. The keys are attached to the keyboard via two plastic pieces that interlock in a \"scissor\"-like fashion and snap to the keyboard and the key. It still uses rubber domes, but a special plastic 'scissors' mechanism links the keycap to a plunger that depresses the rubber dome with a much shorter travel than the typical rubber dome keyboard. Typically scissor-switch keyboards also employ 3-layer membranes as the electrical component of the switch. They also usually have a shorter total key travel distance (2 mm instead of 3.5–4 mm for standard dome-switch switches). This type of switch is often found on the built-in keyboards on laptops and keyboards marketed as 'low-profile'. These keyboards are generally quiet and the keys require little force to press. Scissor-switch keyboards are typically slightly more expensive. They are harder to clean (due to the limited movement of the keys and their multiple attachment points) but also less likely to get debris in them as the gaps between the keys are often smaller (as there is no need for extra room to allow for the 'wiggle' in the key, as typically found on a membrane keyboard).",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Keyboards made of flexible silicone or polyurethane materials can roll up in a bundle. Tightly folding the keyboard may damage the internal membrane circuits. When they are completely sealed in rubber, they are water resistant. Roll-up keyboards provide relatively little tactile feedback, and silicone will tend to attract dirt, dust, and hair.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In this type of keyboard, pressing a key changes the capacitance of a pattern of capacitor pads. The pattern consists of two D-shaped capacitor pads for each switch, printed on a printed circuit board (PCB) and covered by a thin, insulating film of soldermask which acts as a dielectric.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Despite the sophistication of the concept, the mechanism of capacitive switching is physically simple. The movable part ends with a flat foam element about the size of an aspirin tablet, finished with aluminum foil. Opposite the switch is a PCB with the capacitor pads. When the key is pressed, the foil tightly clings to the surface of the PCB, forming a daisy chain of two capacitors between contact pads and itself separated with a thin soldermask, and thus \"shorting\" the contact pads with an easily detectable drop of capacitive reactance between them. Usually, this permits a pulse or pulse train to be sensed. Because the switch does not have an actual electrical contact, there is no debouncing necessary.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The keys do not need to be fully pressed to be actuated, which enables some people to type faster. The sensor tells enough about the position of the key to allow the user to adjust the actuation point (key sensitivity). This adjustment can be done with the help of the bundled software and individually for each key, if so implemented. A keyboard which utilizes these abilities include the Realforce RGB.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The IBM Model F keyboard is mechanical-key design consisting of a buckling spring over a capacitive PCB, similar to the later Model M keyboard that used a membrane in place of the PCB.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Topre Corporation design for switches uses a conical spring below a rubber dome. The dome provides resistance, while the spring helps with the capacitive action.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Every keyboard of this kind contains a discrete, individual switch for each key. This type of switch is composed of a housing, a spring, and a slider, and sometimes other parts such as a separate tactile leaf or a clickbar. These switches come in three variants: \"linear\" with consistent resistance, \"tactile\" with a non-audible tactile bump, and \"clicky\" with both a tactile response and an audible click.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Depending on the mechanism, the switch requires different amounts of pressure to actuate (the activation point whereby the key is recognized by the keyboard) and to bottom out (the full travel distance). The shape of the slider as well as the design of the switch housing varies the actuation and travel distance of the switch.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The sound can be altered by the material of the plate, case, lubrication, the keycap profile, and even modifying the individual switch. These modifications, or \"mods\" include applying lubricant to reduce friction, inserting \"switch films\" to reduce wobble between the top and bottom housings, swapping out the spring inside to modify the resistance of the keypress and many more.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mechanical keyboards typically have a longer lifespan than membrane or dome-switch keyboards.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A major producer of discrete switches is Cherry, who has manufactured the Cherry MX family of switches since the 1980s. Cherry's color-coding system of categorizing switches has been imitated by other switch manufacturers, such as Gateron and Kailh among many others.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Keyboards which utilize this technology are commonly referred to as \"mechanical keyboards\", but there isn't a universally agreed-upon clear-cut definition for this term.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Hot-swappable keyboards are keyboards in which switches can be pulled out and replaced without requiring the typical solder connection. Instead of the switch being soldered to the keyboard's PCB, hot-swap sockets are instead soldered on. Hot-swap sockets can allow users to try a variety of different switches without having the tools or knowledge required to solder.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The buckling spring mechanism (expired U.S. Patent 4,118,611) atop the switch is responsible for the clicky response of the keyboard. This mechanism controls a small hammer that strikes a capacitive or membrane switch.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1993, two years after spawning Lexmark, IBM transferred its keyboard operations to the daughter company. New Model M keyboards continued to be manufactured for IBM by Lexmark until 1996, when Unicomp was established and purchased the keyboard patents and tooling equipment to continue their production.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "IBM continued to make Model M's in their Scotland factory until 1999.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Hall effect keyboards use magnets and Hall effect sensors instead of switches with mechanical contacts. When a key is depressed, it moves a magnet that is detected by a solid-state sensor. Because they require no physical contact for actuation, Hall-effect keyboards are extremely reliable and can accept millions of keystrokes before failing. They are used for ultra-high reliability applications such as nuclear power plants, aircraft cockpits, and critical industrial environments. They can easily be made totally waterproof, and can resist large amounts of dust and contaminants. Because a magnet and sensor are required for each key, as well as custom control electronics, they are expensive to manufacture.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "A hall switch works through magnetic fields. Every switch has a small magnet fixed inside it. When the electricity passes through the main circuit, it creates a magnetic flux. So, every time you press a key, the magnetic intensity changes. This change is noted by the circuit and the sensors send the information to the motherboard.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A laser projection device approximately the size of a computer mouse projects the outline of keyboard keys onto a flat surface, such as a table or desk. This type of keyboard is portable enough to be easily used with PDAs and cellphones, and many models have retractable cords and wireless capabilities. However, sudden or accidental disruption of the laser will register unwanted keystrokes. Also, if the laser malfunctions, the whole unit becomes useless, unlike conventional keyboards which can be used even if a variety of parts (such as the keycaps) are removed. This type of keyboard can be frustrating to use since it is susceptible to errors, even in the course of normal typing, and its complete lack of tactile feedback makes it even less user-friendly than the lowest quality membrane keyboards.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Also known as photo-optical keyboard, light responsive keyboard, photo-electric keyboard, and optical key actuation detection technology.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Optical keyboard technology was introduced in 1962 by Harley E. Kelchner for use in a typewriter machine with the purpose of reducing the noise generating by actuating the typewriter keys.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "An optical keyboard technology utilizes light-emitting devices and photo sensors to optically detect actuated keys. Most commonly the emitters and sensors are located at the perimeter, mounted on a small PCB. The light is directed from side to side of the keyboard interior, and it can only be blocked by the actuated keys. Most optical keyboards require at least two beams (most commonly a vertical beam and a horizontal beam) to determine the actuated key. Some optical keyboards use a special key structure that blocks the light in a certain pattern, allowing only one beam per row of keys (most commonly a horizontal beam).",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The mechanism of the optical keyboard is very simple – a light beam is sent from the emitter to the receiving sensor, and the actuated key blocks, reflects, refracts or otherwise interacts with the beam, resulting in an identified key.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Some earlier optical keyboards were limited in their structure and required special casing to block external light, no multi-key functionality was supported and the design was very limited to a thick rectangular case.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The advantages of optical keyboard technology are that it offers a real waterproof keyboard, resilient to dust and liquids; and it uses about 20% PCB volume, compared with membrane or dome switch keyboards, significantly reducing electronic waste. Additional advantages of optical keyboard technology over other keyboard technologies such as Hall effect, laser, roll-up, and transparent keyboards lie in cost (Hall effect keyboard) and feel – optical keyboard technology does not require different key mechanisms, and the tactile feel of typing has remained the same for over 60 years.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The specialist DataHand keyboard uses optical technology to sense keypresses with a single light beam and sensor per key. The keys are held in their rest position by magnets; when the magnetic force is overcome to press a key, the optical path is unblocked and the keypress is registered.",
"title": "Types"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "When a key is pressed, it oscillates (bounces) against its contacts several times before settling. When released, it oscillates again until it comes to rest. Although it happens on a scale too small to be visible to the naked eye, it can be enough to register multiple keystrokes.",
"title": "Debouncing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "To resolve this, the processor in a keyboard debounces the keystrokes, by averaging the signal over time to produce one \"confirmed\" keystroke that (usually) corresponds to a single press or release. Early membrane keyboards had limited typing speed because they had to do significant debouncing. This was a noticeable problem on the ZX81.",
"title": "Debouncing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Keycaps are used on full-travel keyboards. While modern keycaps are typically surface-printed, they can also be double-shot molded, laser marked, dye sublimation printed, engraved, or made of transparent material with printed paper inserts. There are also keycaps which utilize thin shells that are placed over key bases, which were used on several IBM PC keyboards.",
"title": "Keycaps"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Switches allow for the removal and replacement of keycaps with a common stem type.",
"title": "Keycaps"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Almost all keyboards which utilize keys 2 or more units in length (such as the typical space bar or enter key) use stabilizers. Various lubricants and padding techniques can be used to reduce the rattle of components.",
"title": "Stabilizers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "A modern PC keyboard typically includes a control processor and indicator lights to provide feedback to the user about what state the keyboard is in. Depending on the sophistication of the controller's programming, the keyboard may also offer other special features. The processor is usually a single chip 8048 microcontroller variant. The keyboard switch matrix is wired to its inputs and it processes the incoming keystrokes and sends the results down a serial cable (the keyboard cord) to a receiver in the main computer box. It also controls the illumination of the \"caps lock\", \"num lock\" and \"scroll lock\" lights.",
"title": "Other parts "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "A common test for whether the computer has crashed is pressing the \"caps lock\" key. The keyboard sends the key code to the keyboard driver running in the main computer; if the main computer is operating, it commands the light to turn on. All the other indicator lights work in a similar way. The keyboard driver also tracks the shift, alt and control state of the keyboard.",
"title": "Other parts "
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The keyboard switch matrix is often drawn with horizontal wires and vertical wires in a grid which is called a matrix circuit. It has a switch at some or all intersections, much like a multiplexed display.",
"title": "Keyboard switch matrix"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Almost all keyboards have only the switch (but no diode) at each intersection, which causes \"ghost keys\" and \"key jamming\" when multiple keys are pressed (rollover). Certain, often more expensive, keyboards have a diode between each intersection, allowing the keyboard microcontroller to accurately sense any number of simultaneous keys being pressed, without generating erroneous ghost keys.",
"title": "Keyboard switch matrix"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Optical character recognition (OCR) is preferable to rekeying for converting existing text that is already written down but not in machine-readable format (for example, a Linotype-composed book from the 1940s). In other words, to convert the text from an image to editable text (that is, a string of character codes), a person could re-type it, or a computer could look at the image and deduce what each character is. OCR technology has already reached an impressive state (for example, Google Book Search) and promises more for the future.",
"title": "Alternative text-entering methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Speech recognition converts speech into machine-readable text (that is, a string of character codes). This technology has also reached an advanced state and is implemented in various software products. For certain uses (e.g., transcription of medical or legal dictation; journalism; writing essays or novels) speech recognition is starting to replace the keyboard. However, the lack of privacy when issuing voice commands and dictation makes this kind of input unsuitable for many environments.",
"title": "Alternative text-entering methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Pointing devices can be used to enter text or characters in contexts where using a physical keyboard would be inappropriate or impossible. These accessories typically present characters on a display, in a layout that provides fast access to the more frequently used characters or character combinations. Popular examples of this kind of input are Graffiti, Dasher and on-screen virtual keyboards.",
"title": "Alternative text-entering methods"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Unencrypted Bluetooth keyboards are known to be vulnerable to signal theft for keylogging by other Bluetooth devices in range. Microsoft wireless keyboards 2011 and earlier are documented to have this vulnerability.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Keystroke logging (often called keylogging) is a method of capturing and recording user keystrokes. While it can be used legally to measure employee activity, or by law enforcement agencies to investigate suspicious activities, it is also used by hackers for illegal or malicious acts. Hackers use keyloggers to obtain passwords or encryption keys.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Keystroke logging can be achieved by both hardware and software means. Hardware key loggers are attached to the keyboard cable or installed inside standard keyboards. Software keyloggers work on the target computer's operating system and gain unauthorized access to the hardware, hook into the keyboard with functions provided by the OS, or use remote access software to transmit recorded data out of the target computer to a remote location. Some hackers also use wireless keylogger sniffers to collect packets of data being transferred from a wireless keyboard and its receiver, and then they crack the encryption key being used to secure wireless communications between the two devices.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Anti-spyware applications are able to detect many keyloggers and remove them. Responsible vendors of monitoring software support detection by anti-spyware programs, thus preventing abuse of the software. Enabling a firewall does not stop keyloggers per se, but can possibly prevent transmission of the logged material over the net if properly configured. Network monitors (also known as reverse-firewalls) can be used to alert the user whenever an application attempts to make a network connection. This gives the user the chance to prevent the keylogger from \"phoning home\" with his or her typed information. Automatic form-filling programs can prevent keylogging entirely by not using the keyboard at all. Most keyloggers can be fooled by alternating between typing the login credentials and typing characters somewhere else in the focus window.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Keyboards are also known to emit electromagnetic signatures that can be detected using special spying equipment to reconstruct the keys pressed on the keyboard. Neal O'Farrell, executive director of the Identity Theft Council, revealed to InformationWeek that \"More than 25 years ago, a couple of former spooks showed me how they could capture a user's ATM PIN, from a van parked across the street, simply by capturing and decoding the electromagnetic signals generated by every keystroke,\" O'Farrell said. \"They could even capture keystrokes from computers in nearby offices, but the technology wasn't sophisticated enough to focus in on any specific computer.\"",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The use of any keyboard may cause serious injury (such as carpal tunnel syndrome or other repetitive strain injuries) to the hands, wrists, arms, neck or back. The risks of injuries can be reduced by taking frequent short breaks to get up and walk around a couple of times every hour. Users should also vary tasks throughout the day, to avoid overuse of the hands and wrists. When typing on a keyboard, a person should keep the shoulders relaxed with the elbows at the side, with the keyboard and mouse positioned so that reaching is not necessary. The chair height and keyboard tray should be adjusted so that the wrists are straight, and the wrists should not be rested on sharp table edges. Wrist or palm rests should not be used while typing.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Some adaptive technology ranging from special keyboards, mouse replacements and pen tablet interfaces to speech recognition software can reduce the risk of injury. Pause software reminds the user to pause frequently. Switching to a much more ergonomic mouse, such as a vertical mouse or joystick mouse may provide relief.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "By using a touchpad or a stylus pen with a graphic tablet, in place of a mouse, one can lessen the repetitive strain on the arms and hands.",
"title": "Other issues"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
] |
The technology of computer keyboards includes many elements. Among the more important of these is the switch technology that they use. Computer alphanumeric keyboards typically have 80 to 110 durable switches, generally one for each key. The choice of switch technology affects key response and pre-travel. Virtual keyboards on touch screens have no physical switches and provide audio and haptic feedback instead. Some newer keyboard models use hybrids of various technologies to achieve greater cost savings or better ergonomics. The modern keyboard also includes a control processor and indicator lights to provide feedback to the user about what state the keyboard is in. Plug-and-play technology means that its "out of the box" layout can be notified to the system, making the keyboard immediately ready to use without the need for further configuration, unless the user so desires.
|
2001-09-13T21:36:46Z
|
2023-12-30T15:42:45Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology
|
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Kick
|
A kick is a physical strike using the leg, in unison usually with an area of the knee or lower using the foot, heel, tibia (shin), ball of the foot, blade of the foot, toes or knee (the latter is also known as a knee strike). This type of attack is used frequently by hooved animals as well as humans in the context of stand-up fighting. Kicks play a significant role in many forms of martial arts, such as capoeira, karate, kickboxing, kung fu, MMA, Muay Thai, pankration, pradal serey, savate, sikaran, silat, taekwondo, vovinam, and Yaw-Yan. Kicks are a universal act of aggression among humans.
Kicking is also prominent from its use in many sports, especially those called football. The best known of these sports is association football, also known as soccer.
The English verb to kick appears only in the late 14th century, apparently as a loan from Old Norse, originally in the sense of a hooved animal delivering strikes with his hind legs.
Kicks as an act of human aggression have likely existed worldwide since prehistory. However, the earliest documentation of high kicks, aimed above the waist or to the head, comes from Asian martial arts. Such kicks were introduced to the west in the 19th century with early hybrid martial arts inspired by Asian styles such as Bartitsu and Savate. Practice of high kicks became more universal in the second half of the 20th century with the more widespread development of hybrid styles such as kickboxing and eventually mixed martial arts.
The history of the high kick in Asian martial arts is difficult to trace, it appears to be prevalent in all traditional forms of Indochinese kickboxing, but these cannot be traced with any technical detail to pre-modern times. In Muay Boran ("ancient boxing" in Thailand) was developed under Rama V (r. 1868–1910) and while it is known that earlier forms of "boxing" existed during the Ayutthaya Kingdom, the details regarding these techniques are unclear. Some stances that look like low kicks, but not high kicks, are visible in the Shaolin temple frescoes, dated to the 17th century. The Mahabharata (4.13), an Indian epic compiled at some point before the 5th century AD, describes an unarmed hand-to-hand battle, including the sentence "and they gave each other violent kicks" (without providing any further detail). Kicks including ones above the waist are commonly depicted in the stone carvings of the Khmer Empire temples in Cambodia.
As the human leg is longer and stronger than the arm, kicks are generally used to keep an opponent at a distance, surprise them with their range and inflict substantial damage. Stance is also very important in any combat system and any attempt to deliver a kick will necessarily compromise stability to some degree. The application of kicks is a trade-off between the power and range that can be delivered against the cost incurred to balance. As combat situations are fluid, understanding this trade-off and making the appropriate decision to adjust to each moment is key.
Kicks are commonly directed against helpless or downed targets, while for more general self-defense applications, the consensus is that simple kicks aimed at vulnerable targets below the chest may be highly efficient, but should be executed with a degree of care. Self-defense experts, such as author and teacher Marc Macyoung, claim that kicks should be aimed no higher than the waist/stomach. Thus, the fighter should not compromise their balance while delivering a kick and retract the leg properly to avoid grappling. It is often recommended to build and drill simple combinations that involve attacking different levels of an opponent. A common example would be distracting an opponent's focus via a fake jab, following up with a powerful attack at the opponent's legs and punching.
Further, since low kicks are inherently quicker and harder to see and dodge in general they are often emphasized in a street fight scenario.
The utility of high kicks (above chest level) has been debated. Proponents have viewed that some high front snap kicks are effective for striking the face or throat, particularly against charging opponents and flying kicks can be effective to scare off attackers. Martial arts systems that utilize high kicks also emphasize training of very efficient and technically perfected forms of kicks, include recovery techniques in the event of a miss or block and will employ a wide repertoire of kicks adapted to specific situations.
Detractors have asserted that the flying/jumping kicks performed in synthesis styles are primarily performed for conditioning or aesthetic reasons, while the high kicks as practiced in sport martial arts are privileged due to specialized tournament rules, such as limiting the contest to stand-up fighting, or reducing the penalty resulting from a failed attempt at delivering a kick.
Although kicks can result in an easy takedown for the opponent if they are caught or the resulting imbalance is exploited, kicks to all parts of the body are very present in mixed martial arts, with some fighters employing them sporadically, while others, like Lyoto Machida, Edson Barboza and Donald Cerrone rely heavily on their use and have multiple knockouts by kicks on their resume.
The attacker swings their leg sideways in a circular motion, kicking the opponent's side with the front of the leg, usually with the instep, ball of the foot, toe, or shin. It can also be performed is a 360-degree kick where the attacker performs a full circle with their leg, in which the striking surface is generally either the instep, shin or ball of the foot.
There are many variations of the roundhouse kick based on various chambering of the cocked leg (small, or full, or universal or no chambering) or various footwork possibilities (rear-leg, front-leg, hopping, switch, oblique, dropping, ground spin-back or full 360 spin-back). An important variation is the downward roundhouse kick, nicknamed the "Brazilian kick" from recent K-1 use: A more pronounced twist of the hips allows for a downward end of the trajectory of the kick that is very deceiving.
Due to its power, the roundhouse kick may also be performed at low level against targets, such as the knees, calf, or even thigh, since attacking leg muscles will often cripple an opponent's mobility. It is the most commonly used kick in kickboxing due to its power and ease of use. In most Karate styles, the instep is used to strike, though use of the shin as an official technique for a street fight would mostly be allowed.
Delivering a front kick involves raising the knee and foot of the striking leg to the desired height and extending the leg to contact the target. The strike is usually delivered by the ball of the foot for a forward kick or the top of the toes for an upward kick. Taekwondo practitioners utilize both the heel and ball of the foot for striking. Various combat systems teach "general" front kicks using the heel or whole foot when footwear is on. Depending on the fighter's tactical needs, a front kick may involve more or less body motion and thrusting with the hips is a common method of increasing both reach and power of the kick. The front kick is typically executed with the upper body straight and balanced. Front kicks are typically aimed at targets below the chest: stomach, thighs, groin, knees or lower. Highly skilled martial artists are often capable of striking head-level targets with front kicks.
A side kick is delivered sideways in relation to the body of the person kicking. A standard side kick is performed by first "chambering" by raising the kicking leg diagonally across the body, then extending the leg in a linear fashion toward the target, while flexing the abdominals. The two common impact points in sidekicks are the heel or the outer edge of the foot, with the heel is more suited to hard targets such as the ribs, stomach, jaw, temple and chest. When executing a side kick with the heel, the toes should be pulled back so that they only make contact the heel and not with the whole foot as striking with the arch or the ball of the foot can injure the foot or break an ankle.
Another way of doing the side kick is to make it a result of a faked roundhouse. This technique is considered antiquated and used only after an opponent is persuaded to believe it is a roundhouse (a feint) and then led to believe that closing the distance is best for an upper body attack, which plays into the tactical position and relative requirement of this version of the side kick. In Korean, yeop chagi and in Okinawan fighting, it is sometimes called a "dragon kick". Some have called this side kick a "twist kick" due to its roundhouse like origins. This side kick begins as would a roundhouse kick however the practitioner allows the heel to move towards the center of the body. The kick is then directed outward from a cross-leg chamber so that the final destination of the kick is a target to the side, rather than one that is directly ahead.
Also referred to as a donkey kick, mule kick, horse kick or turning back kick. This kick is directed backwards, keeping the kicking leg close to the standing leg and using the heel as a striking surface. In wushu, this kick is called the "half-moon" kick but involves the slight arching of the back and a higher lift of the leg to give a larger curvature. It is often used to strike opponents by surprise when facing away from them.
These are often complicated variations of basic kicks, either with a different target or combined with another move, such as jumping.
In Japanese, kakato-geri or kakato-otoshi; in Korean, doki bal chagi or naeryeo chagi or chikka chagi. In Chinese, pigua tui or xiapi tui.
An axe kick, also known as a hammer kick or stretch kick, is characterized by a straightened leg with the heel descending onto an opponent like the blade of an axe. It begins with one foot rising upward as in a crescent kick then the upward arc motion is stopped and then the attacking foot is lowered to strike the target from above. The arc can be performed in either an inward (counter-clockwise) or outward (clockwise) fashion.
A well-known proponent of the axe kick was Andy Hug, the Swiss Kyokushinkai Karateka who won the 1996 K-1 Grand Prix.
A butterfly kick is done by doing a large circular motion with both feet in succession, making the combatant airborne. There are many variations of this kick. The kick may look like a slanted aerial cartwheeland at the same time, the body spins horizontally in a circle. It begins as a jump with one leg while kicking with the other, then move the kicking leg down and the jumping leg up into a kick, landing with the first kicking leg, all while spinning. This kick involves arching the back when airborne to give a horizontal body with high angled legs striking horizontally. It may also resemble a jumping spin roundhouse kick (developed by James "Two Screens" Perkins) into a spinning hook kick, all in one jump and one spin although the difference is that both legs remain in the air at the same time for a considerable amount of time.
First practiced in Chinese martial arts, the butterfly kick, or "xuan zi", is widely viewed as ineffective for actual combat. However, its original purpose was to evade an opponent's floor sweep and flip to the antagonist's exposed side or it may be used as a double aerial kick to an opponent standing off to the side. It is now widely used in demonstrative wushu forms (taolu) as a symbol of difficulty. Also note the similarity in execution when compared to an ice skating maneuver known as a flying camel spin (aka Button camel).
This strike is a low roundhouse kick that hits the backside of the calf with the shin. While a calf kick sacrifices range in comparison to a standard low roundhouse kick to the thigh, it can not be checked with a knee or grabbed with an arm making it a safer kick for a striker in MMA matches versus opponents capable of checking low kicks or grapplers looking for takedown opportunities. The kick was popularized by former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson.
In Korean, bandal chagi (반달 차기).
The crescent kick, also referred to as a "swing" kick, has some similarities to a hook kick and is sometimes practised as an off-target front snap kick. The leg is bent like the front kick, but the knee is pointed at a target to the left or right of the true target. The energy from the snap is then redirected, whipping the leg into an arc and hitting the target from the side. This is useful for getting inside defenses and striking the side of the head or for knocking down hands to follow up with a close attack. In many styles of tai chi and Kalaripayattu, crescent kicks are taught as tripping techniques. When training for crescent kicks, it is common to keep the knee extended to increase the difficulty. This also increases the momentum of the foot and can generate more force, though it takes longer to build up the speed.
The inward, inner, or inside crescent hits with the inside edge of the foot. Its arch is clockwise for the left leg and counter-clockwise for the right leg with force generated by both legs' movement towards from the midline of the body. The inward variant has also been called a hangetsu geri (half-moon kick) in karate and is employed to "wipe" an opponent's hand off of the wrist. It can quickly be followed up by a low side-blade kick to the knee of the offender.
The outward, outer, oroutside crescent hits with the "blade", the outside edge of the foot. Its path is counter-clockwise for the left leg and clockwise for the right leg and force is generated by both legs' hip abduction. This is similar to a rising side kick, only with the kicking leg's hip flexed so that the line of force travels parallel to the ground from front to side rather than straight up, beginning and ending at the side.
In Korean, huryeo chagi (후려 차기) or golcho chagi.
A hook kick strikes with the heel from the side. It is executed similar to a side kick. However, the kick is intentionally aimed slightly off target in the direction of the kicking foot's toes. At full extension, the knee is bent and the foot snapped to the side, impacting the target with the heel. In taekwondo it is often used at the resulting miss of a short slide side kick to the head, but is considered a very high level technique in said circumstance. Practitioners of jeet kune do frequently use the term heel hook kick or sweep kick. It is known as "gancho" in capoeira.
There are many variations of the hook kick, generally based on different foot work: rear- or front-leg, oblique or half-pivot, dropping, spin-back and more. The hook kick can be delivered with a near-straight leg at impact, or with a hooked finish (kake in Japanese karate) where the leg bends before impact to catch the target from behind. An important variation is the downward hook kick, delivered as a regular or a spin-back kick, in which the end of the trajectory is diagonally downwards for a surprise effect or following an evading opponent. Another important variation is the whip kick, which strikes with the flat of the foot instead of heel.
The hook kick is mainly used to strike the jaw area of an opponent, but is also highly effective in the temple region.
An L-kick, also called aú batido, is a movement in breakdancing, capoeira and other martial arts and dance forms. It is executed by throwing the body into a cartwheel motion, but rather than completing the wheel, the body flexes while supported by one hand on the ground. One leg is brought downwards and forwards in a kicking motion while the other remains in the air (giving rise to the name).
In Japanese, ushiro mawashi geri (後ろ回し蹴り); in Korean, bandae dollyo chagi (반대 돌려 차기), dwit hu ryo chagi, nakkio mom dollyo chagi or parryo chagi.
This kick is also known as a "heel kick", "turning kick", "reverse round kick", "spinning hook kick", "spin kick", or "wheel kick". A low reverse roundhouse is also known as a "sweep kick" or "sitting spin kick", however, in some martial arts circles, when aimed at a downward angle to the anterior side of the knee it is commonly referred to as a "shark kick" due to its tendency to tear the anterior cruciate ligament. A reverse roundhouse kick traditionally uses the protruding point on the backside of the heel to strike with, the kicking leg coming from around the kicker's back as they pivot and the knee remaining relatively straight on the follow through, unlike the leg position in a reverse hooking kick, despite the spinning motion and the part of the heel being roughly the same. Variations exist for low, middle and high heights. Spinning and leaping variations of the kick are also popular and are often showcased in film and television media. At UFC 142, Edson Barboza knocked out Terry Etim using a wheel kick in the third round of their fight, the first such in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
A similarly named but technically different kick, is the roundhouse kick performed by turning as if for a back straight kick and executing a roundhouse kick. It is known as a "reverse roundhouse kick" because the kicker turns in the opposite, or "reverse", direction before the kick is executed. This kick strikes with the ball of the foot for power or the top of the foot for range. This was exhibited by Bruce Lee on numerous occasions in his films Enter the Dragon, Fist of Fury and The Big Boss. Bill Wallace was also a great user of this kick, as seen in his fight with Bill Briggs, where he knocked his opponent out with the clocked 60 mph kick. The jump spin hook kick was popularized in the mid-eighties by Steven Ho in open martial art competitions.
In Olympic format (sport) taekwondo, this technique is performed using the balls of the feet and in a manner similar to a back thrust, rather than the circular technique adopted in other styles of martial arts.
A flying kick, in martial arts, is a general description of kicks that involve a running start, jump, then a kick in mid-air. Compared to a regular kick, the user is able to achieve greater momentum from the run at the start. Flying kicks are not to be mistaken for jumping kicks, which are similar maneuvers. A jumping kick is very similar to a flying kick, except that it lacks the running start and the user simply jumps and kicks from a stationary position. Flying kicks are often derived from the basic kicks. Some of the more commonly known flying kicks are the: flying side kick, flying back kick and the flying roundhouse kick, as well as the flying reverse roundhouse kick. Flying kicks are commonly practiced in Taekwondo, Karate, Wushu and Muay Thai for fitness, exhibitions and competition. It is known as tobi geri in Japanese martial arts and twyo chagi in Taekwondo.
The showtime kick gained notability after being used by mixed martial artist Anthony Pettis, during his fight against Benson Henderson on December 16, at WEC 53 for the WEC Lightweight Championship. In the fifth round Pettis ran up the cage, jumped off the cage, then landed a switch kick while airborne. Sports reporters later named this the "showtime kick". The kick was also used by mixed martial artists: Zabit Magomedsharipov and others. The kick was featured in the movie Here Comes the Boom.
Several kicks may be called a scissor kick, involving swinging out the legs to kick multiple targets or using the legs to take down an opponent.
The popularized version of a scissor kick is, while lying down, or jumping, the kicker brings both legs to both sides of the opponent's legs or to their body and head, then brings both in as a take down (as the name states, leg motions are like that of a pair of scissors).
The scissor kick in Taekwondo is called kawi chagi. In capoeira it is called tesoura (scissors).
Scissor kicks and other variants are also commonly applied in Vovinam.
A spinning heel kick is where the artist turns their body 360 degrees before landing the heel or the ball of their foot on the target. It is found in Muay Thai and is known in Capoeira as armada.
A vertical kick involves bringing the knee forward and across the chest, then swinging the hip while extending the kicking leg outward, striking with the outside ("sword") edge of the foot. In karate this is called a yoko geri keage, in Taekwondo it is referred to as sewo chagi and can be performed as either an inward (anuro) or outward (bakuro) kick.
In Japanese karate, the term ren geri is used for several kicks performed in succession. Old karate did not promote the use of the legs for weapons as much as modern karate does, seeing them as being too open for countering, in modern sport karate (non-traditional) competitions, however, the ability to use multiple kicks without setting the foot down has become a viable option, not only for effectiveness but also for stylish aesthetics.
In taekwondo, three types of multiple kick are distinguished:
One such multiple kick commonly seen in taekwondo, is a somewhat complex side kick where a high side kick is followed by a low side kick which is in turn followed by a more powerful side kick. This combination is done rapidly and is meant not for multiple targets but for a single one. A multiple kick usually targets the face, thigh and chest, but in turn can be a multiple chest attack which is useful for knocking the breath out of an attacker. A multiple kick is usually involves shooting the leg forward as in a front kick and then pivoting and turning so as to actually deliver a side kick. That style has far less power but is much faster and more deceptive, which is what the multiple kick was designed for. The multiple kick, unlike some side or side blade kicks, never uses the outer edge of the foot; it is intended solely for the heel to be used as the impact point. Depending on the strength and skill of the attacker and the attacked, the combination can be highly effective or highly ineffective when compared to more pragmatic attacks. In some encounters with highly trained and conditioned fighters, multiple side-kicks have seen disastrous results against the abs of their target.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A kick is a physical strike using the leg, in unison usually with an area of the knee or lower using the foot, heel, tibia (shin), ball of the foot, blade of the foot, toes or knee (the latter is also known as a knee strike). This type of attack is used frequently by hooved animals as well as humans in the context of stand-up fighting. Kicks play a significant role in many forms of martial arts, such as capoeira, karate, kickboxing, kung fu, MMA, Muay Thai, pankration, pradal serey, savate, sikaran, silat, taekwondo, vovinam, and Yaw-Yan. Kicks are a universal act of aggression among humans.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kicking is also prominent from its use in many sports, especially those called football. The best known of these sports is association football, also known as soccer.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The English verb to kick appears only in the late 14th century, apparently as a loan from Old Norse, originally in the sense of a hooved animal delivering strikes with his hind legs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kicks as an act of human aggression have likely existed worldwide since prehistory. However, the earliest documentation of high kicks, aimed above the waist or to the head, comes from Asian martial arts. Such kicks were introduced to the west in the 19th century with early hybrid martial arts inspired by Asian styles such as Bartitsu and Savate. Practice of high kicks became more universal in the second half of the 20th century with the more widespread development of hybrid styles such as kickboxing and eventually mixed martial arts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The history of the high kick in Asian martial arts is difficult to trace, it appears to be prevalent in all traditional forms of Indochinese kickboxing, but these cannot be traced with any technical detail to pre-modern times. In Muay Boran (\"ancient boxing\" in Thailand) was developed under Rama V (r. 1868–1910) and while it is known that earlier forms of \"boxing\" existed during the Ayutthaya Kingdom, the details regarding these techniques are unclear. Some stances that look like low kicks, but not high kicks, are visible in the Shaolin temple frescoes, dated to the 17th century. The Mahabharata (4.13), an Indian epic compiled at some point before the 5th century AD, describes an unarmed hand-to-hand battle, including the sentence \"and they gave each other violent kicks\" (without providing any further detail). Kicks including ones above the waist are commonly depicted in the stone carvings of the Khmer Empire temples in Cambodia.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "As the human leg is longer and stronger than the arm, kicks are generally used to keep an opponent at a distance, surprise them with their range and inflict substantial damage. Stance is also very important in any combat system and any attempt to deliver a kick will necessarily compromise stability to some degree. The application of kicks is a trade-off between the power and range that can be delivered against the cost incurred to balance. As combat situations are fluid, understanding this trade-off and making the appropriate decision to adjust to each moment is key.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kicks are commonly directed against helpless or downed targets, while for more general self-defense applications, the consensus is that simple kicks aimed at vulnerable targets below the chest may be highly efficient, but should be executed with a degree of care. Self-defense experts, such as author and teacher Marc Macyoung, claim that kicks should be aimed no higher than the waist/stomach. Thus, the fighter should not compromise their balance while delivering a kick and retract the leg properly to avoid grappling. It is often recommended to build and drill simple combinations that involve attacking different levels of an opponent. A common example would be distracting an opponent's focus via a fake jab, following up with a powerful attack at the opponent's legs and punching.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Further, since low kicks are inherently quicker and harder to see and dodge in general they are often emphasized in a street fight scenario.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The utility of high kicks (above chest level) has been debated. Proponents have viewed that some high front snap kicks are effective for striking the face or throat, particularly against charging opponents and flying kicks can be effective to scare off attackers. Martial arts systems that utilize high kicks also emphasize training of very efficient and technically perfected forms of kicks, include recovery techniques in the event of a miss or block and will employ a wide repertoire of kicks adapted to specific situations.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Detractors have asserted that the flying/jumping kicks performed in synthesis styles are primarily performed for conditioning or aesthetic reasons, while the high kicks as practiced in sport martial arts are privileged due to specialized tournament rules, such as limiting the contest to stand-up fighting, or reducing the penalty resulting from a failed attempt at delivering a kick.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Although kicks can result in an easy takedown for the opponent if they are caught or the resulting imbalance is exploited, kicks to all parts of the body are very present in mixed martial arts, with some fighters employing them sporadically, while others, like Lyoto Machida, Edson Barboza and Donald Cerrone rely heavily on their use and have multiple knockouts by kicks on their resume.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The attacker swings their leg sideways in a circular motion, kicking the opponent's side with the front of the leg, usually with the instep, ball of the foot, toe, or shin. It can also be performed is a 360-degree kick where the attacker performs a full circle with their leg, in which the striking surface is generally either the instep, shin or ball of the foot.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "There are many variations of the roundhouse kick based on various chambering of the cocked leg (small, or full, or universal or no chambering) or various footwork possibilities (rear-leg, front-leg, hopping, switch, oblique, dropping, ground spin-back or full 360 spin-back). An important variation is the downward roundhouse kick, nicknamed the \"Brazilian kick\" from recent K-1 use: A more pronounced twist of the hips allows for a downward end of the trajectory of the kick that is very deceiving.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Due to its power, the roundhouse kick may also be performed at low level against targets, such as the knees, calf, or even thigh, since attacking leg muscles will often cripple an opponent's mobility. It is the most commonly used kick in kickboxing due to its power and ease of use. In most Karate styles, the instep is used to strike, though use of the shin as an official technique for a street fight would mostly be allowed.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Delivering a front kick involves raising the knee and foot of the striking leg to the desired height and extending the leg to contact the target. The strike is usually delivered by the ball of the foot for a forward kick or the top of the toes for an upward kick. Taekwondo practitioners utilize both the heel and ball of the foot for striking. Various combat systems teach \"general\" front kicks using the heel or whole foot when footwear is on. Depending on the fighter's tactical needs, a front kick may involve more or less body motion and thrusting with the hips is a common method of increasing both reach and power of the kick. The front kick is typically executed with the upper body straight and balanced. Front kicks are typically aimed at targets below the chest: stomach, thighs, groin, knees or lower. Highly skilled martial artists are often capable of striking head-level targets with front kicks.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A side kick is delivered sideways in relation to the body of the person kicking. A standard side kick is performed by first \"chambering\" by raising the kicking leg diagonally across the body, then extending the leg in a linear fashion toward the target, while flexing the abdominals. The two common impact points in sidekicks are the heel or the outer edge of the foot, with the heel is more suited to hard targets such as the ribs, stomach, jaw, temple and chest. When executing a side kick with the heel, the toes should be pulled back so that they only make contact the heel and not with the whole foot as striking with the arch or the ball of the foot can injure the foot or break an ankle.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Another way of doing the side kick is to make it a result of a faked roundhouse. This technique is considered antiquated and used only after an opponent is persuaded to believe it is a roundhouse (a feint) and then led to believe that closing the distance is best for an upper body attack, which plays into the tactical position and relative requirement of this version of the side kick. In Korean, yeop chagi and in Okinawan fighting, it is sometimes called a \"dragon kick\". Some have called this side kick a \"twist kick\" due to its roundhouse like origins. This side kick begins as would a roundhouse kick however the practitioner allows the heel to move towards the center of the body. The kick is then directed outward from a cross-leg chamber so that the final destination of the kick is a target to the side, rather than one that is directly ahead.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Also referred to as a donkey kick, mule kick, horse kick or turning back kick. This kick is directed backwards, keeping the kicking leg close to the standing leg and using the heel as a striking surface. In wushu, this kick is called the \"half-moon\" kick but involves the slight arching of the back and a higher lift of the leg to give a larger curvature. It is often used to strike opponents by surprise when facing away from them.",
"title": "Basic kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "These are often complicated variations of basic kicks, either with a different target or combined with another move, such as jumping.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Japanese, kakato-geri or kakato-otoshi; in Korean, doki bal chagi or naeryeo chagi or chikka chagi. In Chinese, pigua tui or xiapi tui.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "An axe kick, also known as a hammer kick or stretch kick, is characterized by a straightened leg with the heel descending onto an opponent like the blade of an axe. It begins with one foot rising upward as in a crescent kick then the upward arc motion is stopped and then the attacking foot is lowered to strike the target from above. The arc can be performed in either an inward (counter-clockwise) or outward (clockwise) fashion.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A well-known proponent of the axe kick was Andy Hug, the Swiss Kyokushinkai Karateka who won the 1996 K-1 Grand Prix.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A butterfly kick is done by doing a large circular motion with both feet in succession, making the combatant airborne. There are many variations of this kick. The kick may look like a slanted aerial cartwheeland at the same time, the body spins horizontally in a circle. It begins as a jump with one leg while kicking with the other, then move the kicking leg down and the jumping leg up into a kick, landing with the first kicking leg, all while spinning. This kick involves arching the back when airborne to give a horizontal body with high angled legs striking horizontally. It may also resemble a jumping spin roundhouse kick (developed by James \"Two Screens\" Perkins) into a spinning hook kick, all in one jump and one spin although the difference is that both legs remain in the air at the same time for a considerable amount of time.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "First practiced in Chinese martial arts, the butterfly kick, or \"xuan zi\", is widely viewed as ineffective for actual combat. However, its original purpose was to evade an opponent's floor sweep and flip to the antagonist's exposed side or it may be used as a double aerial kick to an opponent standing off to the side. It is now widely used in demonstrative wushu forms (taolu) as a symbol of difficulty. Also note the similarity in execution when compared to an ice skating maneuver known as a flying camel spin (aka Button camel).",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "This strike is a low roundhouse kick that hits the backside of the calf with the shin. While a calf kick sacrifices range in comparison to a standard low roundhouse kick to the thigh, it can not be checked with a knee or grabbed with an arm making it a safer kick for a striker in MMA matches versus opponents capable of checking low kicks or grapplers looking for takedown opportunities. The kick was popularized by former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In Korean, bandal chagi (반달 차기).",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The crescent kick, also referred to as a \"swing\" kick, has some similarities to a hook kick and is sometimes practised as an off-target front snap kick. The leg is bent like the front kick, but the knee is pointed at a target to the left or right of the true target. The energy from the snap is then redirected, whipping the leg into an arc and hitting the target from the side. This is useful for getting inside defenses and striking the side of the head or for knocking down hands to follow up with a close attack. In many styles of tai chi and Kalaripayattu, crescent kicks are taught as tripping techniques. When training for crescent kicks, it is common to keep the knee extended to increase the difficulty. This also increases the momentum of the foot and can generate more force, though it takes longer to build up the speed.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The inward, inner, or inside crescent hits with the inside edge of the foot. Its arch is clockwise for the left leg and counter-clockwise for the right leg with force generated by both legs' movement towards from the midline of the body. The inward variant has also been called a hangetsu geri (half-moon kick) in karate and is employed to \"wipe\" an opponent's hand off of the wrist. It can quickly be followed up by a low side-blade kick to the knee of the offender.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The outward, outer, oroutside crescent hits with the \"blade\", the outside edge of the foot. Its path is counter-clockwise for the left leg and clockwise for the right leg and force is generated by both legs' hip abduction. This is similar to a rising side kick, only with the kicking leg's hip flexed so that the line of force travels parallel to the ground from front to side rather than straight up, beginning and ending at the side.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In Korean, huryeo chagi (후려 차기) or golcho chagi.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "A hook kick strikes with the heel from the side. It is executed similar to a side kick. However, the kick is intentionally aimed slightly off target in the direction of the kicking foot's toes. At full extension, the knee is bent and the foot snapped to the side, impacting the target with the heel. In taekwondo it is often used at the resulting miss of a short slide side kick to the head, but is considered a very high level technique in said circumstance. Practitioners of jeet kune do frequently use the term heel hook kick or sweep kick. It is known as \"gancho\" in capoeira.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "There are many variations of the hook kick, generally based on different foot work: rear- or front-leg, oblique or half-pivot, dropping, spin-back and more. The hook kick can be delivered with a near-straight leg at impact, or with a hooked finish (kake in Japanese karate) where the leg bends before impact to catch the target from behind. An important variation is the downward hook kick, delivered as a regular or a spin-back kick, in which the end of the trajectory is diagonally downwards for a surprise effect or following an evading opponent. Another important variation is the whip kick, which strikes with the flat of the foot instead of heel.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The hook kick is mainly used to strike the jaw area of an opponent, but is also highly effective in the temple region.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "An L-kick, also called aú batido, is a movement in breakdancing, capoeira and other martial arts and dance forms. It is executed by throwing the body into a cartwheel motion, but rather than completing the wheel, the body flexes while supported by one hand on the ground. One leg is brought downwards and forwards in a kicking motion while the other remains in the air (giving rise to the name).",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In Japanese, ushiro mawashi geri (後ろ回し蹴り); in Korean, bandae dollyo chagi (반대 돌려 차기), dwit hu ryo chagi, nakkio mom dollyo chagi or parryo chagi.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "This kick is also known as a \"heel kick\", \"turning kick\", \"reverse round kick\", \"spinning hook kick\", \"spin kick\", or \"wheel kick\". A low reverse roundhouse is also known as a \"sweep kick\" or \"sitting spin kick\", however, in some martial arts circles, when aimed at a downward angle to the anterior side of the knee it is commonly referred to as a \"shark kick\" due to its tendency to tear the anterior cruciate ligament. A reverse roundhouse kick traditionally uses the protruding point on the backside of the heel to strike with, the kicking leg coming from around the kicker's back as they pivot and the knee remaining relatively straight on the follow through, unlike the leg position in a reverse hooking kick, despite the spinning motion and the part of the heel being roughly the same. Variations exist for low, middle and high heights. Spinning and leaping variations of the kick are also popular and are often showcased in film and television media. At UFC 142, Edson Barboza knocked out Terry Etim using a wheel kick in the third round of their fight, the first such in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "A similarly named but technically different kick, is the roundhouse kick performed by turning as if for a back straight kick and executing a roundhouse kick. It is known as a \"reverse roundhouse kick\" because the kicker turns in the opposite, or \"reverse\", direction before the kick is executed. This kick strikes with the ball of the foot for power or the top of the foot for range. This was exhibited by Bruce Lee on numerous occasions in his films Enter the Dragon, Fist of Fury and The Big Boss. Bill Wallace was also a great user of this kick, as seen in his fight with Bill Briggs, where he knocked his opponent out with the clocked 60 mph kick. The jump spin hook kick was popularized in the mid-eighties by Steven Ho in open martial art competitions.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In Olympic format (sport) taekwondo, this technique is performed using the balls of the feet and in a manner similar to a back thrust, rather than the circular technique adopted in other styles of martial arts.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "A flying kick, in martial arts, is a general description of kicks that involve a running start, jump, then a kick in mid-air. Compared to a regular kick, the user is able to achieve greater momentum from the run at the start. Flying kicks are not to be mistaken for jumping kicks, which are similar maneuvers. A jumping kick is very similar to a flying kick, except that it lacks the running start and the user simply jumps and kicks from a stationary position. Flying kicks are often derived from the basic kicks. Some of the more commonly known flying kicks are the: flying side kick, flying back kick and the flying roundhouse kick, as well as the flying reverse roundhouse kick. Flying kicks are commonly practiced in Taekwondo, Karate, Wushu and Muay Thai for fitness, exhibitions and competition. It is known as tobi geri in Japanese martial arts and twyo chagi in Taekwondo.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The showtime kick gained notability after being used by mixed martial artist Anthony Pettis, during his fight against Benson Henderson on December 16, at WEC 53 for the WEC Lightweight Championship. In the fifth round Pettis ran up the cage, jumped off the cage, then landed a switch kick while airborne. Sports reporters later named this the \"showtime kick\". The kick was also used by mixed martial artists: Zabit Magomedsharipov and others. The kick was featured in the movie Here Comes the Boom.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Several kicks may be called a scissor kick, involving swinging out the legs to kick multiple targets or using the legs to take down an opponent.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The popularized version of a scissor kick is, while lying down, or jumping, the kicker brings both legs to both sides of the opponent's legs or to their body and head, then brings both in as a take down (as the name states, leg motions are like that of a pair of scissors).",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The scissor kick in Taekwondo is called kawi chagi. In capoeira it is called tesoura (scissors).",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Scissor kicks and other variants are also commonly applied in Vovinam.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "A spinning heel kick is where the artist turns their body 360 degrees before landing the heel or the ball of their foot on the target. It is found in Muay Thai and is known in Capoeira as armada.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A vertical kick involves bringing the knee forward and across the chest, then swinging the hip while extending the kicking leg outward, striking with the outside (\"sword\") edge of the foot. In karate this is called a yoko geri keage, in Taekwondo it is referred to as sewo chagi and can be performed as either an inward (anuro) or outward (bakuro) kick.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In Japanese karate, the term ren geri is used for several kicks performed in succession. Old karate did not promote the use of the legs for weapons as much as modern karate does, seeing them as being too open for countering, in modern sport karate (non-traditional) competitions, however, the ability to use multiple kicks without setting the foot down has become a viable option, not only for effectiveness but also for stylish aesthetics.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In taekwondo, three types of multiple kick are distinguished:",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "One such multiple kick commonly seen in taekwondo, is a somewhat complex side kick where a high side kick is followed by a low side kick which is in turn followed by a more powerful side kick. This combination is done rapidly and is meant not for multiple targets but for a single one. A multiple kick usually targets the face, thigh and chest, but in turn can be a multiple chest attack which is useful for knocking the breath out of an attacker. A multiple kick is usually involves shooting the leg forward as in a front kick and then pivoting and turning so as to actually deliver a side kick. That style has far less power but is much faster and more deceptive, which is what the multiple kick was designed for. The multiple kick, unlike some side or side blade kicks, never uses the outer edge of the foot; it is intended solely for the heel to be used as the impact point. Depending on the strength and skill of the attacker and the attacked, the combination can be highly effective or highly ineffective when compared to more pragmatic attacks. In some encounters with highly trained and conditioned fighters, multiple side-kicks have seen disastrous results against the abs of their target.",
"title": "Advanced kicks"
}
] |
A kick is a physical strike using the leg, in unison usually with an area of the knee or lower using the foot, heel, tibia (shin), ball of the foot, blade of the foot, toes or knee. This type of attack is used frequently by hooved animals as well as humans in the context of stand-up fighting. Kicks play a significant role in many forms of martial arts, such as capoeira, karate, kickboxing, kung fu, MMA, Muay Thai, pankration, pradal serey, savate, sikaran, silat, taekwondo, vovinam, and Yaw-Yan. Kicks are a universal act of aggression among humans. Kicking is also prominent from its use in many sports, especially those called football. The best known of these sports is association football, also known as soccer.
|
2001-09-17T14:01:11Z
|
2023-11-24T11:10:00Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kick
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16,838 |
Khalid al-Mihdhar
|
Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar (Arabic: خالد المحضار, romanized: Khālid al-Miḥḍār; also transliterated as AL Mihdhar; 16 May 1975 – 11 September 2001) was a Saudi Arabian terrorist hijacker. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon as part of the 11 September attacks.
Al-Mihdhar was born in Saudi Arabia. In early 1999, he traveled to Afghanistan where, as an experienced and respected jihadist, he was selected by Osama bin Laden to participate in the attacks. Al-Mihdhar arrived in California with fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi in January 2000, after traveling to Malaysia for the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit. At this point, the CIA was aware of al-Mihdhar, and he was photographed in Malaysia with another al-Qaeda member who was involved in the USS Cole bombing. The CIA did not inform the FBI when it learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had entered the United States, and al-Mihdhar was not placed on any watchlists until late August 2001.
Upon arriving in San Diego County, California, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were to train as pilots, but spoke English poorly and did not do well with flight lessons. In June 2000, al-Mihdhar left the United States for Yemen, leaving al-Hazmi behind in San Diego. Al-Mihdhar spent some time in Afghanistan in early 2001 and returned to the United States in early July 2001. He stayed in New Jersey in July and August, before arriving in the Washington, D.C., area at the beginning of September.
On the morning of 11 September 2001, al-Mihdhar boarded American Airlines Flight 77, and assisted in the hijacking of the plane which was hijacked approximately 30 minutes after takeoff. al-Mihdhar and his team of hijackers then deliberately crashed the plane into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard the flight, along with 125 on the ground.
Al-Mihdhar was born on 16 May 1975, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to a prominent family that belonged to the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. Little is known about his life before the age of 20, when he and childhood friend Nawaf al-Hazmi went to Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight with the mujahideen in the Bosnian War. After the war, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi went to Afghanistan where they fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and al-Qaeda would later dub al-Hazmi his "second in command". In 1997, al-Mihdhar told his family that he was leaving to fight in Chechnya, though it is not certain that he actually went to Chechnya. The same year, both men attracted the attention of Saudi Intelligence, who believed they were involved in arms smuggling, and the following year they were eyed as possible collaborators in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in East Africa after it emerged that Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali had given the FBI the phone number of al-Mihdhar's father-in-law; 967-1-200578, which turned out to be a key communications hub for al-Qaeda militants, and eventually tipped off the Americans about the upcoming Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit.
In the late 1990s, al-Mihdhar married Hoda al-Hada, who was the sister of a comrade from Yemen, and they had two daughters. Through marriage, al-Mihdhar was related to a number of individuals involved with al-Qaeda in some way. Al-Mihdhar's father-in-law, Ahmad Mohammad Ali al-Hada, helped facilitate al-Qaeda communications in Yemen, and in late 2001, al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law, Ahmed al-Darbi, was captured in Azerbaijan and sent to Guantanamo Bay on charges of supporting a plot to bomb ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
In Spring 1999, al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden committed to support the 9/11 attacks plot, which was largely organized by prominent al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were among the first group of participants selected for the operation, along with Tawfiq bin Attash and Abu Bara al Yemeni, al-Qaeda members from Yemen. Al-Mihdhar, who had spent time in al-Qaeda camps in the 1990s, was known and highly regarded by Bin Laden. Al-Mihdhar was so eager to participate in jihad operations in the United States that he had already obtained a one-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) multiple-entry visa from the consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 7 April 1999, one day after obtaining a new passport. Al-Mihdhar listed the Los Angeles Sheraton as his intended destination.
Once selected, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were sent to the Mes Aynak training camp in Afghanistan. In late 1999, al-Hazmi, bin Attash and al Yemeni went to Karachi, Pakistan to see Mohammed, who instructed them on Western culture and travel; however, al-Mihdhar did not go to Karachi, instead returning to Yemen. He was known as Sinaan during the preparations.
The CIA was aware of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi's involvement with al-Qaeda, having been informed by Saudi intelligence during a 1999 meeting in Riyadh. Based on information uncovered by the FBI in the 1998 United States embassy bombings case, the National Security Agency (NSA) began tracking the communications of Hada, al-Mihdhar's father-in-law. In late 1999, the NSA informed the CIA of an upcoming meeting in Malaysia, which Hada mentioned would involve "Khalid", "Nawaf", and "Salem", who was al-Hazmi's younger brother, Salem al-Hazmi.
On 4 January 2000, al-Mihdhar left Yemen and flew to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he spent the night. The CIA broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport, which gave them his full name, birth information and passport number for the first time, and alerted them that he held an entry visa to the United States. The photocopy was sent to the CIA's Alec Station, which was tracking al-Qaeda.
On 5 January 2000, al-Mihdhar traveled to Kuala Lumpur, where he joined al-Hazmi, bin Attash and al-Yemeni, who were all arriving from Pakistan. Hamburg cell member Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also at the summit, and Mohammed possibly attended. The group was in Malaysia to meet with Hambali, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Asian al-Qaeda affiliate. During the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit, many key details of the 9/11 attacks may have been arranged. At the time, the attacks plot had an additional component involving hijacking aircraft in Asia, as well as in the United States. Bin Attash and al-Yemeni were slated for this part of the plot. However, it was later canceled by bin Laden for being too difficult to coordinate with United States operations.
'[W]e've got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad. One of them, at least, has a multiple-entry visa to the U.S. We've got to tell the FBI.' And then [the CIA officer] said to me, 'No, it's not the FBI's case, not the FBI's jurisdiction.'
Mark Rossini, "The Spy Factory"
In Malaysia, the group stayed with Yazid Sufaat, a local Jemaah Islamiyah member, who provided accommodation at Hambali's request. Both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were secretly photographed at the meeting by Malaysian authorities, whom the CIA had asked to provide surveillance. The Malaysians reported that al-Mihdhar spoke at length with bin Attash, and he met with Fahd al-Quso and others who were later involved in the USS Cole bombing. After the meeting, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi traveled to Bangkok, Thailand, on 8 January and left a week later on 15 January for the United States.
On 15 January 2000, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from Bangkok and were admitted as tourists for a period of six months. Immediately after entering the country, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi met Omar al-Bayoumi in an airport restaurant. Al-Bayoumi claimed he was merely being charitable in assisting the two seemingly out-of-place Muslims with moving to San Diego, where he helped them find an apartment near his own, co-signed their lease, and gave them $1,500 to help pay their rent. Mohammed later claimed that he suggested San Diego as their destination, based on information gleaned from a San Diego phone book that listed language and flight schools. Mohammed also recommended that the two seek assistance from the local Muslim community, since neither spoke English nor had experience with Western culture.
While in San Diego, witnesses told the FBI he and al-Hazmi had a close relationship with Anwar Al Awlaki, an imam who served as their spiritual advisor. Authorities say the two regularly attended the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque al-Awlaki led in San Diego, and al-Awlaki had many closed-door meetings with them, which led investigators to believe al-Awlaki knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.
In early February 2000, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi rented an apartment at the Parkwood Apartments complex in the Clairemont Mesa area of San Diego, and al-Mihdhar purchased a used 1988 Toyota Corolla. Neighbors thought that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were odd because months passed without the men getting any furniture, and they slept on mattresses on the floor, yet they carried briefcases, were frequently on their mobile phones, and were occasionally picked up by a limousine. Those who met al-Mihdhar in San Diego described him as "dark and brooding, with a disdain for American culture". Neighbors also said that the pair constantly played flight simulator games.
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi took flight lessons on 5 May 2000, at the Sorbi Flying Club in San Diego, with al-Mihdhar flying an aircraft for 42 minutes. They took additional lessons on 10 May; however, with poor English skills, they did not do well with flight lessons. Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi raised some suspicion when they offered extra money to their flight instructor, Richard Garza, if he would train them to fly jets. Garza refused the offer but did not report them to authorities. After the 9/11 attacks, Garza described the two men as "impatient students" who "wanted to learn to fly jets, specifically Boeings".
Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi moved out of the Parkwood Apartments at the end of May 2000, and al-Mihdhar transferred registration for the Toyota Corolla to al-Hazmi. On 10 June 2000, al-Mihdhar left the United States and returned to Yemen to visit his wife, against the wishes of Mohammed who wanted him to remain in the United States to help al-Hazmi adapt. Mohammed was so angered by this that he decided to remove al-Mihdhar from the 9/11 plot, but he was overruled by bin Laden. Al-Mihdhar remained part of the plot as a muscle hijacker, who would help take over the aircraft. On 12 October 2000, the USS Cole was bombed by a small boat loaded with explosives. After the bombing, Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul Karim al-Iryani reported that al-Mihdhar had been one of the key planners of the attack and had been in the country at the time of the attacks. In late 2000, al-Mihdhar was back in Saudi Arabia, staying with a cousin in Mecca.
In February 2001, al-Mihdhar returned to Afghanistan for several months, possibly entering across the Iranian border after a flight from Syria. FBI director Robert Mueller later stated his belief that al-Mihdhar served as the coordinator and organizer for the muscle hijackers. He was the last of the muscle hijackers to return to the United States. On 10 June, he returned to Saudi Arabia for a month, where he applied to re-enter the United States through the Visa Express program, indicating that he intended to stay at a Marriott hotel in New York City. On his visa application, al-Mihdhar falsely stated that he had never previously traveled to the United States.
On 4 July, al-Mihdhar returned to the United States, arriving at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport, using a new passport obtained the previous month. A digital copy of one of al-Mihdhar's passports was later recovered during a search of an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, which held indicators, such as fake or altered passport stamps, that al-Mihdhar was a member of a known terrorist group. At the time when al-Mihdhar was admitted to the United States, immigration inspectors had not been trained to look for such indicators. Upon arriving, al-Mihdhar did not check into the Marriott but instead spent a night at another hotel in the city.
Al-Mihdhar bought a fake ID on July 10 from All Services Plus in Passaic County, New Jersey, which was in the business of selling counterfeit documents, including another ID to Flight 11 hijacker Abdulaziz al-Omari. On 1 August, al-Mihdhar and fellow Flight 77 hijacker Hani Hanjour drove to Virginia in order to obtain driver's licenses. Once they arrived, they scouted out a 7-Eleven convenience store and a dollar store in Falls Church, and found two Salvadoran immigrants who, for $50 each, were willing to vouch for al-Mihdhar and Hanjour as being Virginian residents. With notarized residency forms, al-Mihdhar and Hanjour were able to obtain driver's licenses at a Virginian motor vehicle office. Flight 77 hijackers Salem al-Hazmi and Majed Moqed, and United Airlines Flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah used the same addresses obtained from the Salvadorans to obtain Virginian driver's licenses.
In August 2001, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi made several visits to the library at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where they used computers to look up travel information and book flights. On 22 August, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi tried to purchase flight tickets from the American Airlines online ticket-merchant, but had technical difficulties and gave up. Al-Mihdhar and Moqed were able to make flight reservations for Flight 77 on 25 August, using Moqed's credit card; however, the transaction did not fully go through because the billing address and the shipment address for the tickets did not match.
On 31 August, al-Mihdhar closed an account at Hudson United Bank in New Jersey, having opened the account when he arrived in July, and was with Hanjour when he made a withdrawal from an ATM in Paterson on September 1. The next day, al-Mihdhar, Moqed and Hanjour traveled to Maryland, where they stayed at budget motels in Laurel. Al-Mihdhar was among the muscle hijackers who worked out at a Gold's Gym in Greenbelt in early September. On September 5, al-Mihdhar and Moqed went to the American Airlines ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport to pick up their tickets for Flight 77, paying $2,300 in cash.
Despite knowledge of his entry into the United States for over a year, al-Mihdhar was not placed on a CIA watchlist until 21 August 2001, and a note was sent on 23 August to the Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi be added to their watchlists. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was not notified about the two men. On 23 August, the CIA informed the FBI that al-Mihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah. The FBI headquarters received a copy of the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on 24 August, showing the New York Marriott as al-Mihdhar's destination. On 23 August, the Mossad gave al-Mihdhar's name to the CIA as one of 19 US residents they suspected would imminently attack the country; only four of these names are known publicly, the others being fellow 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Marwan al-Shehhi. It is not known if the list contained the names of all the 9/11 hijackers or if it were only coincidence that the list had as many names as there were hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.
On 28 August, the FBI New York field office requested that a criminal case be opened to determine whether al-Mihdhar was still in the United States, but the request was refused. The FBI ended up treating al-Mihdhar as an intelligence case, which meant that the FBI's criminal investigators could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence and criminal case operations. An agent in the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying, "Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'" The reply from headquarters was, "we [at headquarters] are all frustrated with this issue ... [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them up."
The FBI contacted Marriott on 30 August, requesting that they check guest records, and on 5 September, they reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of al-Mihdhar checking in. The day before the attacks, Robert Fuller of the New York office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings, because those were the two airlines al-Mihdhar had used to enter the country. Neither the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the FBI's Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other private financial records, were notified about al-Mihdhar prior to 11 September.
Regarding the CIA's refusal to inform the FBI about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, author Lawrence Wright suggests the CIA wanted to protect its turf and was concerned about giving sensitive intelligence to FBI Agent John P. O'Neill, who Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer described as duplicitous. Wright also speculates that the CIA may have been protecting intelligence operations overseas, and might have been eying al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi as recruitment targets to obtain intelligence on al-Qaeda, although the CIA was not authorized to operate in the United States and might have been leaving them for Saudi intelligence to recruit.
On 10 September 2001, al-Mihdhar and the other hijackers checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia, near Washington Dulles International Airport. Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a prominent Saudi Arabian government official, was staying at the same hotel that night, although there is no evidence that they met or knew of each other's presence.
At 6:22 a.m. on 11 September 2001, the group checked out of the hotel and headed to Dulles airport. At 7:15 a.m., al-Mihdhar and Moqed checked in at the American Airlines ticket counter and arrived at the passenger security checkpoint at 7:20 a.m. Both men set off the metal detector and were put through secondary screening. Security video footage later released shows that Moqed was wanded, but the screener did not identify what set off the alarm, and both Moqed and al-Mihdhar were able to proceed without further hindrance. Al-Mihdhar was also selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which involved extra screening of his luggage; however, because al-Mihdhar did not check any luggage, this had no effect. By 7:50 a.m., al-Mihdhar and the other hijackers, carrying knives and box cutters, had made it through the airport security checkpoint and boarded Flight 77 to Los Angeles. Al-Mihdhar was seated in seat 12B, next to Moqed.
The flight was scheduled to depart from Gate D26 at 8:10 a.m. but was delayed by 10 minutes. The last routine radio communication from the plane to air traffic control occurred at 8:50:51 a.m. At 8:54 a.m., Flight 77 deviated from its assigned flight path and began to turn south, at which point the hijackers set the flight's autopilot setting for Washington, D.C. Passenger Barbara Olson called her husband, United States Solicitor General Ted Olson (whose 61st birthday was on that day), and reported that the plane had been hijacked. At 9:37:45 a.m, Flight 77 crashed into the west facade of the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard, along with 125 in the Pentagon. In the recovery process, remains of the five hijackers were identified through a process of elimination, since their DNA did not match any from the victims, and put into the custody of the FBI.
After the attacks, the identification of al-Mihdhar was one of the first links suggesting that bin Laden had played a role in their organization, since al-Mihdhar had been seen at the Malaysian conference speaking to bin Laden's associates. The FBI interrogated Quso, who was arrested following the USS Cole bombing and in custody in Yemen. Quso was able to identify al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and bin Attash in photos provided by the FBI, and he also knew Marwan al-Shehhi, a hijacker aboard United Airlines Flight 175. From Quso, the FBI was able to establish an al-Qaeda link to the attacks.
On 12 September 2001, the Toyota Corolla purchased by al-Mihdhar was found in Dulles International Airport's hourly parking lot. Inside the vehicle, authorities found a letter written by Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard American Airlines Flight 11; maps of Washington, D.C. and New York City; a cashier's check made out to a Phoenix, Arizona, flight school; four drawings of a Boeing 757 cockpit; a box cutter; and a page with notes and phone numbers, which contained evidence that led investigators to San Diego.
On 19 September 2001, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) distributed a special alert that listed al-Mihdhar as still alive, and other reports began suggesting that a number of the alleged hijackers were likewise still alive. For instance, on 23 September 2001, the BBC published an article that suggested al-Mihdhar and others named as hijackers were still at large. The German magazine Der Spiegel later investigated the BBC's claims of "living" hijackers and reported they were cases of mistaken identities. In 2002, Saudi Arabian officials stated that the names of the hijackers were correct and that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. In 2006, in response to 9/11 conspiracy theories surrounding its original news story, the BBC said that confusion had arisen with the common Arabic names, and that its later reports on the hijackers superseded its original story.
In 2005, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged that the Defense Department data mining project Able Danger identified al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, al-Shehri, and Atta as members of a Brooklyn-based al-Qaeda cell in early 2000. Shaffer largely based his allegations on the recollections of Navy Captain Scott Phillpott, who later recanted his recollection, telling investigators that he was "convinced that Atta was not on the chart that we had". Phillpott said that Shaffer was "relying on my recollection 100 percent", and the Defense Department Inspector General's report indicated that Philpott strongly supported the social network analysis techniques used in Able Danger, and might have exaggerated claims of identifying the hijackers.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar (Arabic: خالد المحضار, romanized: Khālid al-Miḥḍār; also transliterated as AL Mihdhar; 16 May 1975 – 11 September 2001) was a Saudi Arabian terrorist hijacker. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon as part of the 11 September attacks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Al-Mihdhar was born in Saudi Arabia. In early 1999, he traveled to Afghanistan where, as an experienced and respected jihadist, he was selected by Osama bin Laden to participate in the attacks. Al-Mihdhar arrived in California with fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi in January 2000, after traveling to Malaysia for the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit. At this point, the CIA was aware of al-Mihdhar, and he was photographed in Malaysia with another al-Qaeda member who was involved in the USS Cole bombing. The CIA did not inform the FBI when it learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had entered the United States, and al-Mihdhar was not placed on any watchlists until late August 2001.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Upon arriving in San Diego County, California, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were to train as pilots, but spoke English poorly and did not do well with flight lessons. In June 2000, al-Mihdhar left the United States for Yemen, leaving al-Hazmi behind in San Diego. Al-Mihdhar spent some time in Afghanistan in early 2001 and returned to the United States in early July 2001. He stayed in New Jersey in July and August, before arriving in the Washington, D.C., area at the beginning of September.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "On the morning of 11 September 2001, al-Mihdhar boarded American Airlines Flight 77, and assisted in the hijacking of the plane which was hijacked approximately 30 minutes after takeoff. al-Mihdhar and his team of hijackers then deliberately crashed the plane into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard the flight, along with 125 on the ground.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Al-Mihdhar was born on 16 May 1975, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to a prominent family that belonged to the Quraysh tribe of Mecca. Little is known about his life before the age of 20, when he and childhood friend Nawaf al-Hazmi went to Bosnia and Herzegovina to fight with the mujahideen in the Bosnian War. After the war, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi went to Afghanistan where they fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, and al-Qaeda would later dub al-Hazmi his \"second in command\". In 1997, al-Mihdhar told his family that he was leaving to fight in Chechnya, though it is not certain that he actually went to Chechnya. The same year, both men attracted the attention of Saudi Intelligence, who believed they were involved in arms smuggling, and the following year they were eyed as possible collaborators in the 1998 United States embassy bombings in East Africa after it emerged that Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali had given the FBI the phone number of al-Mihdhar's father-in-law; 967-1-200578, which turned out to be a key communications hub for al-Qaeda militants, and eventually tipped off the Americans about the upcoming Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the late 1990s, al-Mihdhar married Hoda al-Hada, who was the sister of a comrade from Yemen, and they had two daughters. Through marriage, al-Mihdhar was related to a number of individuals involved with al-Qaeda in some way. Al-Mihdhar's father-in-law, Ahmad Mohammad Ali al-Hada, helped facilitate al-Qaeda communications in Yemen, and in late 2001, al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law, Ahmed al-Darbi, was captured in Azerbaijan and sent to Guantanamo Bay on charges of supporting a plot to bomb ships in the Strait of Hormuz.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In Spring 1999, al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden committed to support the 9/11 attacks plot, which was largely organized by prominent al-Qaeda member Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were among the first group of participants selected for the operation, along with Tawfiq bin Attash and Abu Bara al Yemeni, al-Qaeda members from Yemen. Al-Mihdhar, who had spent time in al-Qaeda camps in the 1990s, was known and highly regarded by Bin Laden. Al-Mihdhar was so eager to participate in jihad operations in the United States that he had already obtained a one-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) multiple-entry visa from the consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on 7 April 1999, one day after obtaining a new passport. Al-Mihdhar listed the Los Angeles Sheraton as his intended destination.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Once selected, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were sent to the Mes Aynak training camp in Afghanistan. In late 1999, al-Hazmi, bin Attash and al Yemeni went to Karachi, Pakistan to see Mohammed, who instructed them on Western culture and travel; however, al-Mihdhar did not go to Karachi, instead returning to Yemen. He was known as Sinaan during the preparations.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The CIA was aware of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi's involvement with al-Qaeda, having been informed by Saudi intelligence during a 1999 meeting in Riyadh. Based on information uncovered by the FBI in the 1998 United States embassy bombings case, the National Security Agency (NSA) began tracking the communications of Hada, al-Mihdhar's father-in-law. In late 1999, the NSA informed the CIA of an upcoming meeting in Malaysia, which Hada mentioned would involve \"Khalid\", \"Nawaf\", and \"Salem\", who was al-Hazmi's younger brother, Salem al-Hazmi.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 4 January 2000, al-Mihdhar left Yemen and flew to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he spent the night. The CIA broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport, which gave them his full name, birth information and passport number for the first time, and alerted them that he held an entry visa to the United States. The photocopy was sent to the CIA's Alec Station, which was tracking al-Qaeda.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 5 January 2000, al-Mihdhar traveled to Kuala Lumpur, where he joined al-Hazmi, bin Attash and al-Yemeni, who were all arriving from Pakistan. Hamburg cell member Ramzi bin al-Shibh was also at the summit, and Mohammed possibly attended. The group was in Malaysia to meet with Hambali, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Asian al-Qaeda affiliate. During the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit, many key details of the 9/11 attacks may have been arranged. At the time, the attacks plot had an additional component involving hijacking aircraft in Asia, as well as in the United States. Bin Attash and al-Yemeni were slated for this part of the plot. However, it was later canceled by bin Laden for being too difficult to coordinate with United States operations.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "'[W]e've got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad. One of them, at least, has a multiple-entry visa to the U.S. We've got to tell the FBI.' And then [the CIA officer] said to me, 'No, it's not the FBI's case, not the FBI's jurisdiction.'",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Mark Rossini, \"The Spy Factory\"",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In Malaysia, the group stayed with Yazid Sufaat, a local Jemaah Islamiyah member, who provided accommodation at Hambali's request. Both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were secretly photographed at the meeting by Malaysian authorities, whom the CIA had asked to provide surveillance. The Malaysians reported that al-Mihdhar spoke at length with bin Attash, and he met with Fahd al-Quso and others who were later involved in the USS Cole bombing. After the meeting, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi traveled to Bangkok, Thailand, on 8 January and left a week later on 15 January for the United States.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On 15 January 2000, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from Bangkok and were admitted as tourists for a period of six months. Immediately after entering the country, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi met Omar al-Bayoumi in an airport restaurant. Al-Bayoumi claimed he was merely being charitable in assisting the two seemingly out-of-place Muslims with moving to San Diego, where he helped them find an apartment near his own, co-signed their lease, and gave them $1,500 to help pay their rent. Mohammed later claimed that he suggested San Diego as their destination, based on information gleaned from a San Diego phone book that listed language and flight schools. Mohammed also recommended that the two seek assistance from the local Muslim community, since neither spoke English nor had experience with Western culture.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "While in San Diego, witnesses told the FBI he and al-Hazmi had a close relationship with Anwar Al Awlaki, an imam who served as their spiritual advisor. Authorities say the two regularly attended the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque al-Awlaki led in San Diego, and al-Awlaki had many closed-door meetings with them, which led investigators to believe al-Awlaki knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In early February 2000, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi rented an apartment at the Parkwood Apartments complex in the Clairemont Mesa area of San Diego, and al-Mihdhar purchased a used 1988 Toyota Corolla. Neighbors thought that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were odd because months passed without the men getting any furniture, and they slept on mattresses on the floor, yet they carried briefcases, were frequently on their mobile phones, and were occasionally picked up by a limousine. Those who met al-Mihdhar in San Diego described him as \"dark and brooding, with a disdain for American culture\". Neighbors also said that the pair constantly played flight simulator games.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi took flight lessons on 5 May 2000, at the Sorbi Flying Club in San Diego, with al-Mihdhar flying an aircraft for 42 minutes. They took additional lessons on 10 May; however, with poor English skills, they did not do well with flight lessons. Al-Mihdhar and Al-Hazmi raised some suspicion when they offered extra money to their flight instructor, Richard Garza, if he would train them to fly jets. Garza refused the offer but did not report them to authorities. After the 9/11 attacks, Garza described the two men as \"impatient students\" who \"wanted to learn to fly jets, specifically Boeings\".",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi moved out of the Parkwood Apartments at the end of May 2000, and al-Mihdhar transferred registration for the Toyota Corolla to al-Hazmi. On 10 June 2000, al-Mihdhar left the United States and returned to Yemen to visit his wife, against the wishes of Mohammed who wanted him to remain in the United States to help al-Hazmi adapt. Mohammed was so angered by this that he decided to remove al-Mihdhar from the 9/11 plot, but he was overruled by bin Laden. Al-Mihdhar remained part of the plot as a muscle hijacker, who would help take over the aircraft. On 12 October 2000, the USS Cole was bombed by a small boat loaded with explosives. After the bombing, Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul Karim al-Iryani reported that al-Mihdhar had been one of the key planners of the attack and had been in the country at the time of the attacks. In late 2000, al-Mihdhar was back in Saudi Arabia, staying with a cousin in Mecca.",
"title": "2000"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In February 2001, al-Mihdhar returned to Afghanistan for several months, possibly entering across the Iranian border after a flight from Syria. FBI director Robert Mueller later stated his belief that al-Mihdhar served as the coordinator and organizer for the muscle hijackers. He was the last of the muscle hijackers to return to the United States. On 10 June, he returned to Saudi Arabia for a month, where he applied to re-enter the United States through the Visa Express program, indicating that he intended to stay at a Marriott hotel in New York City. On his visa application, al-Mihdhar falsely stated that he had never previously traveled to the United States.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On 4 July, al-Mihdhar returned to the United States, arriving at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport, using a new passport obtained the previous month. A digital copy of one of al-Mihdhar's passports was later recovered during a search of an al-Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan, which held indicators, such as fake or altered passport stamps, that al-Mihdhar was a member of a known terrorist group. At the time when al-Mihdhar was admitted to the United States, immigration inspectors had not been trained to look for such indicators. Upon arriving, al-Mihdhar did not check into the Marriott but instead spent a night at another hotel in the city.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Al-Mihdhar bought a fake ID on July 10 from All Services Plus in Passaic County, New Jersey, which was in the business of selling counterfeit documents, including another ID to Flight 11 hijacker Abdulaziz al-Omari. On 1 August, al-Mihdhar and fellow Flight 77 hijacker Hani Hanjour drove to Virginia in order to obtain driver's licenses. Once they arrived, they scouted out a 7-Eleven convenience store and a dollar store in Falls Church, and found two Salvadoran immigrants who, for $50 each, were willing to vouch for al-Mihdhar and Hanjour as being Virginian residents. With notarized residency forms, al-Mihdhar and Hanjour were able to obtain driver's licenses at a Virginian motor vehicle office. Flight 77 hijackers Salem al-Hazmi and Majed Moqed, and United Airlines Flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah used the same addresses obtained from the Salvadorans to obtain Virginian driver's licenses.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In August 2001, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi made several visits to the library at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, where they used computers to look up travel information and book flights. On 22 August, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi tried to purchase flight tickets from the American Airlines online ticket-merchant, but had technical difficulties and gave up. Al-Mihdhar and Moqed were able to make flight reservations for Flight 77 on 25 August, using Moqed's credit card; however, the transaction did not fully go through because the billing address and the shipment address for the tickets did not match.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "On 31 August, al-Mihdhar closed an account at Hudson United Bank in New Jersey, having opened the account when he arrived in July, and was with Hanjour when he made a withdrawal from an ATM in Paterson on September 1. The next day, al-Mihdhar, Moqed and Hanjour traveled to Maryland, where they stayed at budget motels in Laurel. Al-Mihdhar was among the muscle hijackers who worked out at a Gold's Gym in Greenbelt in early September. On September 5, al-Mihdhar and Moqed went to the American Airlines ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport to pick up their tickets for Flight 77, paying $2,300 in cash.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Despite knowledge of his entry into the United States for over a year, al-Mihdhar was not placed on a CIA watchlist until 21 August 2001, and a note was sent on 23 August to the Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi be added to their watchlists. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was not notified about the two men. On 23 August, the CIA informed the FBI that al-Mihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah. The FBI headquarters received a copy of the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on 24 August, showing the New York Marriott as al-Mihdhar's destination. On 23 August, the Mossad gave al-Mihdhar's name to the CIA as one of 19 US residents they suspected would imminently attack the country; only four of these names are known publicly, the others being fellow 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Marwan al-Shehhi. It is not known if the list contained the names of all the 9/11 hijackers or if it were only coincidence that the list had as many names as there were hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On 28 August, the FBI New York field office requested that a criminal case be opened to determine whether al-Mihdhar was still in the United States, but the request was refused. The FBI ended up treating al-Mihdhar as an intelligence case, which meant that the FBI's criminal investigators could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence and criminal case operations. An agent in the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying, \"Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'\" The reply from headquarters was, \"we [at headquarters] are all frustrated with this issue ... [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them up.\"",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The FBI contacted Marriott on 30 August, requesting that they check guest records, and on 5 September, they reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of al-Mihdhar checking in. The day before the attacks, Robert Fuller of the New York office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings, because those were the two airlines al-Mihdhar had used to enter the country. Neither the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the FBI's Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other private financial records, were notified about al-Mihdhar prior to 11 September.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Regarding the CIA's refusal to inform the FBI about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, author Lawrence Wright suggests the CIA wanted to protect its turf and was concerned about giving sensitive intelligence to FBI Agent John P. O'Neill, who Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer described as duplicitous. Wright also speculates that the CIA may have been protecting intelligence operations overseas, and might have been eying al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi as recruitment targets to obtain intelligence on al-Qaeda, although the CIA was not authorized to operate in the United States and might have been leaving them for Saudi intelligence to recruit.",
"title": "2001"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "On 10 September 2001, al-Mihdhar and the other hijackers checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia, near Washington Dulles International Airport. Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a prominent Saudi Arabian government official, was staying at the same hotel that night, although there is no evidence that they met or knew of each other's presence.",
"title": "September 11 attacks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "At 6:22 a.m. on 11 September 2001, the group checked out of the hotel and headed to Dulles airport. At 7:15 a.m., al-Mihdhar and Moqed checked in at the American Airlines ticket counter and arrived at the passenger security checkpoint at 7:20 a.m. Both men set off the metal detector and were put through secondary screening. Security video footage later released shows that Moqed was wanded, but the screener did not identify what set off the alarm, and both Moqed and al-Mihdhar were able to proceed without further hindrance. Al-Mihdhar was also selected by the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which involved extra screening of his luggage; however, because al-Mihdhar did not check any luggage, this had no effect. By 7:50 a.m., al-Mihdhar and the other hijackers, carrying knives and box cutters, had made it through the airport security checkpoint and boarded Flight 77 to Los Angeles. Al-Mihdhar was seated in seat 12B, next to Moqed.",
"title": "September 11 attacks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The flight was scheduled to depart from Gate D26 at 8:10 a.m. but was delayed by 10 minutes. The last routine radio communication from the plane to air traffic control occurred at 8:50:51 a.m. At 8:54 a.m., Flight 77 deviated from its assigned flight path and began to turn south, at which point the hijackers set the flight's autopilot setting for Washington, D.C. Passenger Barbara Olson called her husband, United States Solicitor General Ted Olson (whose 61st birthday was on that day), and reported that the plane had been hijacked. At 9:37:45 a.m, Flight 77 crashed into the west facade of the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard, along with 125 in the Pentagon. In the recovery process, remains of the five hijackers were identified through a process of elimination, since their DNA did not match any from the victims, and put into the custody of the FBI.",
"title": "September 11 attacks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "After the attacks, the identification of al-Mihdhar was one of the first links suggesting that bin Laden had played a role in their organization, since al-Mihdhar had been seen at the Malaysian conference speaking to bin Laden's associates. The FBI interrogated Quso, who was arrested following the USS Cole bombing and in custody in Yemen. Quso was able to identify al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and bin Attash in photos provided by the FBI, and he also knew Marwan al-Shehhi, a hijacker aboard United Airlines Flight 175. From Quso, the FBI was able to establish an al-Qaeda link to the attacks.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 12 September 2001, the Toyota Corolla purchased by al-Mihdhar was found in Dulles International Airport's hourly parking lot. Inside the vehicle, authorities found a letter written by Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard American Airlines Flight 11; maps of Washington, D.C. and New York City; a cashier's check made out to a Phoenix, Arizona, flight school; four drawings of a Boeing 757 cockpit; a box cutter; and a page with notes and phone numbers, which contained evidence that led investigators to San Diego.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On 19 September 2001, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) distributed a special alert that listed al-Mihdhar as still alive, and other reports began suggesting that a number of the alleged hijackers were likewise still alive. For instance, on 23 September 2001, the BBC published an article that suggested al-Mihdhar and others named as hijackers were still at large. The German magazine Der Spiegel later investigated the BBC's claims of \"living\" hijackers and reported they were cases of mistaken identities. In 2002, Saudi Arabian officials stated that the names of the hijackers were correct and that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. In 2006, in response to 9/11 conspiracy theories surrounding its original news story, the BBC said that confusion had arisen with the common Arabic names, and that its later reports on the hijackers superseded its original story.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 2005, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged that the Defense Department data mining project Able Danger identified al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, al-Shehri, and Atta as members of a Brooklyn-based al-Qaeda cell in early 2000. Shaffer largely based his allegations on the recollections of Navy Captain Scott Phillpott, who later recanted his recollection, telling investigators that he was \"convinced that Atta was not on the chart that we had\". Phillpott said that Shaffer was \"relying on my recollection 100 percent\", and the Defense Department Inspector General's report indicated that Philpott strongly supported the social network analysis techniques used in Able Danger, and might have exaggerated claims of identifying the hijackers.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "",
"title": "Sources"
}
] |
Khalid Muhammad Abdallah al-Mihdhar was a Saudi Arabian terrorist hijacker. He was one of the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon as part of the 11 September attacks. Al-Mihdhar was born in Saudi Arabia. In early 1999, he traveled to Afghanistan where, as an experienced and respected jihadist, he was selected by Osama bin Laden to participate in the attacks. Al-Mihdhar arrived in California with fellow hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi in January 2000, after traveling to Malaysia for the Kuala Lumpur al-Qaeda Summit. At this point, the CIA was aware of al-Mihdhar, and he was photographed in Malaysia with another al-Qaeda member who was involved in the USS Cole bombing. The CIA did not inform the FBI when it learned that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had entered the United States, and al-Mihdhar was not placed on any watchlists until late August 2001. Upon arriving in San Diego County, California, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were to train as pilots, but spoke English poorly and did not do well with flight lessons. In June 2000, al-Mihdhar left the United States for Yemen, leaving al-Hazmi behind in San Diego. Al-Mihdhar spent some time in Afghanistan in early 2001 and returned to the United States in early July 2001. He stayed in New Jersey in July and August, before arriving in the Washington, D.C., area at the beginning of September. On the morning of 11 September 2001, al-Mihdhar boarded American Airlines Flight 77, and assisted in the hijacking of the plane which was hijacked approximately 30 minutes after takeoff. al-Mihdhar and his team of hijackers then deliberately crashed the plane into the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard the flight, along with 125 on the ground.
|
2001-09-16T20:30:14Z
|
2023-12-26T16:24:34Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_al-Mihdhar
|
16,839 |
Kilo-
|
Kilo is a decimal unit prefix in the metric system denoting multiplication by one thousand (10). It is used in the International System of Units, where it has the symbol k, in lowercase.
The prefix kilo is derived from the Greek word χίλιοι (chilioi), meaning "thousand".
In 19th century English it was sometimes spelled chilio, in line with a puristic opinion by Thomas Young. As an opponent of suggestions to introduce the metric system in Britain, he qualified the nomenclature adopted in France as barbarous.
By extension, currencies are also sometimes preceded by the prefix kilo-:
For the kilobyte, a second definition has been in common use in some fields of computer science and information technology. It uses kilobyte to mean 2 bytes (= 1024 bytes), because of the mathematical coincidence that 2 is approximately 10. The reason for this application is that digital hardware and architectures natively use base 2 exponentiation, and not decimal systems. JEDEC memory standards still permit this definition, but acknowledge the correct SI usage.
NIST comments on the confusion caused by these contrasting definitions: "Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes", instead of kilo for 1024. To address this conflict, a new set of binary prefixes has been introduced, which is based on powers of 2. Therefore, 1024 bytes are defined as one kibibyte (1 KiB).
When units occur in exponentiation, such as in square and cubic forms, any multiplier prefix is considered part of the unit, and thus included in the exponentiation.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kilo is a decimal unit prefix in the metric system denoting multiplication by one thousand (10). It is used in the International System of Units, where it has the symbol k, in lowercase.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The prefix kilo is derived from the Greek word χίλιοι (chilioi), meaning \"thousand\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 19th century English it was sometimes spelled chilio, in line with a puristic opinion by Thomas Young. As an opponent of suggestions to introduce the metric system in Britain, he qualified the nomenclature adopted in France as barbarous.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "By extension, currencies are also sometimes preceded by the prefix kilo-:",
"title": "Examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "For the kilobyte, a second definition has been in common use in some fields of computer science and information technology. It uses kilobyte to mean 2 bytes (= 1024 bytes), because of the mathematical coincidence that 2 is approximately 10. The reason for this application is that digital hardware and architectures natively use base 2 exponentiation, and not decimal systems. JEDEC memory standards still permit this definition, but acknowledge the correct SI usage.",
"title": "kilobyte"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "NIST comments on the confusion caused by these contrasting definitions: \"Faced with this reality, the IEEE Standards Board decided that IEEE standards will use the conventional, internationally adopted, definitions of the SI prefixes\", instead of kilo for 1024. To address this conflict, a new set of binary prefixes has been introduced, which is based on powers of 2. Therefore, 1024 bytes are defined as one kibibyte (1 KiB).",
"title": "kilobyte"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "When units occur in exponentiation, such as in square and cubic forms, any multiplier prefix is considered part of the unit, and thus included in the exponentiation.",
"title": "Exponentiation"
}
] |
Kilo is a decimal unit prefix in the metric system denoting multiplication by one thousand (103). It is used in the International System of Units, where it has the symbol k, in lowercase. The prefix kilo is derived from the Greek word χίλιοι (chilioi), meaning "thousand". In 19th century English it was sometimes spelled chilio, in line with a puristic opinion by Thomas Young. As an opponent of suggestions to introduce the metric system in Britain, he qualified the nomenclature adopted in France as barbarous.
|
2001-09-17T16:48:23Z
|
2023-12-06T14:43:04Z
|
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|
16,843 |
Utamaro
|
Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese: 喜多川 歌麿; c. 1753 – 31 October 1806) was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his bijin ōkubi-e "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects.
Little is known of Utamaro's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later.
Utamaro's work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade, which they imitated. The reference to the "Japanese influence" among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro.
Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The art form took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the ukiyo "floating world" lifestyle of the pleasure districts. Alongside paintings, mass-produced woodblock prints were a major form of the genre. Ukiyo-e art was aimed at the common townspeople at the bottom of the social scale, especially of the administrative capital of Edo. Its audience, themes, aesthetics, and mass-produced nature kept it from consideration as serious art.
In the mid-eighteenth century, full-colour nishiki-e prints became common. They were printed by using a large number of woodblocks, one for each colour. Towards the close of the eighteenth century there was a peak in both quality and quantity of the work. Kiyonaga was the pre-eminent portraitist of beauties during the 1780s, and the tall, graceful beauties in his work had a great influence on Utamaro, who was to succeed him in fame. Shunshō of the Katsukawa school introduced the ōkubi-e "large-headed picture" in the 1760s. He and other members of the Katsukawa school, such as Shunkō, popularized the form for yakusha-e actor prints, and popularized the dusting of mica in the backgrounds to produce a glittering effect.
Little is known of Utamaro's life. He was born Kitagawa Ichitarō in c. 1753. As an adult, he was known by the given names Yūsuke, and later Yūki. Early accounts have given his birthplace as Kyoto, Osaka, Yoshiwara in Edo (modern Tokyo), or Kawagoe in Musashi Province (modern Saitama Prefecture); none of these places has been verified. The names of his parents are not known; it has been suggested his father may have been a Yoshiwara teahouse owner, or Toriyama Sekien, an artist who tutored him and who wrote of Utamaro playing in his garden as a child.
Apparently, Utamaro married, although little is known about his wife and there is no record of their having had children. There are, however, many prints of tender and intimate domestic scenes featuring the same woman and child over several years of the child's growth among his works.
Sometime during his childhood Utamaro came under the tutelage of Sekien, who described his pupil as bright and devoted to art. Sekien, although trained in the upper-class Kanō school of Japanese painting, had become in middle age a practitioner of ukiyo-e and his art was aimed at the townspeople in Edo. His students included haiku poets and ukiyo-e artists such as Eishōsai Chōki.
Utamaro's first published work may be an illustration of eggplants in the haikai poetry anthology Chiyo no Haru published in 1770. His next known works appear in 1775 under the name Kitagawa Toyoaki,—the cover to a kabuki playbook entitled Forty-eight Famous Love Scenes which was distributed at the Edo playhouse Nakamura-za. As Toyoaki, Utamaro continued as an illustrator of popular literature for the rest of the decade, and occasionally produced single-sheet yakusha-e portraits of kabuki actors.
The young, ambitious publisher [Tsutaya Jūzaburō] enlisted Utamaro and in the autumn of 1782 the artist hosted a lavish banquet whose list of guests included artists such as Kiyonaga, Kitao Shigemasa, and Katsukawa Shunshō, as well as writers such as Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823)and Hōseidō Kisanji [ja]. It was at this banquet that it is believed the artist first announced his new art name, Utamaro. Per custom, he distributed a specially made print for the occasion, in which, before a screen bearing the names of his guests, is a self-portrait of Utamaro making a deep bow.
Utamaro's first work for Tsutaya appeared in a publication dated as 1783: The Fantastic Travels of a Playboy in the Land of Giants, a kibyōshi picture book created in collaboration with his friend Shimizu Enjū, a writer. In the book, Tsutaya described the pair as making their debuts.
At some point in the mid-1780s, probably 1783, he went to live with Tsutaya Jūzaburō. It is estimated that he lived there for approximately five years. He seems to have become a principal artist for the Tsutaya firm. Evidence of his prints for the next few years is sporadic, as he mostly produced illustrations for books of kyōka ("crazy verse"), a parody of the classical waka form. None of his work produced during the period 1790–1792 has survived.
In about 1791 Utamaro gave up designing prints for books and concentrated on making single portraits of women displayed in half-length, rather than the prints of women in groups favoured by other ukiyo-e artists.
In 1793 he achieved recognition as an artist, and his semi-exclusive arrangement with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō ended. Utamaro then went on to produce several series of well-known works, all featuring women of the Yoshiwara district.
Over the years, he also created a number of volumes of animal, insect, and nature studies and shunga, or erotica. Shunga prints were quite acceptable in Japanese culture, not associated with a negative concept of pornography as found in western cultures, but considered rather as a natural aspect of human behavior and circulated among all levels of Japanese society.
Tsutaya Jūzaburō died in 1797, and Utamaro thereafter lived in Kyūemon-chō, then Bakuro-chō, and finally near the Benkei Bridge. Utamaro was apparently very upset by the loss of his long-time friend and supporter. Some commentators feel that after this event, his work never reached the heights previously attained.
A law went into effect in 1790 requiring prints to bear a censor's seal of approval to be sold. Censorship increased in strictness over the following decades, and violators could receive harsh punishments. From 1799 even preliminary drafts required approval. A group of Utagawa-school offenders including Toyokuni had their works repressed in 1801. In 1804, Utamaro ran into legal trouble over a series of prints of samurai warriors, with their names slightly disguised; the depiction of warriors, their names, and their crests was forbidden at the time. Records have not survived of what sort of punishment Utamaro received.
The Ehon Taikōki [ja], published from 1797 to 1802, detailed the life of the 16th-century military ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The work was widely adapted, such as for kabuki and bunraku theatre. When artists and writers put out prints and books based on the Ehon Taikōki in the disparaged ukiyo-e style, it attracted reprisals from the government. In probably the most famous case of censorship of the Edo period, Utamaro was imprisoned in 1804, after which he was manacled along with Tsukimaro, Toyokuni, Shuntei, Shun'ei, and Jippensha Ikku for fifty days and their publishers subjected to heavy fines.
Government documents of the case are no longer extant, and there are few other documents relating to the incident. It appears that Utamaro was most prominent of the group. The artists might have offended the authorities by identifying the historical figures by name and with their identifying crests and other symbols, which was prohibited, and by depicting Hideyoshi with prostitutes of the pleasure quarters. Utamaro's censored prints include one of the daimyō Katō Kiyomasa lustily gazing at a Korean dancer at a party, another of Hideyoshi holding the hand of his page Ishida Mitsunari in a sexually suggestive manner, and another of Hideyoshi with his five consorts viewing the cherry blossoms at the temple Daigo-ji in Kyoto, a historical event famous for displaying Hideyoshi's extravagance. This last displays the names of each consort while placing them in the typical poses of courtesans at a Yoshiwara party.
Records give Utamaro's death date as the 20th day of the 9th month of the year Bunka, which equates to 31 October 1806. He was given the Buddhist posthumous name Shōen Ryōkō Shinshi. Apparently with no heirs, his tomb at the temple Senkōji [ja] was left untended. A century later, in 1917, admirers of Utamaro had the decayed grave repaired.
Utamaro had a number of pupils, who took names such as Kikumaro (later Tsukimaro), Hidemaro, and Takemaro. These artists produced works in the master's style, though none are considered of Utamaro's quality. Sometimes he allowed them to sign his name. Of his students, Koikawa Shunchō married Utamaro's widow on the master's death and took on the name Utamaro II [ja]. After 1820 he produced his work under the name Kitagawa Tetsugorō.
[Utamaro] created an absolutely new type of female beauty. At first he was content to draw the head in normal proportions and quite definitely round in shape; only the neck on which this head was posed was already notably slender ... Towards the middle of the tenth decade these exaggerated proportions of the body had reached such an extreme that the heads were twice as long as they were broad, set upon slim long necks, which in turn swayed upon very slim shoulders; the upper coiffure bulged out to such a degree that it almost surpassed the head itself in extent; the eyes were indicated by short slits, and were separated by an inordinately long nose from an infinitesimally small mouth; the soft robes hung loosely about figures of an almost unearthly thinness.
What little information about Utamaro's life that has been passed down is often contradictory, so analysis of his development as an artist relies chiefly on his work itself. Utamaro is known primarily for his bijin-ga portraits of female beauties, though his work ranges from kachō-e "flower-and-bird pictures" to landscapes to book illustrations.
Utamaro's early bijin-ga follow closely the example of Kiyonaga. In the 1790s his figures became more exaggerated, with thin bodies and long faces with small features. Utamaro experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in the features, expressions, and backdrops of subjects from a wide variety of class and background. Utamaro's individuated beauties were in sharp contrast to the stereotyped, idealized images that had been the norm.
By the end of the 1790s, especially following the death of his patron Tsutaya Jūzaburō in 1797, Utamaro's prodigious output declined in quality. By 1800 his exaggerations had become more extreme, with faces three times as long as they are wide and body proportions of eight heads length to the body. By this point, critics such as Basil Stewart consider Utamaro's figures to "lose much of their grace"; these later works are less prized amongst collectors.
Utamaro produced more than two thousand prints during his working career, amongst which are over 120 bijin-ga print series. He made illustrations for nearly 100 books and about 30 paintings. He also created a number of paintings and surimono, as well as many illustrated books, including more than thirty shunga books, albums, and related publications. Among his best-known works are the series Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy, A Collection of Reigning Beauties, Great Love Themes of Classical Poetry (sometimes called Women in Love containing individual prints such as Revealed Love and Pensive Love), and Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters. His work appeared from at least 60 publishers, of which Tsutaya Jūzaburō and Izumiya Ichibei were the most important.
He alone, of his contemporary ukiyo-e artists, achieved a national reputation during his lifetime. His sensuous beauties generally are considered the finest and most evocative bijinga in all of ukiyo-e.
He succeeded in capturing the subtle aspects of personality and the transient moods of women of all classes, ages, and circumstances. His reputation has remained undiminished since. Kitagawa Utamaro's work is known worldwide, and he generally is regarded as one of the half-dozen greatest ukiyo-e artists of all time.
Utamaro was recognized as a master in his own age. He appears to have achieved a national reputation at a time when even the most popular Edo ukiyo-e artists were little known outside the city. Due to his popularity Utamaro had many imitators, some of whom likely signed their work with his name; this is believed to include students of his and his successor, Utamaro II. On rare occasions Utamaro signed his work "the genuine Utamaro" to distinguish himself from these imitators. Forgeries and reprints of Utamaro's work are common; he produced a large body of work, but his earlier, more popular works are difficult to find in good condition.
A wave of interest in Japanese art swept France from the mid-19th century, called Japonisme. Exhibitions in Paris of Japanese art began to be staged in the 1880s, include an Utamaro exhibition in 1888 by the German-French art dealer Siegfried Bing. The French Impressionists regarded Utamaro's work on a level akin with Hokusai and Hiroshige. French artist-collectors of Utamaro's work included Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec
Utamaro had an influence on the compositional, colour, and sense of tranquility of the American painter Mary Cassatt's work. The shin-hanga ("new prints") artist Goyō Hashiguchi (1880–1921) was called the "Utamaro of the Taishō period" (1912–1926) for his manner of depicting women. The painter character Seiji Moriyama in the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World (1986) has a reputation as a "modern Utamaro" for his combination of Western techniques Utamaro-like feminine subjects.
In 2016 Utamaro's Fukaku Shinobu Koi set the record price for an ukiyo-e print sold at auction at €745000.
The only surviving official record of Utamaro is a stele at Senkō-ji Temple, which gives his death date as the 20th day of the 9th month of the year Bunka, which equates to 31 October 1806. The record states he was 54 by East Asian age reckoning, by which age begins at 1 rather than 0. From this a birth year of c. 1753 is deduced.
Utamaro has gained general acceptance as one of the form's greatest masters. The earliest document of ukiyo-e artists, Ukiyo-e Ruikō, was first compiled while Utamaro was active. The work was not printed, but exists in various manuscripts that different writers altered and expanded. The earliest surviving copy, the Ukiyo-e Kōshō, wrote of Utamaro:
The earliest comprehensive historical and critical works on ukiyo-e came from the West, and often denied Utamaro a place in the ukiyo-e canon. Ernest Fenollosa's Masters of Ukioye of 1896 was the first such overview of ukiyo-e. The book posited ukiyo-e as having evolved towards a late-18th-century golden age that began to decline with the advent of Utamaro, which he condemned for his "gradual elongation of the figure, and an adoption of violent emotion and extravagant attitudes". Fenollosa had harsher criticism for Utamaro's pupils, who he considered to have "carried the extravagances of their teacher to a point of ugliness". In his Chats on Japanese Prints of 1915, Arthur Davison Ficke concurred that with Utamaro ukiyo-e entered a period of exaggerated, manneristic decadence.
Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote an account in Painting in the Far East in 1908 that was similar to Fenollosa's, considering the 1790s a period of decline, but placing Utamaro amongst the masters. He called Utamaro "one of the world's artists for the intrinsic qualities of his genius" and "the greatest of all the figure-designers" in ukiyo-e, with a "far greater resource of composition" than his peers and an "endless" capacity for "unexpected invention". James A. Michener re-evaluated the development of ukiyo-e in The Floating World of 1954, in which he places the 1790s as "the culminating years of ukiyo-e", when "Utamaro brought the grace of Sukenobu to its apex". Seiichirō Takahashi [ja]'s Traditional Woodblock Prints of Japan of 1964 set the golden age of ukiyo-e at the period of Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Sharaku, followed by a period of decline with the declaration beginning in the 1790s of strict sumptuary laws that dictated what could be depicted in artworks.
The French art critic Edmond de Goncourt published Outamaro, the first monograph on Utamaro, in 1891, with help from the Japanese art dealer Tadamasa Hayashi. British ukiyo-e scholar Jack Hillier had the monograph Utamaro: Colour Prints and Paintings published in 1961.
A partial list of his print series and their dates includes:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kitagawa Utamaro (Japanese: 喜多川 歌麿; c. 1753 – 31 October 1806) was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his bijin ōkubi-e \"large-headed pictures of beautiful women\" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Little is known of Utamaro's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Utamaro's work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade, which they imitated. The reference to the \"Japanese influence\" among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ukiyo-e art flourished in Japan during the Edo period from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The art form took as its primary subjects courtesans, kabuki actors, and others associated with the ukiyo \"floating world\" lifestyle of the pleasure districts. Alongside paintings, mass-produced woodblock prints were a major form of the genre. Ukiyo-e art was aimed at the common townspeople at the bottom of the social scale, especially of the administrative capital of Edo. Its audience, themes, aesthetics, and mass-produced nature kept it from consideration as serious art.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the mid-eighteenth century, full-colour nishiki-e prints became common. They were printed by using a large number of woodblocks, one for each colour. Towards the close of the eighteenth century there was a peak in both quality and quantity of the work. Kiyonaga was the pre-eminent portraitist of beauties during the 1780s, and the tall, graceful beauties in his work had a great influence on Utamaro, who was to succeed him in fame. Shunshō of the Katsukawa school introduced the ōkubi-e \"large-headed picture\" in the 1760s. He and other members of the Katsukawa school, such as Shunkō, popularized the form for yakusha-e actor prints, and popularized the dusting of mica in the backgrounds to produce a glittering effect.",
"title": "Background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Little is known of Utamaro's life. He was born Kitagawa Ichitarō in c. 1753. As an adult, he was known by the given names Yūsuke, and later Yūki. Early accounts have given his birthplace as Kyoto, Osaka, Yoshiwara in Edo (modern Tokyo), or Kawagoe in Musashi Province (modern Saitama Prefecture); none of these places has been verified. The names of his parents are not known; it has been suggested his father may have been a Yoshiwara teahouse owner, or Toriyama Sekien, an artist who tutored him and who wrote of Utamaro playing in his garden as a child.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Apparently, Utamaro married, although little is known about his wife and there is no record of their having had children. There are, however, many prints of tender and intimate domestic scenes featuring the same woman and child over several years of the child's growth among his works.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Sometime during his childhood Utamaro came under the tutelage of Sekien, who described his pupil as bright and devoted to art. Sekien, although trained in the upper-class Kanō school of Japanese painting, had become in middle age a practitioner of ukiyo-e and his art was aimed at the townspeople in Edo. His students included haiku poets and ukiyo-e artists such as Eishōsai Chōki.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Utamaro's first published work may be an illustration of eggplants in the haikai poetry anthology Chiyo no Haru published in 1770. His next known works appear in 1775 under the name Kitagawa Toyoaki,—the cover to a kabuki playbook entitled Forty-eight Famous Love Scenes which was distributed at the Edo playhouse Nakamura-za. As Toyoaki, Utamaro continued as an illustrator of popular literature for the rest of the decade, and occasionally produced single-sheet yakusha-e portraits of kabuki actors.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The young, ambitious publisher [Tsutaya Jūzaburō] enlisted Utamaro and in the autumn of 1782 the artist hosted a lavish banquet whose list of guests included artists such as Kiyonaga, Kitao Shigemasa, and Katsukawa Shunshō, as well as writers such as Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823)and Hōseidō Kisanji [ja]. It was at this banquet that it is believed the artist first announced his new art name, Utamaro. Per custom, he distributed a specially made print for the occasion, in which, before a screen bearing the names of his guests, is a self-portrait of Utamaro making a deep bow.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Utamaro's first work for Tsutaya appeared in a publication dated as 1783: The Fantastic Travels of a Playboy in the Land of Giants, a kibyōshi picture book created in collaboration with his friend Shimizu Enjū, a writer. In the book, Tsutaya described the pair as making their debuts.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "At some point in the mid-1780s, probably 1783, he went to live with Tsutaya Jūzaburō. It is estimated that he lived there for approximately five years. He seems to have become a principal artist for the Tsutaya firm. Evidence of his prints for the next few years is sporadic, as he mostly produced illustrations for books of kyōka (\"crazy verse\"), a parody of the classical waka form. None of his work produced during the period 1790–1792 has survived.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In about 1791 Utamaro gave up designing prints for books and concentrated on making single portraits of women displayed in half-length, rather than the prints of women in groups favoured by other ukiyo-e artists.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1793 he achieved recognition as an artist, and his semi-exclusive arrangement with the publisher Tsutaya Jūzaburō ended. Utamaro then went on to produce several series of well-known works, all featuring women of the Yoshiwara district.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Over the years, he also created a number of volumes of animal, insect, and nature studies and shunga, or erotica. Shunga prints were quite acceptable in Japanese culture, not associated with a negative concept of pornography as found in western cultures, but considered rather as a natural aspect of human behavior and circulated among all levels of Japanese society.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Tsutaya Jūzaburō died in 1797, and Utamaro thereafter lived in Kyūemon-chō, then Bakuro-chō, and finally near the Benkei Bridge. Utamaro was apparently very upset by the loss of his long-time friend and supporter. Some commentators feel that after this event, his work never reached the heights previously attained.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "A law went into effect in 1790 requiring prints to bear a censor's seal of approval to be sold. Censorship increased in strictness over the following decades, and violators could receive harsh punishments. From 1799 even preliminary drafts required approval. A group of Utagawa-school offenders including Toyokuni had their works repressed in 1801. In 1804, Utamaro ran into legal trouble over a series of prints of samurai warriors, with their names slightly disguised; the depiction of warriors, their names, and their crests was forbidden at the time. Records have not survived of what sort of punishment Utamaro received.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Ehon Taikōki [ja], published from 1797 to 1802, detailed the life of the 16th-century military ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The work was widely adapted, such as for kabuki and bunraku theatre. When artists and writers put out prints and books based on the Ehon Taikōki in the disparaged ukiyo-e style, it attracted reprisals from the government. In probably the most famous case of censorship of the Edo period, Utamaro was imprisoned in 1804, after which he was manacled along with Tsukimaro, Toyokuni, Shuntei, Shun'ei, and Jippensha Ikku for fifty days and their publishers subjected to heavy fines.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Government documents of the case are no longer extant, and there are few other documents relating to the incident. It appears that Utamaro was most prominent of the group. The artists might have offended the authorities by identifying the historical figures by name and with their identifying crests and other symbols, which was prohibited, and by depicting Hideyoshi with prostitutes of the pleasure quarters. Utamaro's censored prints include one of the daimyō Katō Kiyomasa lustily gazing at a Korean dancer at a party, another of Hideyoshi holding the hand of his page Ishida Mitsunari in a sexually suggestive manner, and another of Hideyoshi with his five consorts viewing the cherry blossoms at the temple Daigo-ji in Kyoto, a historical event famous for displaying Hideyoshi's extravagance. This last displays the names of each consort while placing them in the typical poses of courtesans at a Yoshiwara party.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Records give Utamaro's death date as the 20th day of the 9th month of the year Bunka, which equates to 31 October 1806. He was given the Buddhist posthumous name Shōen Ryōkō Shinshi. Apparently with no heirs, his tomb at the temple Senkōji [ja] was left untended. A century later, in 1917, admirers of Utamaro had the decayed grave repaired.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Utamaro had a number of pupils, who took names such as Kikumaro (later Tsukimaro), Hidemaro, and Takemaro. These artists produced works in the master's style, though none are considered of Utamaro's quality. Sometimes he allowed them to sign his name. Of his students, Koikawa Shunchō married Utamaro's widow on the master's death and took on the name Utamaro II [ja]. After 1820 he produced his work under the name Kitagawa Tetsugorō.",
"title": "Pupils"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "[Utamaro] created an absolutely new type of female beauty. At first he was content to draw the head in normal proportions and quite definitely round in shape; only the neck on which this head was posed was already notably slender ... Towards the middle of the tenth decade these exaggerated proportions of the body had reached such an extreme that the heads were twice as long as they were broad, set upon slim long necks, which in turn swayed upon very slim shoulders; the upper coiffure bulged out to such a degree that it almost surpassed the head itself in extent; the eyes were indicated by short slits, and were separated by an inordinately long nose from an infinitesimally small mouth; the soft robes hung loosely about figures of an almost unearthly thinness.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "What little information about Utamaro's life that has been passed down is often contradictory, so analysis of his development as an artist relies chiefly on his work itself. Utamaro is known primarily for his bijin-ga portraits of female beauties, though his work ranges from kachō-e \"flower-and-bird pictures\" to landscapes to book illustrations.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Utamaro's early bijin-ga follow closely the example of Kiyonaga. In the 1790s his figures became more exaggerated, with thin bodies and long faces with small features. Utamaro experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in the features, expressions, and backdrops of subjects from a wide variety of class and background. Utamaro's individuated beauties were in sharp contrast to the stereotyped, idealized images that had been the norm.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "By the end of the 1790s, especially following the death of his patron Tsutaya Jūzaburō in 1797, Utamaro's prodigious output declined in quality. By 1800 his exaggerations had become more extreme, with faces three times as long as they are wide and body proportions of eight heads length to the body. By this point, critics such as Basil Stewart consider Utamaro's figures to \"lose much of their grace\"; these later works are less prized amongst collectors.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Utamaro produced more than two thousand prints during his working career, amongst which are over 120 bijin-ga print series. He made illustrations for nearly 100 books and about 30 paintings. He also created a number of paintings and surimono, as well as many illustrated books, including more than thirty shunga books, albums, and related publications. Among his best-known works are the series Ten Studies in Female Physiognomy, A Collection of Reigning Beauties, Great Love Themes of Classical Poetry (sometimes called Women in Love containing individual prints such as Revealed Love and Pensive Love), and Twelve Hours in the Pleasure Quarters. His work appeared from at least 60 publishers, of which Tsutaya Jūzaburō and Izumiya Ichibei were the most important.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "He alone, of his contemporary ukiyo-e artists, achieved a national reputation during his lifetime. His sensuous beauties generally are considered the finest and most evocative bijinga in all of ukiyo-e.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "He succeeded in capturing the subtle aspects of personality and the transient moods of women of all classes, ages, and circumstances. His reputation has remained undiminished since. Kitagawa Utamaro's work is known worldwide, and he generally is regarded as one of the half-dozen greatest ukiyo-e artists of all time.",
"title": "Analysis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Utamaro was recognized as a master in his own age. He appears to have achieved a national reputation at a time when even the most popular Edo ukiyo-e artists were little known outside the city. Due to his popularity Utamaro had many imitators, some of whom likely signed their work with his name; this is believed to include students of his and his successor, Utamaro II. On rare occasions Utamaro signed his work \"the genuine Utamaro\" to distinguish himself from these imitators. Forgeries and reprints of Utamaro's work are common; he produced a large body of work, but his earlier, more popular works are difficult to find in good condition.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "A wave of interest in Japanese art swept France from the mid-19th century, called Japonisme. Exhibitions in Paris of Japanese art began to be staged in the 1880s, include an Utamaro exhibition in 1888 by the German-French art dealer Siegfried Bing. The French Impressionists regarded Utamaro's work on a level akin with Hokusai and Hiroshige. French artist-collectors of Utamaro's work included Monet, Degas, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Utamaro had an influence on the compositional, colour, and sense of tranquility of the American painter Mary Cassatt's work. The shin-hanga (\"new prints\") artist Goyō Hashiguchi (1880–1921) was called the \"Utamaro of the Taishō period\" (1912–1926) for his manner of depicting women. The painter character Seiji Moriyama in the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World (1986) has a reputation as a \"modern Utamaro\" for his combination of Western techniques Utamaro-like feminine subjects.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 2016 Utamaro's Fukaku Shinobu Koi set the record price for an ukiyo-e print sold at auction at €745000.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The only surviving official record of Utamaro is a stele at Senkō-ji Temple, which gives his death date as the 20th day of the 9th month of the year Bunka, which equates to 31 October 1806. The record states he was 54 by East Asian age reckoning, by which age begins at 1 rather than 0. From this a birth year of c. 1753 is deduced.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Utamaro has gained general acceptance as one of the form's greatest masters. The earliest document of ukiyo-e artists, Ukiyo-e Ruikō, was first compiled while Utamaro was active. The work was not printed, but exists in various manuscripts that different writers altered and expanded. The earliest surviving copy, the Ukiyo-e Kōshō, wrote of Utamaro:",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The earliest comprehensive historical and critical works on ukiyo-e came from the West, and often denied Utamaro a place in the ukiyo-e canon. Ernest Fenollosa's Masters of Ukioye of 1896 was the first such overview of ukiyo-e. The book posited ukiyo-e as having evolved towards a late-18th-century golden age that began to decline with the advent of Utamaro, which he condemned for his \"gradual elongation of the figure, and an adoption of violent emotion and extravagant attitudes\". Fenollosa had harsher criticism for Utamaro's pupils, who he considered to have \"carried the extravagances of their teacher to a point of ugliness\". In his Chats on Japanese Prints of 1915, Arthur Davison Ficke concurred that with Utamaro ukiyo-e entered a period of exaggerated, manneristic decadence.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Laurence Binyon, the Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote an account in Painting in the Far East in 1908 that was similar to Fenollosa's, considering the 1790s a period of decline, but placing Utamaro amongst the masters. He called Utamaro \"one of the world's artists for the intrinsic qualities of his genius\" and \"the greatest of all the figure-designers\" in ukiyo-e, with a \"far greater resource of composition\" than his peers and an \"endless\" capacity for \"unexpected invention\". James A. Michener re-evaluated the development of ukiyo-e in The Floating World of 1954, in which he places the 1790s as \"the culminating years of ukiyo-e\", when \"Utamaro brought the grace of Sukenobu to its apex\". Seiichirō Takahashi [ja]'s Traditional Woodblock Prints of Japan of 1964 set the golden age of ukiyo-e at the period of Kiyonaga, Utamaro, and Sharaku, followed by a period of decline with the declaration beginning in the 1790s of strict sumptuary laws that dictated what could be depicted in artworks.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The French art critic Edmond de Goncourt published Outamaro, the first monograph on Utamaro, in 1891, with help from the Japanese art dealer Tadamasa Hayashi. British ukiyo-e scholar Jack Hillier had the monograph Utamaro: Colour Prints and Paintings published in 1961.",
"title": "Historiography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "A partial list of his print series and their dates includes:",
"title": "Print series"
}
] |
Kitagawa Utamaro was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his bijin ōkubi-e "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects. Little is known of Utamaro's life. His work began to appear in the 1770s, and he rose to prominence in the early 1790s with his portraits of beauties with exaggerated, elongated features. He produced over 2000 known prints and was one of the few ukiyo-e artists to achieve fame throughout Japan in his lifetime. In 1804 he was arrested and manacled for fifty days for making illegal prints depicting the 16th-century military ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and died two years later. Utamaro's work reached Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, where it was very popular, enjoying particular acclaim in France. He influenced the European Impressionists, particularly with his use of partial views and his emphasis on light and shade, which they imitated. The reference to the "Japanese influence" among these artists often refers to the work of Utamaro.
|
2001-09-20T22:59:23Z
|
2023-11-29T02:41:23Z
|
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Kofi Annan
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Kofi Atta Annan (/ˈkoʊfi ˈænæn/ KOH-fee AN-an; 8 April 1938 – 18 August 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organisation founded by Nelson Mandela.
Annan studied economics at Macalester College, international relations at the Graduate Institute Geneva, and management at MIT. Annan joined the UN in 1962, working for the World Health Organization's Geneva office. He went on to work in several capacities at the UN Headquarters, including serving as the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping between March 1992 and December 1996. He was appointed secretary-general on 13 December 1996 by the Security Council and later confirmed by the General Assembly, making him the first officeholder to be elected from the UN staff itself. He was re-elected for a second term in 2001 and was succeeded as secretary-general by Ban Ki-moon in 2007.
As secretary-general, Annan reformed the UN bureaucracy, worked to combat HIV/AIDS (especially in Africa) and launched the UN Global Compact. He was criticised for not expanding the Security Council and faced calls for his resignation after an investigation into the Oil-for-Food Programme, but was largely exonerated of personal corruption. After the end of his term as secretary-general, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation in 2007 to work on international development. In 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria to help find a resolution to the ongoing conflict there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UN's lack of progress with regards to conflict resolution. In September 2016, Annan was appointed to lead a UN commission to investigate the Rohingya crisis. He died in 2018 and was given a state funeral.
Kofi Annan was born in Kumasi in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) on 8 April 1938. His twin sister Efua Atta, who died in 1991, shared the middle name Atta, which in the Akan language means "twin". Annan and his sister were born into one of the country's Fante aristocratic families; both of their grandfathers and their uncle were Fante paramount chiefs, and their brother Kobina would go on to become Ghana's ambassador to Morocco.
In the Akan names tradition, some children are named according to the day of the week they were born, sometimes in relation to how many children precede them. Kofi in Akan is the name that corresponds with Friday, the day on which Annan was born. The last name Annan in Fante means fourth-born child. Annan said that his surname rhymes with "cannon" in English.
From 1954 to 1957, Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim, an all-boys Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan said that the school taught him that "suffering anywhere, concerns people everywhere". In 1957, the year Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, the Gold Coast gained independence from the UK and began using the name "Ghana".
In 1958, Annan began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Ghana. He received a Ford Foundation grant, enabling him to complete his undergraduate studies in economics at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, US, in 1961. Annan then completed a diplôme d'études approfondies DEA degree in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1961 to 1962. After some years of work experience, he studied at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1971–72) in the Sloan Fellows program and earned a master's degree in management.
Annan was fluent in English, French, Akan, and some Kru languages as well as other African languages.
In 1962, Annan started working as a budget officer for the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations (UN). From 1974 to 1976, he worked as a manager of the state-owned Ghana Tourist Development Company in Accra. In 1980 he became the head of personnel for the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. Between 1981 and 1983, he was a member of the Governing Board of the International School of Geneva. In 1983 he became the director of administrative management services of the UN Secretariat in New York. In 1987, Annan was appointed as an assistant secretary-general for Human Resources Management and Security Coordinator for the UN system. In 1990, he became Assistant Secretary-General for Program Planning, Budget and Finance, and Control.
When Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali established the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 1992, Annan was appointed to the new department as Deputy to then Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding. Annan replaced Goulding in March 1993 as Under-Secretary-General of that department after American officials persuaded Boutros-Ghali that Annan was more flexible and more aligned with the role that the Pentagon expected of UN peacekeepers in Somalia. On 29 August 1995, while Boutros-Ghali was unreachable on an aeroplane, Annan instructed United Nations officials to "relinquish for a limited period of time their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia". This move allowed NATO forces to conduct Operation Deliberate Force and made him a favourite of the United States. According to Richard Holbrooke, Annan's "gutsy performance" convinced the United States that he would be a good replacement for Boutros-Ghali.
He was appointed a special representative of the Secretary-General to the former Yugoslavia, serving from November 1995 to March 1996.
In 2003, retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, who was force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), claimed that Annan was overly passive in his response to the imminent genocide. In his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003), Dallaire asserted that Annan held back UN troops from intervening to settle the conflict and from providing more logistical and material support. Dallaire claimed that Annan failed to respond to his repeated faxes asking for access to a weapons depository; such weapons could have helped Dallaire defend the endangered Tutsis. In 2004, ten years after the genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed, Annan said: "I could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support."
In his book Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, Annan again argued that the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations could have made better use of the media to raise awareness of the violence in Rwanda and put pressure on governments to provide the troops necessary for an intervention. Annan explained that the events in Somalia and the collapse of the UNOSOM II mission fostered a hesitation among UN member states to approve robust peacekeeping operations. As a result, when the UNAMIR mission was approved just days after the battle, the resulting force lacked the troop levels, resources and mandate to operate effectively.
In 1996, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali ran unopposed for a second term. Although he won 14 of the 15 votes on the Security Council, he was vetoed by the United States. After four deadlocked meetings of the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali suspended his candidacy, becoming the only secretary-general ever to be denied a second term. Annan was the leading candidate to replace him, beating Amara Essy by one vote in the first round. However, France vetoed Annan four times before finally abstaining. The UN Security Council recommended Annan on 13 December 1996. Confirmed four days later by the vote of the General Assembly, he started his first term as secretary-general on 1 January 1997.
Due to Boutros-Ghali's overthrow, a second Annan term would give Africa the office of Secretary-General for three consecutive terms. In 2001, the Asia-Pacific Group agreed to support Annan for a second term in return for the African Group's support for an Asian secretary-general in the 2006 selection. The Security Council recommended Annan for a second term on 27 June 2001, and the General Assembly approved his reappointment on 29 June 2001.
Soon after taking office in 1997, Annan released two reports on management reform. On 17 March 1997, the report Management and Organisational Measures (A/51/829) introduced new management mechanisms through the establishment of a cabinet-style body to assist him and the UN's activities in accordance with four core missions. A comprehensive reform agenda was issued on 14 July 1997 titled Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform (A/51/950). Key proposals included the introduction of strategic management to strengthen unity of purpose, the establishment of the position of deputy secretary-general, a 10-per cent reduction in posts, a reduction in administrative costs, the consolidation of the UN at the country level, and reaching out to civil society and the private sector as partners. Annan also proposed to hold a Millennium Summit in 2000. After years of research, Annan presented a progress report, In Larger Freedom, to the UN General Assembly on 21 March 2005. Annan recommended Security Council expansion and a host of other UN reforms.
On 31 January 2006, Annan outlined his vision for a comprehensive and extensive reform of the UN in a policy speech to the United Nations Association UK. The speech, delivered at Central Hall, Westminster, also marked the 60th anniversary of the first meetings of the General Assembly and Security Council.
On 7 March 2006, he presented to the General Assembly his proposals for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations Secretariat. The reform report is titled Investing in the United Nations, For a Stronger Organization Worldwide.
On 30 March 2006, he presented to the General Assembly his analysis and recommendations for updating the entire work programme of the United Nations Secretariat. The reform report is titled Mandating and Delivering: Analysis and Recommendations to Facilitate the Review of Mandates.
Regarding the UN Human Rights Council, Annan said "declining credibility" had "cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system. Unless we re-make our human rights machinery, we may be unable to renew public confidence in the United Nations itself." He believed that, despite its flaws, the council could do good.
In March 2000, Annan appointed the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations to assess the shortcomings of the then existing system and to make specific and realistic recommendations for change. The panel was composed of individuals experienced in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The report it produced, which became known as the Brahimi Report, after the chair of the Panel Lakhdar Brahimi, called for "renewed political commitment on the part of Member States, significant institutional change, and increased financial support." The Panel further noted that to be effective, UN peacekeeping operations must be adequately resourced and equipped, and operate under clear, credible and achievable mandates. In a letter transmitting the report to the General Assembly and Security Council, Annan stated that the Panel's recommendations were essential to making the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace. Later that same year, the Security Council adopted several provisions relating to peacekeeping following the report, in Resolution 1327.
In 2000, Annan issued a report titled We the Peoples: the Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. The report called for member states to "put people at the centre of everything we do": "No calling is more noble, and no responsibility greater, than that of enabling men, women and children, in cities and villages around the world, to make their lives better."
In the final chapter of the report, Annan called to "free our fellow men and women from the abject and dehumanizing poverty in which more than 1 billion of them are currently confined".
At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, national leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, which the United Nations Secretariat subsequently implemented as the Millennium Development Goals in 2001.
Within the We the Peoples document, Annan suggested the establishment of a United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), a consortium of high-tech volunteer corps, including NetCorps Canada and Net Corps America, which United Nations Volunteers (UNV) would coordinate. In the "Report of the high-level panel of experts on information and communication technology", suggesting a UN ICT Task Force, the panel welcomed the establishment of UNITeS. It made suggestions on its configuration and implementation strategy, including that ICT4D volunteering opportunities make mobilising "national human resources" (local ICT experts) within developing countries a priority for both men and women. The initiative was launched at the UNV and was active from February 2001 to February 2005. Initiative staff and volunteers participated in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in December 2003.
In an address to the World Economic Forum on 31 January 1999, Annan argued that the "goals of the United Nations and those of business can, indeed, be mutually supportive" and proposed that the private sector and the United Nations initiate "a global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market".
On 26 July 2000, the United Nations Global Compact was officially launched at UN headquarters in New York. It is a principle-based framework for businesses which aims to "[c]atalyse actions in support of broader UN goals, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)". The Compact established ten core principles in the areas of human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption. Under the Compact, companies commit to the ten principles and are brought together with UN agencies, labour groups and civil society to implement them effectively.
Towards the end of the 1990s, increased awareness of the destructive potential of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS pushed public health issues to the top of the global development agenda. In April 2001, Annan issued a five-point "Call to Action" to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Stating it was a "personal priority", Annan proposed the establishment of a Global AIDS and Health Fund, "dedicated to the battle against HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases", to stimulate the increased international spending needed to help developing countries confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. In June of that year, the General Assembly of the United Nations committed to creating such a fund during a special session on AIDS, and the permanent secretariat of the Global Fund was subsequently established in January 2002.
Following the failure of Annan and the international community to intervene in the genocide in Rwanda and in Srebrenica, Annan asked whether the international community had an obligation in such situations to intervene to protect civilian populations. In a speech to the General Assembly on 20 September 1999, "to address the prospects for human security and intervention in the next century", Annan argued that individual sovereignty—the protections afforded by the Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the UN—was being strengthened, while the notion of state sovereignty was being redefined by globalisation and international co-operation. As a result, the UN and its member states had to consider a willingness to act to prevent conflict and civilian suffering, a dilemma between "two concepts of sovereignty" that Annan also presented in a preceding article in The Economist on 16 September 1999.
In the March 2000 Millennium Report to the UN, Annan asked: "If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?"
In September 2001, the Canadian government established an ad hoc committee to address this balance between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty published its final report in 2001, which focused not on the right of states to intervene but on a responsibility to protect populations at risk. The report moved beyond military intervention, arguing that various diplomatic and humanitarian actions could also be utilised to protect civilian populations.
In 2005, Annan included the doctrine of "Responsibility to Protect" (RtoP) in his report In Larger Freedom. When the UN General Assembly endorsed that report, it amounted to the first formal endorsement by UN member states of the doctrine of RtoP.
In the years after 1998, when UNSCOM was expelled by the government of Saddam Hussein, and during the Iraq disarmament crisis, in which the United States blamed UNSCOM and former IAEA director Hans Blix for failing to disarm Iraq properly, former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter blamed Annan for being slow and ineffective in enforcing Security Council resolutions on Iraq and was overtly submissive to the demands of the Clinton administration for regime removal and inspection of sites, often presidential palaces, that were not mandated in any resolution and were of questionable intelligence value, severely hampering UNSCOM's ability to co-operate with the Iraqi government and contributed to their expulsion from the country. Ritter also claimed that Annan regularly interfered with the work of the inspectors and diluted the chain of command by trying to micromanage all of the activities of UNSCOM, which caused intelligence processing (and the resulting inspections) to be backed up and caused confusion with the Iraqis as to who was in charge and as a result, they generally refused to take orders from Ritter or Rolf Ekéus without explicit approval from Annan, which could have taken days, if not weeks. He later believed Annan was oblivious that the Iraqis took advantage of this to delay inspections. He claimed that on one occasion, Annan refused to implement a no-notice inspection of the Iraqi Special Security Organization (SSO) headquarters and instead tried to negotiate access. Still, the negotiation took nearly six weeks, giving the Iraqis more than enough time to clean the site.
During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Annan called on the United States and the United Kingdom not to invade without the support of the United Nations. In a September 2004 interview on the BBC, when questioned about the legal authority for the invasion, Annan said he believed it was not in conformity with the UN charter and was illegal.
In 1998, Annan was deeply involved in supporting the transition from military to civilian rule in Nigeria. The following year, he supported the efforts of East Timor to secure independence from Indonesia. In 2000, he was responsible for certifying Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, and in 2006, he led talks in New York between the presidents of Cameroon and Nigeria, which led to a settlement of the dispute between the two countries over the Bakassi peninsula.
Annan and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disagreed sharply on Iran's nuclear program, on an Iranian exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust, and on the then-upcoming International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, an Iranian Holocaust denial conference in 2006. During a visit to Iran instigated by continued Iranian uranium enrichment, Annan said: "I think the tragedy of the Holocaust is an undeniable historical fact and we should really accept that fact and teach people what happened in World War II and ensure it is never repeated."
Annan supported sending a UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudan. He worked with the government of Sudan to accept a transfer of power from the African Union peacekeeping mission to a UN one. Annan also worked with several Arab and Muslim countries on women's rights and other topics.
Beginning in 1998, Annan convened an annual UN "Security Council Retreat" with the 15 states' council representatives. It was held at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Conference Center at the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, and was sponsored by both the RBF and the UN.
In June 2004, Annan was given a copy of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) report on the complaint brought by four female workers against Ruud Lubbers, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, for sexual harassment, abuse of authority, and retaliation. The report also reviewed a long-serving staff member's allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Werner Blatter, director of UNHCR personnel. The investigation found Lubbers guilty of sexual harassment; no mention was made publicly of the other charge against a senior official or two subsequent complaints filed later that year. During the official investigation, Lubbers wrote a letter which some considered a threat to the female worker who had brought the charges. On 15 July 2004, Annan cleared Lubbers of the accusations, saying they were not substantial enough legally. The internal UN–OIOS report on Lubbers was leaked, and sections accompanied by an article by Kate Holt were published in a British newspaper. In February 2005, Lubbers resigned as head of the UN refugee agency, saying he wanted to relieve political pressure on Annan.
In December 2004, reports surfaced that the Secretary-General's son Kojo Annan received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection SA, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations. On 11 November 2005, The Sunday Times agreed to apologise and pay a substantial sum in damages to Kojo Annan, accepting that the allegations were untrue.
Annan appointed the Independent Inquiry Committee, which was led by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, then the director of the United Nations Association of the US. In his first interview with the Inquiry Committee, Annan denied meeting with Cotecna. Later in the inquiry, he recalled having met with Cotecna's chief executive Elie-Georges Massey twice. In a final report issued on 27 October, the committee found insufficient evidence to indict Annan on any illegal actions but did find fault with Benon Sevan, an Armenian-Cypriot national who had worked for the UN for about 40 years. Appointed by Annan to the Oil-For-Food role, Sevan repeatedly asked Iraqis for allocations of oil to the African Middle East Petroleum Company. Sevan's behaviour was "ethically improper", Volcker said to reporters. Sevan repeatedly denied the charges and argued that he was being made a "scapegoat". The Volcker report was highly critical of the UN management structure and the Security Council oversight. It strongly recommended a new chief operating officer (COO) position to handle the fiscal and administrative responsibilities then under the Secretary-General's office. The report listed the Western and Middle Eastern companies that had benefited illegally from the program.
In 2001, its centennial year, the Nobel Committee decided that the Peace Prize was to be divided between the UN and Annan. They were awarded the Peace Prize "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world", having revitalised the UN and prioritised human rights. The Nobel Committee also recognised his commitment to the struggle to contain the spread of HIV in Africa and his declared opposition to international terrorism.
Soon after Annan was awarded the Peace Prize, he was given a chieftaincy title by the Asantehene of Asanteman. The honour was conferred upon him for his "[selfless] contributions to humanity and promotion of peace throughout the world".
Annan defended his deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown, who openly criticised the United States in a speech on 6 June 2006: "[T]he prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the UN one way or another. [...] [That] the US is constructively engaged with the UN [...] is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News." Malloch later said his talk was a "sincere and constructive critique of U.S. policy toward the U.N. by a friend and admirer".
The talk was unusual because it violated the unofficial policy of not having top officials publicly criticise member nations. The interim US ambassador John Bolton, appointed by President George W. Bush, was reported to have told Annan on the phone: "I've known you since 1989 and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time." Observers from other nations supported Malloch's view that conservative politicians in the US prevented many citizens from understanding the benefits of US involvement in the UN.
On 19 September 2006, Annan gave a farewell address to world leaders gathered at the UN headquarters in New York in anticipation of his retirement on 31 December. In the speech, he outlined three major problems of "an unjust world economy, world disorder, and widespread contempt for human rights and the rule of law", which he believed "have not resolved, but sharpened" during his time as secretary-general. He also pointed to violence in Africa and the Arab–Israeli conflict as two major issues warranting attention.
On 11 December 2006, in his final speech as secretary-general, delivered at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, Annan recalled President Truman's leadership in the founding of the United Nations. He called for the United States to return to Truman's multilateralist foreign policies and to follow Truman's doctrine that "the responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world". He also said that the United States must maintain its commitment to human rights, "including in the struggle against terrorism".
After he served as UN secretary-general, Annan took up residence in Geneva and worked in a leading capacity on various international humanitarian endeavours.
In 2007, Annan established the Kofi Annan Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation that "works to promote better global governance and strengthen the capacities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more secure world".
The organisation was founded on the principles that fair and peaceful societies rest on three pillars: peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights and the rule of law, and they have made it their mission to mobilise the leadership and the political resolve needed to tackle threats to these three pillars ranging from violent conflict to flawed elections and climate change, to achieve "a fairer, more peaceful world".
The Foundation provides the analytical, communication and co-ordination capacities needed to ensure that these objectives are achieved. Annan's contribution to peace worldwide is delivered through mediation, political mentoring, advocacy and advice. Through his engagement, Annan aimed to strengthen local and international conflict resolution capabilities. The Foundation provides the analytical and logistical support to facilitate this in cooperation with relevant local, regional and international actors. The Foundation works mainly through private diplomacy, where Annan provided informal counsel and participated in discreet diplomatic initiatives to avert or resolve crises by applying his experience and inspirational leadership. He was often asked to intercede in crises, sometimes as an impartial, independent mediator, sometimes as a special envoy of the international community. In recent years he had provided such counsel to Burkina Faso, Kenya, Myanmar, Senegal, Iraq and Colombia.
Following the outbreak of violence after the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya, the African Union (AU) established the Panel of Eminent African Personalities to assist in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. Annan was appointed as chair of the panel, to lead it with Benjamin Mkapa, former president of Tanzania; and humanitarian Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique and South Africa.
The panel managed to convince the two principal parties to the conflict, Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) and Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), to participate in the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Process (KNDR). Over the course of 41 days of negotiations, several agreements regarding taking actions to stop the violence and to remedy its consequences were signed. On 28 February, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga signed a coalition government agreement.
On 23 February 2012, Annan was appointed as the UN and Arab League joint special envoy to Syria in an attempt to end the civil war taking place. He developed a six-point plan for peace:
On 2 August, he resigned as envoy to Syria, citing the intransigence of both the Assad government and the rebels, as well as the stalemate on the Security Council as preventing any peaceful resolution of the situation. Annan also stated that the lack of international unity and ineffective diplomacy among world leaders had made the peaceful resolution in Syria an impossible task.
Annan served as the chair of the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security. The commission was launched in May 2011 as a joint initiative of the Kofi Annan Foundation and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It comprised 12 eminent individuals from around the world, including Ernesto Zedillo, Martti Ahtisaari, Madeleine Albright and Amartya Sen, and aimed to highlight the importance of the integrity of elections to achieving a more secure, prosperous and stable world. The Commission released its final report, Deepening Democracy, a Strategy to Improve the Integrity of Elections Worldwide, in September 2012.
In September 2016, Annan was asked to lead the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, Myanmar, an impoverished region beset by ethnic conflict and extreme sectarian violence, particularly by Myanmar's Buddhist majority against the Rohingya Muslim minority, further targeted by government forces. The commission, widely known simply as the "Annan Commission", was opposed by many Myanmar Buddhists as unwelcome interference in their relations with the Rohingya.
When the Annan commission released its final report, the week of 24 August 2017, with recommendations unpopular with all sides, violence exploded in the Rohingya conflict – the largest and bloodiest humanitarian disaster in the region in decades – driving most of the Rohingya from Myanmar. Annan attempted to engage the United Nations to resolve the matter, but failed.
Annan died a week before the first anniversary of the report, shortly after an announcement by a replacement commission that it would not "point fingers" at the guilty parties – leading to widespread concern that the new commission was just a sham to protect culpable Myanmar government officials and citizens from accountability.
In 2018, before Annan's death, Myanmar's civilian government, under the direction of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, made a gesture of acceptance of the Annan commission's recommendations by convening another board – the advisory board for the Committee for Implementation of the Recommendations on Rakhine State – ostensibly to implement the Annan commission's proposed reforms, but never actually implemented them. Some of the international representatives resigned – notably the panel's secretary, Thailand's former foreign minister Surakiart Sathirathai, and former US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson – decrying the "implementation" committee as ineffective, or a "whitewash".
In March 2011, Annan became a member of the advisory board for Investcorp Bank B. S. C. Europe, an international private equity firm and sovereign wealth fund owned by the United Arab Emirates. He held the position until 2018.
Annan became a member of the Global Advisory Board of Macro Advisory Partners LLP, a risk and strategic consulting firm based in London and New York City for business, finance and government decision-makers, with some operations related to Investcorp.
In addition to the above, Annan also became involved with several organisations with both global and African focuses, including the following:
Annan served as chair of The Elders, a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues. In November 2008, Annan and fellow elders Jimmy Carter and Graça Machel attempted to travel to Zimbabwe to make a first-hand assessment of the humanitarian situation in the country. Refused entry, the Elders instead carried out their assessment from Johannesburg, where they met Zimbabwe- and South Africa-based leaders from politics, business, international organisations, and civil society. In May 2011, following months of political violence in Côte d'Ivoire, Annan travelled to the country with elders Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to encourage national reconciliation. On 16 October 2014, Annan attended the One Young World Summit in Dublin. During a session with fellow elder Mary Robinson, Annan encouraged 1,300 young leaders from 191 countries to lead on intergenerational issues such as climate change and the need for action to take place now, not tomorrow:
We don't have to wait to act. The action must be now. You will come across people who think we should start tomorrow. Even for those who believe action should begin tomorrow, remind them tomorrow begins now, tomorrow begins today, so let's all move forward.
Annan chaired the Africa Progress Panel (APP), a group of ten distinguished individuals who advocate at the highest levels for equitable and sustainable development in Africa. As chair, he facilitated coalition building to leverage and broker knowledge, in addition to convening decision-makers to influence policy and create lasting change in Africa. Every year, the Panel releases a report, the Africa Progress Report, which outlines an issue of immediate importance to the continent and suggests a set of associated policies. In 2014, the Report highlighted the potential of African fisheries, agriculture, and forests to drive economic development. The 2015 report explores the role of climate change and the potential of renewable energy investments in determining Africa's economic future.
On 4 September 2012, Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh wrote a memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Published by Penguin Press, the book has been described as a "personal biography of global statecraft".
Prioritisation of snakebite in the WHO
Kofi Annan played a pivotal role in getting a WHO resolution on halving the burden of snakebite in late 2020's
In 1965, Annan married Titi Alakija, a Nigerian woman from an aristocratic family. Several years later, they had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo. The couple separated in the late 1970s, and divorced in 1983.
In 1984, Annan married Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer at the UN and a maternal half-niece of diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. She has a daughter, Nina, from a previous marriage.
In 2002, Annan was enstooled by Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene of Asanteman, as the Busumuru of the Ashanti people - a Ghanaian chief. He was the first person to hold this title.
Annan died on the morning of 18 August 2018 in Bern, Switzerland, at the age of 80, after a short illness. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said that Annan was "a global champion for peace" and "a guiding force for good". Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad also said he is saddened by the death of Annan. His body was returned to his native Ghana from Geneva in a brief and solemn ceremony at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, on 10 September. His coffin, draped in the blue UN flag, was accompanied by his widow Nane, his children and senior diplomats from the international organisation.
On 13 September, a state funeral was held for Annan in Ghana at the Accra International Conference Centre. The ceremony was attended by several political leaders from across Africa as well as Ghanaian traditional rulers, European royalty and dignitaries from the international community, including the UN secretary-general António Guterres. Prior to the funeral service, his body lay in state in the foyer of the same venue, from 11 to 12 September. A private burial followed the funeral service at the new Military Cemetery at Burma Camp, with full military honours and the sounding of the Last Post by army buglers and a 17-gun salute.
The United Nations Postal Administration released a new stamp in memory of Annan on 31 May 2019. His portrait on the stamp was designed by artist Martin Mörck. The Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre and the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, both in Accra, are named in his honour. The Kofi Annan University of Guinea [fr] is named after him.
Speeches
Lectures
|
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{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Annan studied economics at Macalester College, international relations at the Graduate Institute Geneva, and management at MIT. Annan joined the UN in 1962, working for the World Health Organization's Geneva office. He went on to work in several capacities at the UN Headquarters, including serving as the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping between March 1992 and December 1996. He was appointed secretary-general on 13 December 1996 by the Security Council and later confirmed by the General Assembly, making him the first officeholder to be elected from the UN staff itself. He was re-elected for a second term in 2001 and was succeeded as secretary-general by Ban Ki-moon in 2007.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As secretary-general, Annan reformed the UN bureaucracy, worked to combat HIV/AIDS (especially in Africa) and launched the UN Global Compact. He was criticised for not expanding the Security Council and faced calls for his resignation after an investigation into the Oil-for-Food Programme, but was largely exonerated of personal corruption. After the end of his term as secretary-general, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation in 2007 to work on international development. In 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria to help find a resolution to the ongoing conflict there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UN's lack of progress with regards to conflict resolution. In September 2016, Annan was appointed to lead a UN commission to investigate the Rohingya crisis. He died in 2018 and was given a state funeral.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kofi Annan was born in Kumasi in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) on 8 April 1938. His twin sister Efua Atta, who died in 1991, shared the middle name Atta, which in the Akan language means \"twin\". Annan and his sister were born into one of the country's Fante aristocratic families; both of their grandfathers and their uncle were Fante paramount chiefs, and their brother Kobina would go on to become Ghana's ambassador to Morocco.",
"title": "Early years and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the Akan names tradition, some children are named according to the day of the week they were born, sometimes in relation to how many children precede them. Kofi in Akan is the name that corresponds with Friday, the day on which Annan was born. The last name Annan in Fante means fourth-born child. Annan said that his surname rhymes with \"cannon\" in English.",
"title": "Early years and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From 1954 to 1957, Annan attended the elite Mfantsipim, an all-boys Methodist boarding school in Cape Coast founded in the 1870s. Annan said that the school taught him that \"suffering anywhere, concerns people everywhere\". In 1957, the year Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, the Gold Coast gained independence from the UK and began using the name \"Ghana\".",
"title": "Early years and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1958, Annan began studying economics at the Kumasi College of Science and Technology, now the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology of Ghana. He received a Ford Foundation grant, enabling him to complete his undergraduate studies in economics at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, US, in 1961. Annan then completed a diplôme d'études approfondies DEA degree in International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1961 to 1962. After some years of work experience, he studied at the MIT Sloan School of Management (1971–72) in the Sloan Fellows program and earned a master's degree in management.",
"title": "Early years and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Annan was fluent in English, French, Akan, and some Kru languages as well as other African languages.",
"title": "Early years and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1962, Annan started working as a budget officer for the World Health Organization, an agency of the United Nations (UN). From 1974 to 1976, he worked as a manager of the state-owned Ghana Tourist Development Company in Accra. In 1980 he became the head of personnel for the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. Between 1981 and 1983, he was a member of the Governing Board of the International School of Geneva. In 1983 he became the director of administrative management services of the UN Secretariat in New York. In 1987, Annan was appointed as an assistant secretary-general for Human Resources Management and Security Coordinator for the UN system. In 1990, he became Assistant Secretary-General for Program Planning, Budget and Finance, and Control.",
"title": "Diplomatic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "When Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali established the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) in 1992, Annan was appointed to the new department as Deputy to then Under-Secretary-General Marrack Goulding. Annan replaced Goulding in March 1993 as Under-Secretary-General of that department after American officials persuaded Boutros-Ghali that Annan was more flexible and more aligned with the role that the Pentagon expected of UN peacekeepers in Somalia. On 29 August 1995, while Boutros-Ghali was unreachable on an aeroplane, Annan instructed United Nations officials to \"relinquish for a limited period of time their authority to veto air strikes in Bosnia\". This move allowed NATO forces to conduct Operation Deliberate Force and made him a favourite of the United States. According to Richard Holbrooke, Annan's \"gutsy performance\" convinced the United States that he would be a good replacement for Boutros-Ghali.",
"title": "Diplomatic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "He was appointed a special representative of the Secretary-General to the former Yugoslavia, serving from November 1995 to March 1996.",
"title": "Diplomatic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2003, retired Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, who was force commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), claimed that Annan was overly passive in his response to the imminent genocide. In his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (2003), Dallaire asserted that Annan held back UN troops from intervening to settle the conflict and from providing more logistical and material support. Dallaire claimed that Annan failed to respond to his repeated faxes asking for access to a weapons depository; such weapons could have helped Dallaire defend the endangered Tutsis. In 2004, ten years after the genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed, Annan said: \"I could and should have done more to sound the alarm and rally support.\"",
"title": "Diplomatic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In his book Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, Annan again argued that the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations could have made better use of the media to raise awareness of the violence in Rwanda and put pressure on governments to provide the troops necessary for an intervention. Annan explained that the events in Somalia and the collapse of the UNOSOM II mission fostered a hesitation among UN member states to approve robust peacekeeping operations. As a result, when the UNAMIR mission was approved just days after the battle, the resulting force lacked the troop levels, resources and mandate to operate effectively.",
"title": "Diplomatic career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1996, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali ran unopposed for a second term. Although he won 14 of the 15 votes on the Security Council, he was vetoed by the United States. After four deadlocked meetings of the Security Council, Boutros-Ghali suspended his candidacy, becoming the only secretary-general ever to be denied a second term. Annan was the leading candidate to replace him, beating Amara Essy by one vote in the first round. However, France vetoed Annan four times before finally abstaining. The UN Security Council recommended Annan on 13 December 1996. Confirmed four days later by the vote of the General Assembly, he started his first term as secretary-general on 1 January 1997.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Due to Boutros-Ghali's overthrow, a second Annan term would give Africa the office of Secretary-General for three consecutive terms. In 2001, the Asia-Pacific Group agreed to support Annan for a second term in return for the African Group's support for an Asian secretary-general in the 2006 selection. The Security Council recommended Annan for a second term on 27 June 2001, and the General Assembly approved his reappointment on 29 June 2001.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Soon after taking office in 1997, Annan released two reports on management reform. On 17 March 1997, the report Management and Organisational Measures (A/51/829) introduced new management mechanisms through the establishment of a cabinet-style body to assist him and the UN's activities in accordance with four core missions. A comprehensive reform agenda was issued on 14 July 1997 titled Renewing the United Nations: A Programme for Reform (A/51/950). Key proposals included the introduction of strategic management to strengthen unity of purpose, the establishment of the position of deputy secretary-general, a 10-per cent reduction in posts, a reduction in administrative costs, the consolidation of the UN at the country level, and reaching out to civil society and the private sector as partners. Annan also proposed to hold a Millennium Summit in 2000. After years of research, Annan presented a progress report, In Larger Freedom, to the UN General Assembly on 21 March 2005. Annan recommended Security Council expansion and a host of other UN reforms.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 31 January 2006, Annan outlined his vision for a comprehensive and extensive reform of the UN in a policy speech to the United Nations Association UK. The speech, delivered at Central Hall, Westminster, also marked the 60th anniversary of the first meetings of the General Assembly and Security Council.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 7 March 2006, he presented to the General Assembly his proposals for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations Secretariat. The reform report is titled Investing in the United Nations, For a Stronger Organization Worldwide.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On 30 March 2006, he presented to the General Assembly his analysis and recommendations for updating the entire work programme of the United Nations Secretariat. The reform report is titled Mandating and Delivering: Analysis and Recommendations to Facilitate the Review of Mandates.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Regarding the UN Human Rights Council, Annan said \"declining credibility\" had \"cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system. Unless we re-make our human rights machinery, we may be unable to renew public confidence in the United Nations itself.\" He believed that, despite its flaws, the council could do good.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In March 2000, Annan appointed the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations to assess the shortcomings of the then existing system and to make specific and realistic recommendations for change. The panel was composed of individuals experienced in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The report it produced, which became known as the Brahimi Report, after the chair of the Panel Lakhdar Brahimi, called for \"renewed political commitment on the part of Member States, significant institutional change, and increased financial support.\" The Panel further noted that to be effective, UN peacekeeping operations must be adequately resourced and equipped, and operate under clear, credible and achievable mandates. In a letter transmitting the report to the General Assembly and Security Council, Annan stated that the Panel's recommendations were essential to making the United Nations truly credible as a force for peace. Later that same year, the Security Council adopted several provisions relating to peacekeeping following the report, in Resolution 1327.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2000, Annan issued a report titled We the Peoples: the Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. The report called for member states to \"put people at the centre of everything we do\": \"No calling is more noble, and no responsibility greater, than that of enabling men, women and children, in cities and villages around the world, to make their lives better.\"",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the final chapter of the report, Annan called to \"free our fellow men and women from the abject and dehumanizing poverty in which more than 1 billion of them are currently confined\".",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, national leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, which the United Nations Secretariat subsequently implemented as the Millennium Development Goals in 2001.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Within the We the Peoples document, Annan suggested the establishment of a United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS), a consortium of high-tech volunteer corps, including NetCorps Canada and Net Corps America, which United Nations Volunteers (UNV) would coordinate. In the \"Report of the high-level panel of experts on information and communication technology\", suggesting a UN ICT Task Force, the panel welcomed the establishment of UNITeS. It made suggestions on its configuration and implementation strategy, including that ICT4D volunteering opportunities make mobilising \"national human resources\" (local ICT experts) within developing countries a priority for both men and women. The initiative was launched at the UNV and was active from February 2001 to February 2005. Initiative staff and volunteers participated in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in December 2003.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In an address to the World Economic Forum on 31 January 1999, Annan argued that the \"goals of the United Nations and those of business can, indeed, be mutually supportive\" and proposed that the private sector and the United Nations initiate \"a global compact of shared values and principles, which will give a human face to the global market\".",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On 26 July 2000, the United Nations Global Compact was officially launched at UN headquarters in New York. It is a principle-based framework for businesses which aims to \"[c]atalyse actions in support of broader UN goals, such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)\". The Compact established ten core principles in the areas of human rights, labour, the environment and anti-corruption. Under the Compact, companies commit to the ten principles and are brought together with UN agencies, labour groups and civil society to implement them effectively.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Towards the end of the 1990s, increased awareness of the destructive potential of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS pushed public health issues to the top of the global development agenda. In April 2001, Annan issued a five-point \"Call to Action\" to address the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Stating it was a \"personal priority\", Annan proposed the establishment of a Global AIDS and Health Fund, \"dedicated to the battle against HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases\", to stimulate the increased international spending needed to help developing countries confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. In June of that year, the General Assembly of the United Nations committed to creating such a fund during a special session on AIDS, and the permanent secretariat of the Global Fund was subsequently established in January 2002.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Following the failure of Annan and the international community to intervene in the genocide in Rwanda and in Srebrenica, Annan asked whether the international community had an obligation in such situations to intervene to protect civilian populations. In a speech to the General Assembly on 20 September 1999, \"to address the prospects for human security and intervention in the next century\", Annan argued that individual sovereignty—the protections afforded by the Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the UN—was being strengthened, while the notion of state sovereignty was being redefined by globalisation and international co-operation. As a result, the UN and its member states had to consider a willingness to act to prevent conflict and civilian suffering, a dilemma between \"two concepts of sovereignty\" that Annan also presented in a preceding article in The Economist on 16 September 1999.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In the March 2000 Millennium Report to the UN, Annan asked: \"If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?\"",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In September 2001, the Canadian government established an ad hoc committee to address this balance between state sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty published its final report in 2001, which focused not on the right of states to intervene but on a responsibility to protect populations at risk. The report moved beyond military intervention, arguing that various diplomatic and humanitarian actions could also be utilised to protect civilian populations.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In 2005, Annan included the doctrine of \"Responsibility to Protect\" (RtoP) in his report In Larger Freedom. When the UN General Assembly endorsed that report, it amounted to the first formal endorsement by UN member states of the doctrine of RtoP.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the years after 1998, when UNSCOM was expelled by the government of Saddam Hussein, and during the Iraq disarmament crisis, in which the United States blamed UNSCOM and former IAEA director Hans Blix for failing to disarm Iraq properly, former UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter blamed Annan for being slow and ineffective in enforcing Security Council resolutions on Iraq and was overtly submissive to the demands of the Clinton administration for regime removal and inspection of sites, often presidential palaces, that were not mandated in any resolution and were of questionable intelligence value, severely hampering UNSCOM's ability to co-operate with the Iraqi government and contributed to their expulsion from the country. Ritter also claimed that Annan regularly interfered with the work of the inspectors and diluted the chain of command by trying to micromanage all of the activities of UNSCOM, which caused intelligence processing (and the resulting inspections) to be backed up and caused confusion with the Iraqis as to who was in charge and as a result, they generally refused to take orders from Ritter or Rolf Ekéus without explicit approval from Annan, which could have taken days, if not weeks. He later believed Annan was oblivious that the Iraqis took advantage of this to delay inspections. He claimed that on one occasion, Annan refused to implement a no-notice inspection of the Iraqi Special Security Organization (SSO) headquarters and instead tried to negotiate access. Still, the negotiation took nearly six weeks, giving the Iraqis more than enough time to clean the site.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "During the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Annan called on the United States and the United Kingdom not to invade without the support of the United Nations. In a September 2004 interview on the BBC, when questioned about the legal authority for the invasion, Annan said he believed it was not in conformity with the UN charter and was illegal.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In 1998, Annan was deeply involved in supporting the transition from military to civilian rule in Nigeria. The following year, he supported the efforts of East Timor to secure independence from Indonesia. In 2000, he was responsible for certifying Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, and in 2006, he led talks in New York between the presidents of Cameroon and Nigeria, which led to a settlement of the dispute between the two countries over the Bakassi peninsula.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Annan and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disagreed sharply on Iran's nuclear program, on an Iranian exhibition of cartoons mocking the Holocaust, and on the then-upcoming International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, an Iranian Holocaust denial conference in 2006. During a visit to Iran instigated by continued Iranian uranium enrichment, Annan said: \"I think the tragedy of the Holocaust is an undeniable historical fact and we should really accept that fact and teach people what happened in World War II and ensure it is never repeated.\"",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Annan supported sending a UN peacekeeping mission to Darfur, Sudan. He worked with the government of Sudan to accept a transfer of power from the African Union peacekeeping mission to a UN one. Annan also worked with several Arab and Muslim countries on women's rights and other topics.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Beginning in 1998, Annan convened an annual UN \"Security Council Retreat\" with the 15 states' council representatives. It was held at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) Conference Center at the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, and was sponsored by both the RBF and the UN.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In June 2004, Annan was given a copy of the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) report on the complaint brought by four female workers against Ruud Lubbers, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, for sexual harassment, abuse of authority, and retaliation. The report also reviewed a long-serving staff member's allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against Werner Blatter, director of UNHCR personnel. The investigation found Lubbers guilty of sexual harassment; no mention was made publicly of the other charge against a senior official or two subsequent complaints filed later that year. During the official investigation, Lubbers wrote a letter which some considered a threat to the female worker who had brought the charges. On 15 July 2004, Annan cleared Lubbers of the accusations, saying they were not substantial enough legally. The internal UN–OIOS report on Lubbers was leaked, and sections accompanied by an article by Kate Holt were published in a British newspaper. In February 2005, Lubbers resigned as head of the UN refugee agency, saying he wanted to relieve political pressure on Annan.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In December 2004, reports surfaced that the Secretary-General's son Kojo Annan received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna Inspection SA, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Programme. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations. On 11 November 2005, The Sunday Times agreed to apologise and pay a substantial sum in damages to Kojo Annan, accepting that the allegations were untrue.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Annan appointed the Independent Inquiry Committee, which was led by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, then the director of the United Nations Association of the US. In his first interview with the Inquiry Committee, Annan denied meeting with Cotecna. Later in the inquiry, he recalled having met with Cotecna's chief executive Elie-Georges Massey twice. In a final report issued on 27 October, the committee found insufficient evidence to indict Annan on any illegal actions but did find fault with Benon Sevan, an Armenian-Cypriot national who had worked for the UN for about 40 years. Appointed by Annan to the Oil-For-Food role, Sevan repeatedly asked Iraqis for allocations of oil to the African Middle East Petroleum Company. Sevan's behaviour was \"ethically improper\", Volcker said to reporters. Sevan repeatedly denied the charges and argued that he was being made a \"scapegoat\". The Volcker report was highly critical of the UN management structure and the Security Council oversight. It strongly recommended a new chief operating officer (COO) position to handle the fiscal and administrative responsibilities then under the Secretary-General's office. The report listed the Western and Middle Eastern companies that had benefited illegally from the program.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2001, its centennial year, the Nobel Committee decided that the Peace Prize was to be divided between the UN and Annan. They were awarded the Peace Prize \"for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world\", having revitalised the UN and prioritised human rights. The Nobel Committee also recognised his commitment to the struggle to contain the spread of HIV in Africa and his declared opposition to international terrorism.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Soon after Annan was awarded the Peace Prize, he was given a chieftaincy title by the Asantehene of Asanteman. The honour was conferred upon him for his \"[selfless] contributions to humanity and promotion of peace throughout the world\".",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Annan defended his deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown, who openly criticised the United States in a speech on 6 June 2006: \"[T]he prevailing practice of seeking to use the UN almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool while failing to stand up for it against its domestic critics is simply not sustainable. You will lose the UN one way or another. [...] [That] the US is constructively engaged with the UN [...] is not well known or understood, in part because much of the public discourse that reaches the US heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.\" Malloch later said his talk was a \"sincere and constructive critique of U.S. policy toward the U.N. by a friend and admirer\".",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The talk was unusual because it violated the unofficial policy of not having top officials publicly criticise member nations. The interim US ambassador John Bolton, appointed by President George W. Bush, was reported to have told Annan on the phone: \"I've known you since 1989 and I'm telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior UN official that I have seen in that entire time.\" Observers from other nations supported Malloch's view that conservative politicians in the US prevented many citizens from understanding the benefits of US involvement in the UN.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 19 September 2006, Annan gave a farewell address to world leaders gathered at the UN headquarters in New York in anticipation of his retirement on 31 December. In the speech, he outlined three major problems of \"an unjust world economy, world disorder, and widespread contempt for human rights and the rule of law\", which he believed \"have not resolved, but sharpened\" during his time as secretary-general. He also pointed to violence in Africa and the Arab–Israeli conflict as two major issues warranting attention.",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On 11 December 2006, in his final speech as secretary-general, delivered at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, Annan recalled President Truman's leadership in the founding of the United Nations. He called for the United States to return to Truman's multilateralist foreign policies and to follow Truman's doctrine that \"the responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world\". He also said that the United States must maintain its commitment to human rights, \"including in the struggle against terrorism\".",
"title": "United Nations Secretary-General (1997–2006)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "After he served as UN secretary-general, Annan took up residence in Geneva and worked in a leading capacity on various international humanitarian endeavours.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2007, Annan established the Kofi Annan Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation that \"works to promote better global governance and strengthen the capacities of people and countries to achieve a fairer, more secure world\".",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The organisation was founded on the principles that fair and peaceful societies rest on three pillars: peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights and the rule of law, and they have made it their mission to mobilise the leadership and the political resolve needed to tackle threats to these three pillars ranging from violent conflict to flawed elections and climate change, to achieve \"a fairer, more peaceful world\".",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Foundation provides the analytical, communication and co-ordination capacities needed to ensure that these objectives are achieved. Annan's contribution to peace worldwide is delivered through mediation, political mentoring, advocacy and advice. Through his engagement, Annan aimed to strengthen local and international conflict resolution capabilities. The Foundation provides the analytical and logistical support to facilitate this in cooperation with relevant local, regional and international actors. The Foundation works mainly through private diplomacy, where Annan provided informal counsel and participated in discreet diplomatic initiatives to avert or resolve crises by applying his experience and inspirational leadership. He was often asked to intercede in crises, sometimes as an impartial, independent mediator, sometimes as a special envoy of the international community. In recent years he had provided such counsel to Burkina Faso, Kenya, Myanmar, Senegal, Iraq and Colombia.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Following the outbreak of violence after the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya, the African Union (AU) established the Panel of Eminent African Personalities to assist in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. Annan was appointed as chair of the panel, to lead it with Benjamin Mkapa, former president of Tanzania; and humanitarian Graça Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique and South Africa.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The panel managed to convince the two principal parties to the conflict, Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki's Party of National Unity (PNU) and Raila Odinga's Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), to participate in the Kenya National Dialogue and Reconciliation Process (KNDR). Over the course of 41 days of negotiations, several agreements regarding taking actions to stop the violence and to remedy its consequences were signed. On 28 February, President Kibaki and Prime Minister Odinga signed a coalition government agreement.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On 23 February 2012, Annan was appointed as the UN and Arab League joint special envoy to Syria in an attempt to end the civil war taking place. He developed a six-point plan for peace:",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "On 2 August, he resigned as envoy to Syria, citing the intransigence of both the Assad government and the rebels, as well as the stalemate on the Security Council as preventing any peaceful resolution of the situation. Annan also stated that the lack of international unity and ineffective diplomacy among world leaders had made the peaceful resolution in Syria an impossible task.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Annan served as the chair of the Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security. The commission was launched in May 2011 as a joint initiative of the Kofi Annan Foundation and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. It comprised 12 eminent individuals from around the world, including Ernesto Zedillo, Martti Ahtisaari, Madeleine Albright and Amartya Sen, and aimed to highlight the importance of the integrity of elections to achieving a more secure, prosperous and stable world. The Commission released its final report, Deepening Democracy, a Strategy to Improve the Integrity of Elections Worldwide, in September 2012.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In September 2016, Annan was asked to lead the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, Myanmar, an impoverished region beset by ethnic conflict and extreme sectarian violence, particularly by Myanmar's Buddhist majority against the Rohingya Muslim minority, further targeted by government forces. The commission, widely known simply as the \"Annan Commission\", was opposed by many Myanmar Buddhists as unwelcome interference in their relations with the Rohingya.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "When the Annan commission released its final report, the week of 24 August 2017, with recommendations unpopular with all sides, violence exploded in the Rohingya conflict – the largest and bloodiest humanitarian disaster in the region in decades – driving most of the Rohingya from Myanmar. Annan attempted to engage the United Nations to resolve the matter, but failed.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Annan died a week before the first anniversary of the report, shortly after an announcement by a replacement commission that it would not \"point fingers\" at the guilty parties – leading to widespread concern that the new commission was just a sham to protect culpable Myanmar government officials and citizens from accountability.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 2018, before Annan's death, Myanmar's civilian government, under the direction of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, made a gesture of acceptance of the Annan commission's recommendations by convening another board – the advisory board for the Committee for Implementation of the Recommendations on Rakhine State – ostensibly to implement the Annan commission's proposed reforms, but never actually implemented them. Some of the international representatives resigned – notably the panel's secretary, Thailand's former foreign minister Surakiart Sathirathai, and former US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson – decrying the \"implementation\" committee as ineffective, or a \"whitewash\".",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In March 2011, Annan became a member of the advisory board for Investcorp Bank B. S. C. Europe, an international private equity firm and sovereign wealth fund owned by the United Arab Emirates. He held the position until 2018.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Annan became a member of the Global Advisory Board of Macro Advisory Partners LLP, a risk and strategic consulting firm based in London and New York City for business, finance and government decision-makers, with some operations related to Investcorp.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In addition to the above, Annan also became involved with several organisations with both global and African focuses, including the following:",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Annan served as chair of The Elders, a group of independent global leaders who work together on peace and human rights issues. In November 2008, Annan and fellow elders Jimmy Carter and Graça Machel attempted to travel to Zimbabwe to make a first-hand assessment of the humanitarian situation in the country. Refused entry, the Elders instead carried out their assessment from Johannesburg, where they met Zimbabwe- and South Africa-based leaders from politics, business, international organisations, and civil society. In May 2011, following months of political violence in Côte d'Ivoire, Annan travelled to the country with elders Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson to encourage national reconciliation. On 16 October 2014, Annan attended the One Young World Summit in Dublin. During a session with fellow elder Mary Robinson, Annan encouraged 1,300 young leaders from 191 countries to lead on intergenerational issues such as climate change and the need for action to take place now, not tomorrow:",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "We don't have to wait to act. The action must be now. You will come across people who think we should start tomorrow. Even for those who believe action should begin tomorrow, remind them tomorrow begins now, tomorrow begins today, so let's all move forward.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Annan chaired the Africa Progress Panel (APP), a group of ten distinguished individuals who advocate at the highest levels for equitable and sustainable development in Africa. As chair, he facilitated coalition building to leverage and broker knowledge, in addition to convening decision-makers to influence policy and create lasting change in Africa. Every year, the Panel releases a report, the Africa Progress Report, which outlines an issue of immediate importance to the continent and suggests a set of associated policies. In 2014, the Report highlighted the potential of African fisheries, agriculture, and forests to drive economic development. The 2015 report explores the role of climate change and the potential of renewable energy investments in determining Africa's economic future.",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "On 4 September 2012, Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh wrote a memoir, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace. Published by Penguin Press, the book has been described as a \"personal biography of global statecraft\".",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Prioritisation of snakebite in the WHO",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Kofi Annan played a pivotal role in getting a WHO resolution on halving the burden of snakebite in late 2020's",
"title": "Post-UN career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1965, Annan married Titi Alakija, a Nigerian woman from an aristocratic family. Several years later, they had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo. The couple separated in the late 1970s, and divorced in 1983.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1984, Annan married Nane Lagergren, a Swedish lawyer at the UN and a maternal half-niece of diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. She has a daughter, Nina, from a previous marriage.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In 2002, Annan was enstooled by Otumfuo Nana Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene of Asanteman, as the Busumuru of the Ashanti people - a Ghanaian chief. He was the first person to hold this title.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Annan died on the morning of 18 August 2018 in Bern, Switzerland, at the age of 80, after a short illness. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general, said that Annan was \"a global champion for peace\" and \"a guiding force for good\". Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad also said he is saddened by the death of Annan. His body was returned to his native Ghana from Geneva in a brief and solemn ceremony at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, on 10 September. His coffin, draped in the blue UN flag, was accompanied by his widow Nane, his children and senior diplomats from the international organisation.",
"title": "Death and state funeral"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "On 13 September, a state funeral was held for Annan in Ghana at the Accra International Conference Centre. The ceremony was attended by several political leaders from across Africa as well as Ghanaian traditional rulers, European royalty and dignitaries from the international community, including the UN secretary-general António Guterres. Prior to the funeral service, his body lay in state in the foyer of the same venue, from 11 to 12 September. A private burial followed the funeral service at the new Military Cemetery at Burma Camp, with full military honours and the sounding of the Last Post by army buglers and a 17-gun salute.",
"title": "Death and state funeral"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The United Nations Postal Administration released a new stamp in memory of Annan on 31 May 2019. His portrait on the stamp was designed by artist Martin Mörck. The Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre and the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, both in Accra, are named in his honour. The Kofi Annan University of Guinea [fr] is named after him.",
"title": "Memorials and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Speeches",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Lectures",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kofi Atta Annan was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founder and chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as chairman of The Elders, an international organisation founded by Nelson Mandela. Annan studied economics at Macalester College, international relations at the Graduate Institute Geneva, and management at MIT. Annan joined the UN in 1962, working for the World Health Organization's Geneva office. He went on to work in several capacities at the UN Headquarters, including serving as the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping between March 1992 and December 1996. He was appointed secretary-general on 13 December 1996 by the Security Council and later confirmed by the General Assembly, making him the first officeholder to be elected from the UN staff itself. He was re-elected for a second term in 2001 and was succeeded as secretary-general by Ban Ki-moon in 2007. As secretary-general, Annan reformed the UN bureaucracy, worked to combat HIV/AIDS and launched the UN Global Compact. He was criticised for not expanding the Security Council and faced calls for his resignation after an investigation into the Oil-for-Food Programme, but was largely exonerated of personal corruption. After the end of his term as secretary-general, he founded the Kofi Annan Foundation in 2007 to work on international development. In 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria to help find a resolution to the ongoing conflict there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UN's lack of progress with regards to conflict resolution. In September 2016, Annan was appointed to lead a UN commission to investigate the Rohingya crisis. He died in 2018 and was given a state funeral.
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2001-09-23T03:06:14Z
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2023-12-26T02:42:55Z
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Kentucky
|
Kentucky (US: /kənˈtʌki/ kən-TUK-ee, UK: /kɛn-/ ken-), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of several states considered a part of the Upland South. Kentucky borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort and its largest city is Louisville. Its population was approximately 4.5 million in 2020.
Kentucky was admitted into the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, splitting from Virginia in the process. It is known as the "Bluegrass State", a nickname based on Kentucky bluegrass, a species of green grass introduced by European settlers for the purpose of grazing in pastures, which has supported the thoroughbred horse industry in the center of the state.
Historically, Kentucky had excellent farming conditions, which led to the development of large tobacco plantations similar to those in Virginia and North Carolina in the central and western parts of the state that utilized enslaved labor during the Antebellum South and Civil War periods. Kentucky ranks fifth nationally in goat farming, eight in beef cattle production, and 14th in corn production. While Kentucky has been a long-standing major center for the tobacco industry, the state's economy has diversified in multiple non-agricultural sectors, including auto manufacturing, energy fuel production, and medical facilities. The state ranks 4th among US states in the number of automobiles and trucks assembled.
The state is home to the world's longest cave system in Mammoth Cave National Park, the greatest length of navigable waterways and streams in the contiguous United States, and the two largest artificial lakes east of the Mississippi River. Kentucky is known for its distinct culture, which features horse racing, bourbon, moonshine, coal, My Old Kentucky Home State Park, automobile manufacturing, tobacco, southern cuisine, barbecue, bluegrass music, college basketball, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Kentucky Colonel.
In the late 18th century, prior to 1769, Botetourt and successor counties of Virginia Colony whose geographical extent was south of the Ohio/Allegheny rivers beyond the Appalachian Mountains became known to European Americans as Kentucky (or Kentucke) country named for the Kentucky River, a tributary of the Ohio River in east central Kentucky. The precise etymology of the name is uncertain.
One theory sees the word based on an Iroquoian name meaning "(on) the meadow" or "(on) the prairie" (cf. Mohawk kenhtà:ke, Seneca gëdá'geh (phonemic /kɛ̃taʔkɛh/), "at the field").
Another theory suggests a derivation from the term Kenta Aki, which could have come from an Algonquian language, in particular from Shawnee. Folk etymology translates this as "Land of Our Fathers". The closest approximation in another Algonquian language, Ojibwe, translates as "Land of Our In-Laws", thus making a fairer English translation "The Land of Those Who Became Our Fathers". In any case, the word aki means "land" in most Algonquian languages.
The first archaeological evidence of human occupation of Kentucky is approximately 9500BCE, and it was Clovis culture, primitive hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Around 1800 BCE, a gradual transition began from a hunter-gatherer economy to agriculturalism. Around 900 CE, a Mississippian culture took root in western and central Kentucky; by contrast, a Fort Ancient culture appeared in eastern Kentucky. While the two had many similarities, the distinctive ceremonial earthwork mounds constructed in the former's centers were not part of the culture of the latter. Fort Ancient settlements depended largely on corn, beans, and squash, and practiced a system of agriculture that prevented ecological degradation by rotating crops, burning sections of forest to create ideal habitat for wild game, relocating villages every 10–30 years, and continually shifting the location of fields to maintain plots of land in various stages of ecological succession.
In about the 10th century, the Kentucky native people's variety of corn became highly productive, supplanting the Eastern Agricultural Complex, and replaced it with a maize-based agriculture in the Mississippian era. As of the 16th century, what became Kentucky was home to tribes from diverse linguistic groups. The Kispoko, an Algonquian-speaking tribe controlled much of the interior of the state.
French explorers in the 17th century documented numerous tribes living in Kentucky until the Beaver Wars in the 1670s; however, by the time that European colonial explorers and settlers began entering Kentucky in greater numbers in the mid-18th century, there were no major Native American settlements in the region.
The Chickasaw had territory up to the confluence of Mississippi and Ohio rivers. During a period known as the Beaver Wars (1640–1680), another Algonquian tribe called the Maumee, or Mascouten was chased out of southern Michigan. The vast majority of them moved to Kentucky, pushing the Kispoko east and war broke out with the Tutelo of North Carolina and Virginia that pushed them further north and east. The Maumee were closely related to the Miami from Indiana. Later, the Kispoko merged with the Shawnee, who migrated from the east and the Ohio River valley.
European explorers arrived in Kentucky possibly as early as 1671. While French explorers surely spied Kentucky during expeditions on the Mississippi, there is no evidence French or Spanish explorers set foot in the lands south of the Ohio, notwithstanding speculations about Hernando de Soto and Robert de la Salle. The terrain in those days was not surveyed, so there is some uncertainty whether and to what extent the early English explorers out of Virginia set foot on the land. Confounding the issue is that the region south of the Ohio/Allegheny later known as Kentucke country was larger than the state of Kentucky today, encompassing most of today's West Virginia and (vaguely) part of southwestern Pennsylvania. Notable expeditions were Batts and Fallam 1671, Needham and Arthur 1673. Dr. Thomas Walker and surveyor Christopher Gist surveyed the area now known as Kentucky in 1750 and 1751.
As more settlers entered the area, warfare broke out with the Native Americans over their traditional hunting grounds.
June 16, 1774, James Harrod founded Harrod's Town (modern Harrodsburg). The settlement was abandoned during the conflict period of Dunmore's War, and resettled in March, 1775, becoming the first permanent European settlement in Kentucky. It was followed within months by Boone's Station, Logan's Fort and Lexington before Kentucky was organized.
This period was the time of Daniel Boone's legendary expeditions starting in 1767 through the Cumberland Gap and down the Kentucky River to reach the bluegrass heartland of Kentucky.
While the Cherokee did not settle in Kentucky, they hunted there. They relinquished their hunting rights there in an extra-legal private contract with speculator Richard Henderson called Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775.
On December 31, 1776, by an act of the Virginia General Assembly, the portion of Fincastle County west of the Big Sandy River (including today's Tug Fork tributary) terminating at the North Carolina border (today Tennessee) extending to the Mississippi River, previously most of what was known as Kentucky (or Kentucke) country, was split off into its own county of Kentucky. Harrod's Town (Oldtown as it was known at the time) was named the county seat.
A 1790 U.S. government report states that 1,500 Kentucky settlers had been killed by Native Americans since the end of the Revolutionary War.
The county was subdivided into Jefferson, Lincoln and Fayette Counties in 1780, but continued to be administered as the District of Kentucky even as new counties were split off.
On several occasions the region's residents petitioned the General Assembly and the Confederation Congress for separation from Virginia and statehood. Ten constitutional conventions were held in Danville between 1784 and 1792. One petition, which had Virginia's assent, came before the Confederation Congress in early July 1788. Unfortunately, its consideration came up a day after word of New Hampshire's all-important ninth ratification of the proposed Constitution, thus establishing it as the new framework of governance for the United States. In light of this development, Congress thought that it would be "unadvisable" to admit Kentucky into the Union, as it could do so "under the Articles of Confederation" only, but not "under the Constitution", and so declined to take action.
On December 18, 1789, Virginia again gave its consent to Kentucky statehood. The United States Congress gave its approval on February 4, 1791. (This occurred two weeks before Congress approved Vermont's petition for statehood.) Kentucky officially became the fifteenth state in the Union on June 1, 1792. Isaac Shelby, a military veteran from Virginia, was elected its first Governor.
Central Kentucky, the bluegrass region, as well as western Kentucky, were the areas of the state with the most slave owners. Planters cultivated tobacco and hemp (see Hemp in Kentucky) on plantations with the use of enslaved labor, and were noted for their quality livestock. During the 19th century, Kentucky slaveholders began to sell unneeded slaves to the Deep South, with Louisville becoming a major slave market and departure port for slaves being transported downriver.
Kentucky was one of the Southern border states during the American Civil War, and it remained neutral within the Union. Despite this, representatives from 68 of 110 counties met at Russellville calling themselves the "Convention of the People of Kentucky" and passed an Ordinance of Secession on November 20, 1861. They established a Confederate government of Kentucky with its capital in Bowling Green, and Kentucky was officially admitted into the Confederacy on December 10, 1861, as the 13th Confederate state with full recognition in Richmond. The Confederate shadow government was never popularly elected statewide, though 116 delegates were sent representing 68 Kentucky counties which at the time made up a little over half the territory of the Commonwealth to the Russellville Convention in 1861, and were occupied and governed by the Confederacy at some point in the duration of the war, and Kentucky had full representation within the Confederate Government. Although Confederate forces briefly controlled Frankfort, they were expelled by Union forces before a Confederate government could be installed in the state capital. After the expulsion of Confederate forces after the Battle of Perryville, this government operated in-exile. Though it existed throughout the war, Kentucky's provisional government only had governing authority in areas of Kentucky under direct Confederate control and had very little effect on the events in the Commonwealth or in the war once they were driven out of the state.
Kentucky remained officially "neutral" throughout the war due to the Southern Unionists sympathies of a majority of the Commonwealth's citizens who were split between the struggle of Kentucky's sister Southern States fully in the Confederate States of America and a continued loyalty to the Unionist cause that was also prevalent in other areas of the South such as in East Tennessee, West Virginia, Western North Carolina, and others. Despite this, some 21st-century Kentuckians observe Confederate Memorial Day on Confederate leader Jefferson Davis' birthday, June 3, and participate in Confederate battle re-enactments. Both Davis and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln were born in Kentucky. John C. Breckinridge, the 14th and youngest-ever Vice President was born in Lexington, Kentucky at Cabell's Dale Farm. Breckenridge was expelled from the U. S. Senate for his support of the Confederacy.
On January 30, 1900, Governor William Goebel, flanked by two bodyguards, was mortally wounded by an assassin while walking to the State Capitol in downtown Frankfort. Goebel was contesting the Kentucky gubernatorial election of 1899, which William S. Taylor was initially believed to have won. For several months, J. C. W. Beckham, Goebel's running mate, and Taylor fought over who was the legal governor until the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in May in favor of Beckham. After fleeing to Indiana, Taylor was indicted as a co-conspirator in Goebel's assassination. Goebel is the only governor of a U.S. state to have been assassinated while in office.
The Black Patch Tobacco Wars, a vigilante action, occurred in Western Kentucky in the early 20th century. As a result of the tobacco industry monopoly, tobacco farmers in the area were forced to sell their crops at prices that were too low. Many local farmers and activists united in a refusal to sell their crops to the major tobacco companies.
An Association meeting occurred in downtown Guthrie, where a vigilante wing of "Night Riders", formed. The riders terrorized farmers who sold their tobacco at the low prices demanded by the tobacco corporations. They burned several tobacco warehouses throughout the area, stretching as far west as Hopkinsville to Princeton. In the later period of their operation, they were known to physically assault farmers who broke the boycott. Governor Augustus E. Willson declared martial law and deployed the Kentucky National Guard to end the wars.
Kentucky is situated in the Upland South. A significant portion of eastern Kentucky is part of Appalachia.
Kentucky borders seven states, from the Midwest and the Southeast. West Virginia lies to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, Missouri to the west, Illinois to the northwest, and Indiana and Ohio to the north. Only Missouri and Tennessee, both of which border eight states, touch more.
Kentucky's northern border is formed by the Ohio River and its western border by the Mississippi River; however, the official border is based on the courses of the rivers as they existed when Kentucky became a state in 1792. For instance, northbound travelers on U.S. 41 from Henderson, after crossing the Ohio River, will be in Kentucky for about two miles (3.2 km). Ellis Park, a thoroughbred racetrack, is located in this small piece of Kentucky. Waterworks Road is part of the only land border between Indiana and Kentucky.
Kentucky has a non-contiguous part known as Kentucky Bend, at the far west corner of the state. It exists as an exclave surrounded completely by Missouri and Tennessee, and is included in the boundaries of Fulton County. Road access to this small part of Kentucky on the Mississippi River (populated by 18 people as of 2010) requires a trip through Tennessee.
The epicenter of the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes was near this area, causing the Mississippi River to flow backwards in some places. Though the series of quakes changed the area geologically and affected the small number of inhabitants of the area at the time, the Kentucky Bend is the result of a surveying error, not the New Madrid earthquake.
Kentucky can be divided into five primary regions: the Cumberland Plateau in the east, which is wholly underlain by coal and constitutes the Eastern Coal Field; the north-central Bluegrass region, where the major cities and the capital are located; the south-central and western Pennyroyal Plateau (a Mississippian-age plateau that is divided into eastern, central and western sub-regions, the latter known as the Pennyrile); the Western Coal Field; and the far-western Jackson Purchase, the northernmost extension of the Mississippian Embayment, west and south of the Tennessee River.
The Bluegrass region is commonly divided into two regions, the Inner Bluegrass encircling 90 miles (140 km) around Lexington, and the Outer Bluegrass that contains most of the northern portion of the state, above the Knobs. Much of the outer Bluegrass is in the Eden Shale Hills sub-region, made up of short, steep, and very narrow hills. The alluvial plain of the Ohio River is another geological region, as is the area south and east of Pine Mountain, part of the Ridge and Valley Belt of Appalachia.
Located within the southeastern interior portion of North America, Kentucky has a climate that is best described as a humid subtropical climate (Köppen: Cfa), only small higher areas of the southeast of the state has an oceanic climate (Cfb) influenced by the Appalachians. Temperatures in Kentucky usually range from daytime summer highs of 87 °F (31 °C) to the winter low of 23 °F (−5 °C). The average precipitation is 46 inches (1,200 mm) a year. Kentucky has four distinct seasons, with substantial variations in the severity of summer and winter. The highest recorded temperature was 114 °F (46 °C) at Greensburg on July 28, 1930, while the lowest recorded temperature was −37 °F (−38 °C) at Shelbyville on January 19, 1994. The state rarely experiences the extreme cold of far northern states, nor the high heat of the states in the Deep South. Temperatures seldom drop below 0 degrees or rise above 100 degrees. Rain and snowfall totals about 45 inches per year.
The climate varies markedly within the state. The northern parts tend to be about five degrees cooler than those in the western parts of the state. Somerset in the south-central part receives ten more inches of rain per year than, for instance, Covington to the north. Average temperatures for the entire Commonwealth range from the low 30s in January to the high 80s in mid-July. The annual average temperature varies from 55 to 60 °F (13 to 16 °C): of 55 °F (13 °C) in the far north as an average annual temperature and of 60 °F (16 °C) in the extreme southwest.
In general, Kentucky has relatively hot, humid, rainy summers, and moderately cold and rainy winters. Mean maximum temperatures in July vary from 83 to 90 °F (28 to 32 °C); the mean minimum July temperatures are 61 to 69 °F (16 to 21 °C). In January the mean maximum temperatures range from 36 to 44 °F (2 to 7 °C); the mean minimum temperatures range from 19 to 26 °F (−7 to −3 °C). Temperature means vary with northern and far-eastern mountain regions averaging five degrees cooler year-round, compared to the relatively warmer areas of the southern and western regions of the state. Precipitation also varies north to south with the north averaging of 38 to 40 inches (970 to 1,020 mm), and the south averaging of 50 inches (1,300 mm). Days per year below the freezing point vary from about sixty days in the southwest to more than a hundred days in the far-north and far-east.
Kentucky has more navigable miles of water than any other state in the union, other than Alaska.
Kentucky is the only U.S. state to have a continuous border of rivers running along three of its sides – the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio River to the north, and the Big Sandy River and Tug Fork to the east. Its major internal rivers include the Kentucky River, Tennessee River, Cumberland River, Green River and Licking River.
Though it has only three major natural lakes, Kentucky is home to many artificial lakes. Kentucky has both the largest artificial lake east of the Mississippi in water volume (Lake Cumberland) and surface area (Kentucky Lake). Kentucky Lake's 2,064 miles (3,322 km) of shoreline, 160,300 acres (64,900 hectares) of water surface, and 4,008,000 acre-feet (4.9 billion cubic meters) of flood storage are the most of any lake in the TVA system.
Kentucky's 90,000 miles (140,000 km) of streams provides one of the most expansive and complex stream systems in the nation.
Kentucky hosts multiple habitats with a high number of endemic species, including some of the most extensive cave systems in the world. 102 species are known to be endemic to the state. The Bluegrass region, which is believed to have once been a lush open woodland environment similar to oak savanna with abundant thickets of river cane, a species of bamboo, was once described by E. Lucy Braun as having the most "anomalous" plant life of the whole Eastern United States. Kentucky's natural environment has suffered greatly from destructive human activities that began after European colonization, particularly the conversion of natural habitat to farmland and coal mining.
Kentucky has an expansive park system, which includes one national park, two National Recreation Areas, two National Historic Parks, two national forests, two National Wildlife Refuges, 45 state parks, 37,896 acres (153 km) of state forest, and 82 wildlife management areas.
Kentucky has been part of two of the most successful wildlife reintroduction projects in United States history. In the winter of 1997, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources began to re-stock elk in the state's eastern counties, which had been extirpated from the area for over 150 years. As of 2009, the herd had reached the project goal of 10,000 animals, making it the largest herd east of the Mississippi River.
The state also stocked wild turkeys in the 1950s. There were reported to be fewer than 900 at one point. Once nearly extinct here, wild turkeys thrive throughout today's Kentucky. Hunters officially reported a record 29,006 birds taken during the 23-day season in spring 2009.
In 1991 the Land Between the Lakes partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the Red Wolf Recovery Program, a captive breeding program.
Kentucky is subdivided into 120 counties, the largest being Pike County at 787.6 square miles (2,040 km), and the most populous being Jefferson County (which coincides with the Louisville Metro governmental area) with 741,096 residents as of 2010.
County government, under the Kentucky Constitution of 1891, is vested in the County Judge/Executive, (formerly called the County Judge) who serves as the executive head of the county, and a legislature called a Fiscal Court. Despite the unusual name, the Fiscal Court no longer has judicial functions.
Kentucky's two most populous counties, Jefferson and Fayette, have their governments consolidated with the governments of their largest cities. Louisville-Jefferson County Government (Louisville Metro) and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (Lexington Metro) are unique in that their city councils and county Fiscal Court structures have been merged into a single entity with a single chief executive, the Metro Mayor and Urban County Mayor, respectively. Although the counties still exist as subdivisions of the state, in reference the names Louisville and Lexington are used to refer to the entire area coextensive with the former cities and counties.
The Metro Louisville government area has a 2018 population of 1,298,990. Under United States Census Bureau methodology, the population of Louisville was 623,867. The latter figure is the population of the so-called "balance" – the parts of Jefferson County that were either unincorporated or within the City of Louisville before the formation of the merged government in 2003. In 2018 the Louisville Combined Statistical Area (CSA) had a population of 1,569,112; including 1,209,191 in Kentucky, which means more than 25% of the state's population now lives in the Louisville CSA. Since 2000, over one-third of the state's population growth has occurred in the Louisville CSA. In addition, the top 28 wealthiest places in Kentucky are in Jefferson County and seven of the 15 wealthiest counties in the state are located in the Louisville CSA.
The second-largest city is Lexington with a 2018 census population of 323,780, its metro had a population of 516,697, and its CSA, which includes the Frankfort and Richmond statistical areas, having a population of 746,310. The Northern Kentucky area, which comprises the seven Kentucky counties in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky metropolitan area, had a population of 447,457 in 2018. The metropolitan areas of Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky have a combined population of 2,402,958 as of 2018, which is 54% of the state's total population on only about 19% of the state's land. This area is often referred to as the Golden triangle as it contains a majority of the state's wealth, population, population growth, and economic growth, it is also where most of the state's largest cities by population are located. It is referred to as the Golden triangle as the metro areas of Lexington, Louisville, and Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati outline a triangle shape. Interstates I-71, I-75, and I-64 form the triangle shape. Additionally, all counties in Kentucky that are part of an MSA or CSA have a total population of 2,970,694, which is 67% of the state's population.
As of 2017 Bowling Green had a population of 67,067, making it the third most populous city in the state. The Bowling Green metropolitan area had an estimated population of 174,835; and the combined statistical area it shares with Glasgow has an estimated population of 228,743.
The two other fast-growing urban areas in Kentucky are the Bowling Green area and the "Tri-Cities Region" of southeastern Kentucky, comprising Somerset, London and Corbin.
Although only one town in the "Tri-Cities" (Somerset) currently has more than 12,000 people, the area has been experiencing heightened population and job growth since the 1990s. Growth has been especially rapid in Laurel County, which outgrew areas such as Scott and Jessamine counties around Lexington or Shelby and Nelson Counties around Louisville. London significantly grew in population in the 2000s, from 5,692 in 2000 to 7,993 in 2010. London also landed a Wal-Mart distribution center in 1997, bringing thousands of jobs to the community.
In northeast Kentucky, the greater Ashland area is an important transportation, manufacturing, and medical center. Iron and petroleum production, as well as the transport of coal by rail and barge, have been historical pillars of the region's economy. Due to a decline in the area's industrial base, Ashland has seen a sizable reduction in its population since 1990; however, the population of the area has since stabilized with the medical service industry taking a greater role in the local economy. The Ashland area, including the counties of Boyd and Greenup, is part of the Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). As of the 2000 census, the MSA had a population of 288,649. More than 21,000 of those people (as of 2010) reside within the city limits of Ashland.
The largest county in Kentucky by area is Pike, which contains Pikeville and suburb Coal Run Village. The county and surrounding area is the most populated region in the state that is not part of a Micropolitan Statistical Area or a Metropolitan Statistical Area containing nearly 200,000 people in five counties: Floyd County, Martin County, Letcher County, and neighboring Mingo County, West Virginia. Pike County contains slightly more than 68,000 people.
Only three U.S. states have capitals with smaller populations than Kentucky's Frankfort (pop. 25,527): Augusta, Maine (pop. 18,560), Pierre, South Dakota (pop. 13,876), and Montpelier, Vermont (pop. 8,035).
The United States Census Bureau determined that the population of Kentucky was 4,505,836 in 2020, increasing since the 2010 United States census.
As of July 1, 2016, Kentucky had an estimated population of 4,436,974, which is an increase of 12,363 from the prior year and an increase of 97,607, or 2.2%, since the year 2010. This includes a natural increase since the last census of 73,541 people (that is 346,968 births minus 273,427 deaths) and an increase due to net migration of 26,135 people into the state. Immigration from outside the United States resulted in a net increase of 40,051 people, and migration within the country produced a net decrease of 13,916 people. As of 2015, Kentucky's population included about 149,016 foreign-born persons (3.4%). In 2016 the population density of the state was 110 people per square mile (42 people/km). Mexico, India, Cuba, China, and Guatemala are the top countries of origin for Kentucky's immigrants.
Kentucky's population has grown during every decade since records have been kept. But during most decades of the 20th century there was also net out-migration from Kentucky. Since 1900, rural Kentucky counties have had a net loss of more than a million people to migration, while urban areas have experienced a slight net gain.
Kentucky's center of population is in Washington County, in the city of Willisburg.
According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 3,984 homeless people in Kentucky.
Life expectancy in Kentucky is 72.5 years in 2021.
According to U.S. Census Bureau official statistics, the largest ancestry in 2013 was American totalling 20.2%. In 1980, before the status of ethnic American was an available option on the official census, the largest claimed ancestries in the commonwealth were English (49.6%), Irish (26.3%), and German (24.2%). In the state's most urban counties of Jefferson, Oldham, Fayette, Boone, Kenton, and Campbell, German is the largest reported ancestry. Americans of Scots-Irish and English stock are present throughout the entire state. Many residents claim Irish ancestry because of known "Scots-Irish" among their ancestors, who immigrated from Ireland, where their ancestors had moved for a period from Scotland during the plantation period.
As of the 1980s, the only counties in the United States where over half of the population cited "English" as their only ancestry group were in the hills of eastern Kentucky (virtually every county in this region had a majority of residents identifying as exclusively English in ancestry).
In the 2000 census, some 20,000 people (0.49%) in the state self-identified as Native American. The state has no federally recognized tribes or state-recognized tribes.
African Americans, who were mostly enslaved at the time, made up 25% of Kentucky's population before the Civil War; they were held and worked primarily in the central Bluegrass region, an area of hemp and tobacco cultivation, as well as raising blooded livestock. The number of African Americans living in Kentucky declined during the 20th century. Many migrated during the early part of the century to the industrial North and Midwest during the Great Migration for jobs and the chance to leave the segregated, oppressive societies. Today, less than 9% of the state's total population is African-American.
The state's African-American population is highly urbanized and 52% of them live in the Louisville metropolitan area; 44.2% of them reside in Jefferson County. The county's population is 20% African American. Other areas with high concentrations, besides Christian and Fulton counties and the Bluegrass region, are the cities of Paducah and Lexington.
The Hispanic and Asian population in Kentucky are small but have grown significantly since the late 20th century. Most of Kentucky's Hispanic residents are of Mexican ancestry. Most of Kentucky's Asian residents of Chinese and Indian heritage.
In 2000 96.1% of all residents five years old and older spoke only English at home, a decrease from 97.5% in 1990.
Speech patterns in the state generally reflect the first settlers' Virginia and Kentucky backgrounds. South Midland features are best preserved in the mountains, with Southern in most other areas of Kentucky, but some common to Midland and Southern are widespread. After a vowel, the /r/ may be weak or missing. For instance, Coop has the vowel of put, but the root rhymes with boot. In southern Kentucky, earthworms are called redworms, a burlap bag is known as a tow sack or the Southern grass sack, and green beans are called snap beans. In Kentucky English, a young man may carry, not escort, his girlfriend to a party.
Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in Kentucky, after English.
As of 2010, the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) reported the following groupings of Kentucky's 4,339,367 residents:
Kentucky being a Southern state in the Bible Belt is predominantly Christian and is home to several seminaries. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville is the principal seminary for the Southern Baptist Convention. Louisville is also the home of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an institution of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Lexington has one seminary, Lexington Theological Seminary (affiliated with the Disciples of Christ). The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky is located on the campus of Georgetown College in Georgetown. Asbury Theological Seminary, a multi-denominational seminary in the Methodist tradition, is located in nearby Wilmore.
In addition to seminaries, there are several colleges affiliated with denominations:
Louisville is home to the Cathedral of the Assumption, the third-oldest Catholic cathedral in continuous use in the United States. The city also holds the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and their printing press. Reflecting late 19th, 20th and 21st-century immigration from different countries, Louisville also has Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu communities.
In 1996 the Center for Interfaith Relations established the Festival of Faiths, the first and oldest annual interfaith festival to be held in the United States.
The Christian creationist apologetics group, Answers in Genesis, along with its Creation Museum, is headquartered in Petersburg, Kentucky.
Early in its history, Kentucky gained recognition for its excellent farming conditions. It was the site of the first commercial winery in the United States (started in present-day Jessamine County in 1799) and due to the high calcium content of the soil in the Bluegrass region quickly became a major horse breeding (and later racing) area. Today Kentucky ranks 5th nationally in goat farming, 8th in beef cattle production, and 14th in corn production. Kentucky has also been a long-standing major center of the tobacco industry – both as a center of business and tobacco farming.
Today Kentucky's economy has expanded to importance in non-agricultural terms as well, especially in auto manufacturing, energy fuel production, and medical facilities.
Kentucky ranks 4th among U.S. states in the number of automobiles and trucks assembled. The Chevrolet Corvette, Cadillac XLR (2004–2009), Ford Escape, Ford Super Duty trucks, Ford Expedition, Lincoln Navigator, Toyota Camry, Toyota Avalon, Toyota Solara, Toyota Venza, and Lexus ES 350 are assembled in Kentucky.
Kentucky has historically been a major coal producer, but the coal industry has been in decline since the 1980s, and the number of people employed in the coal industry there dropped by more than half between 2011 and 2015.
As of 2010, 24% of electricity produced in the U.S. depended on either enriched uranium rods coming from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (the only domestic site of low-grade uranium enrichment), or from the 107,336 tons of coal extracted from the state's two coal fields (which combined produce 4% percent of the electricity in the United States).
Kentucky produces 95% of the world's supply of bourbon whiskey, and the number of barrels of bourbon being aged in Kentucky (more than 5.7 million) exceeds the state's population. Bourbon has been a growing market – with production of Kentucky bourbon rising 170 percent between 1999 and 2015. In 2019 the state had more than fifty distilleries for bourbon production.
Kentucky exports reached a record $22.1 billion in 2012, with products and services going to 199 countries.
According to the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, the primary state agency in Kentucky responsible for creating new jobs and new investment in the state, new business investment in Kentucky in 2012 totaled nearly $2.7 billion, with the creation of more than 14,000 new jobs. One such investment was L'Oréal in Northern Kentucky, which added 200 jobs on top of the 280 already in existing facilities in Florence and Walton.
Fort Knox, a United States Army post best known as the site of the United States Bullion Depository, which is used to house a large portion of the United States official gold reserves, is located in Kentucky between Louisville and Elizabethtown. In May 2010, the Army Human Resource Center of Excellence, the largest office building in the state at nearly 900,000 square feet (84,000 m) opened at Fort Knox. The complex employs nearly 4,300 soldiers and civilians.
Kentucky contains two of the twenty U.S. Federal Penitentiaries: USP Big Sandy (in the east in Martin County near Inez) and USP McCreary (in the south in McCreary County in the Daniel Boone National Forest).
The total gross state product for 2020 was $212.539 billion. Its per capita income was $25,888 in 2017. An organization called the Institute for Truth in Accounting estimated that the state government's debts exceeded its available assets by $26,300 per taxpayer as of 2011, ranking the state as having the 5th highest such debt burden in the nation.
As of October 2023, the state's unemployment rate is 4.2%. In 2014 Kentucky was found to be the most affordable U.S. state in which to live.
Tax is collected by the Kentucky Department of Revenue.
Kentucky has a flat 4.5% individual income tax rate. The rate will decrease to 4.0% effective January 1, 2024. The sales tax rate in Kentucky is 6%.
Kentucky has a broadly based classified property tax system. All classes of property, unless exempted by the Constitution, are taxed by the state, although at widely varying rates. Many of these classes are exempted from taxation by local government. Of the classes that are subject to local taxation, three have special rates set by the General Assembly, one by the Kentucky Supreme Court and the remaining classes are subject to the full local rate, which includes the tax rate set by the local taxing bodies plus all voted levies. Real property is assessed on 100% of the fair market value and property taxes are due by December 31. Once the primary source of state and local government revenue, property taxes now account for only about 6% of the Kentucky's annual General Fund revenues.
Until January 1, 2006, Kentucky imposed a tax on intangible personal property held by a taxpayer on January 1 of each year. The Kentucky intangible tax was repealed under House Bill 272. Intangible property consisted of any property or investment that represents evidence of value or the right to value. Some types of intangible property included: bonds, notes, retail repurchase agreements, accounts receivable, trusts, enforceable contracts sale of real estate (land contracts), money in hand, money in safe deposit boxes, annuities, interests in estates, loans to stockholders, and commercial paper.
In 2023, Kentucky launched a regulated local and online sports betting industry. Taxing sportsbooks at 9.75% (in person) and 14.25% (online), the first two months of action saw the state collect $7.94 million.
In December 2002, the Kentucky governor Paul Patton unveiled the state slogan "It's that friendly", in hope of drawing more people into the state based on the idea of southern hospitality. This campaign was neither a failure nor a success. Though it was meant to embrace southern values, many Kentuckians rejected the slogan as cheesy and generic. It was quickly seen that the slogan did not encourage tourism as much as initially hoped for. So government decided to create a different slogan to embrace Kentucky as a whole while also encouraging more people to visit the Bluegrass.
In 2004, then Governor Ernie Fletcher launched a comprehensive branding campaign with the hope of making the state's $12–14 million advertising budget more effective. The resulting "Unbridled Spirit" brand was the result of a $500,000 contract with New West, a Kentucky-based public relations advertising and marketing firm, to develop a viable brand and tag line. The Fletcher administration aggressively marketed the brand in both the public and private sectors. Since that time, the "Welcome to Kentucky" signs at border areas have an "Unbridled Spirit" symbol on them.
Tourism has become an increasingly important part of the Kentucky economy. In 2019 tourism grew to $7.6 billion in economic impact. Key attractions include horse racing with events like the Kentucky Derby and the Keeneland Fall and Spring Meets, bourbon distillery tours, including along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and Louisville Urban Bourbon Trail, and natural attractions such as the state's many lakes and parks to include Mammoth Cave, Lake Cumberland and Red River Gorge.
The state also has several religious destinations such as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter of Answers in Genesis.
Horse Racing has long been associated with Kentucky. Churchill Downs, the home of the Derby, is a large venue with a capacity exceeding 165,000. The track hosts multiple events throughout the year and is a significant draw to the city of Louisville. Keeneland Race Course, in Lexington, hosts two major meets, the Spring and Fall running. Beyond hosting races Keeneland also hosts a significant horse auction drawing buyers from around the world. In 2019 $360 million was spent on the September Yearling sale. The Kentucky Horse Park in Georgetown hosts multiple events throughout the year, including international equestrian competitions and also offers horseback riding from April to October.
Kentucky maintains eight public four-year universities. There are two general tiers: major research institutions (the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville) and regional universities, which encompass the remaining six schools. The regional schools have specific target counties that many of their programs are targeted towards (such as Forestry at Eastern Kentucky University or Cave Management at Western Kentucky University), however, most of their curriculum varies little from any other public university.
The University of Kentucky (UK) and the University of Louisville (UofL) have the highest academic rankings and admissions standards although the regional schools are not without their national recognized departments – examples being Western Kentucky University's nationally ranked Journalism Department or Morehead State University offering one of the nation's only Space Science degrees. UK is the flagship and land grant of the system and has agriculture extension services in every county. The two research schools split duties related to the medical field, UK handles all medical outreach programs in the eastern half of the state while UofL does all medical outreach in the state's western half.
The state's sixteen public two-year colleges have been governed by the Kentucky Community and Technical College System since the passage of the Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997, commonly referred to as House Bill 1. Before the passage of House Bill 1, most of these colleges were under the control of the University of Kentucky.
Transylvania University, a liberal arts university located in Lexington, was founded in 1780 as the oldest university west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Berea College, located at the extreme southern edge of the Bluegrass below the Cumberland Plateau, was the first coeducational college in the South to admit both Black and white students, doing so from its very establishment in 1855. A state law in 1904 ended integration, and the law was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Berea College v. Kentucky in 1908.The state law was repealed in 1950 and Berea resumed integration.
There are 173 school districts and 1,233 public schools in Kentucky. For the 2010 to 2011 school year, there were approximately 647,827 students enrolled in public school.
Kentucky has been the site of much educational reform over the past two decades. In 1989 the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled the state's education system was unconstitutional. The response of the General Assembly was passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) the following year. Years later, Kentucky has shown progress, but most agree that further reform is needed.
The West Virginia teachers' strike in 2018 inspired teachers in other states, including Kentucky, to take similar action.
Kentucky is served by six major Interstate highways (I-24, I-64, I-65, I-69, I-71, and I-75), seven parkways, and six bypasses and spurs (I-165, I-169, I-264, I-265, I-275, and I-471). The parkways were originally toll roads, but on November 22, 2006, Governor Ernie Fletcher ended the toll charges on the William H. Natcher Parkway and the Audubon Parkway, the last two parkways in Kentucky to charge tolls for access. The related toll booths have been demolished.
Ending the tolls some seven months ahead of schedule was generally agreed to have been a positive economic development for transportation in Kentucky. In June 2007, a law went into effect raising the speed limit on rural portions of Kentucky Interstates and parkways from 65 to 70 miles per hour (105 to 113 km/h).
Road tunnels include the interstate Cumberland Gap Tunnel and the rural Nada Tunnel.
Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, provides service to Ashland, South Portsmouth, Maysville and Fulton. The Cardinal (trains 50 and 51) is the line that offers Amtrak service to Ashland, South Shore, Maysville and South Portsmouth. The City of New Orleans (trains 58 and 59) serve Fulton. The Northern Kentucky area is served by the Cardinal at Cincinnati Union Terminal. The terminal is just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.
Norfolk Southern Railway passes through the Central and Southern parts of the Commonwealth, via its Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific (CNO&TP) subsidiary. The line originates in Cincinnati and terminates 338 miles south in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
As of 2004, there were approximately 2,640 miles (4,250 km) of railways in Kentucky, with about 65% of those being operated by CSX Transportation. Coal was by far the most common cargo, accounting for 76% of cargo loaded and 61% of cargo delivered.
Bardstown features a tourist attraction known as My Old Kentucky Dinner Train. Run along a 20-mile (30 km) stretch of rail purchased from CSX in 1987, guests are served a four-course meal as they make a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip between Bardstown and Limestone Springs. The Kentucky Railway Museum is located in nearby New Haven.
Other areas in Kentucky are reclaiming old railways in rail trail projects. One such project is Louisville's Big Four Bridge. When the bridge's Indiana approach ramps opened in 2014, completing the pedestrian connection across the Ohio River, the Big Four Bridge rail trail became the second-longest pedestrian-only bridge in the world. The longest pedestrian-only bridge is also found in Kentucky – the Newport Southbank Bridge, popularly known as the "Purple People Bridge", connecting Newport to Cincinnati, Ohio.
Kentucky's primary airports include Louisville International Airport (Standiford Field (SDF)) of Louisville, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) of Cincinnati/Covington, and Blue Grass Airport (LEX) in Lexington. Louisville International Airport is home to UPS's Worldport, its international air-sorting hub. Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is the largest airport in the state, and is a focus city for passenger airline Delta Air Lines and headquarters of its Delta Private Jets. The airport is one of DHL Aviation's three super-hubs, serving destinations throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, making it the 7th busiest airport in the U.S. and 36th in the world based on passenger and cargo operations. CVG is also a focus city for Frontier Airlines and is the largest O&D airport and base for Allegiant Air, along with home to a maintenance for American Airlines subsidiary PSA Airlines and Delta Air Lines subsidiary Endeavor Air. There are also a number of regional airports scattered across the state.
On August 27, 2006, Blue Grass Airport was the site of a crash that killed 47 passengers and 2 crew members aboard a Bombardier CRJ designated Comair Flight 191, or Delta Air Lines Flight 5191, sometimes mistakenly identified by the press as Comair Flight 5191. The lone survivor was the flight's first officer, James Polehinke, who doctors determined to be brain damaged and unable to recall the crash at all.
As the state is bounded by two of the largest rivers in North America, water transportation has historically played a major role in Kentucky's economy. Louisville was a major port for steamships in the nineteenth century. Today, most barge traffic on Kentucky waterways consists of coal that is shipped from both the Eastern and Western Coalfields, about half of which is used locally to power many power plants located directly off the Ohio River, with the rest being exported to other countries, most notably Japan.
Many of the largest ports in the United States are located in or adjacent to Kentucky, including:
As a state, Kentucky ranks 10th overall in port tonnage.
The only natural obstacle along the entire length of the Ohio River is the Falls of the Ohio, located just west of Downtown Louisville.
Kentucky is one of four U.S. states to officially use the term commonwealth. The term was used for Kentucky as it had also been used by Virginia, from which Kentucky was created. The term has no particular significance in its meaning and was chosen to emphasize the distinction from the status of royal colonies as a place governed for the general welfare of the populace. Kentucky was originally styled as the "State of Kentucky" in the act admitting it to the union since that is how it was referred to in Kentucky's first constitution.
The commonwealth term was used in citizen petitions submitted between 1786 and 1792 for the creation of the state. It was also used in the title of a history of the state that was published in 1834 and was used in various places within that book in references to Virginia and Kentucky. The other three states officially called "commonwealths" are Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands are also formally commonwealths.
Kentucky is one of only five states that elect their state officials in odd-numbered years (the others being Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia). Kentucky holds elections for these offices every four years in the years preceding Presidential election years. Thus, Kentucky held gubernatorial elections in 2015, 2019 and 2023.
The executive branch is headed by the governor, who serves as both head of state and head of government. The lieutenant governor may or may not have executive authority depending on whether the person is a member of the Governor's cabinet. Under the current Kentucky Constitution, the lieutenant governor assumes the duties of the governor only if the governor is incapacitated. (Before 1992 the lieutenant governor assumed power any time the governor was out of the state.) The governor and lieutenant governor usually run on a single ticket (also per a 1992 constitutional amendment) and are elected to four-year terms. The current governor is Andy Beshear, and the lieutenant governor is Jacqueline Coleman. Both are Democrats.
The executive branch is organized into the following "cabinets", each headed by a secretary who is also a member of the governor's cabinet:
The cabinet system was introduced in 1972 by Governor Wendell Ford to consolidate hundreds of government entities that reported directly to the governor's office.
Other elected constitutional offices include the Secretary of State, Attorney General, Auditor of Public Accounts, State Treasurer and Commissioner of Agriculture. Currently, Republican Michael G. Adams serves as the Secretary of State. The commonwealth's chief prosecutor, law enforcement officer, and law officer is the Attorney General, currently Republican Daniel Cameron. The Auditor of Public Accounts is Republican Mike Harmon. Republican Allison Ball is the current Treasurer. Republican Ryan Quarles is the current Commissioner of Agriculture.
Kentucky's legislative branch consists of a bicameral body known as the Kentucky General Assembly.
The Senate is considered the upper house. It has 38 members and is led by the President of the Senate, currently Robert Stivers (R).
The House of Representatives has 100 members, and is led by the Speaker of the House, currently David Osborne of the Republican Party.
In November 2016, Republicans won control of the House for the first time since 1922, and currently have supermajorities in both the House and Senate.
The judicial branch of Kentucky is called the Kentucky Court of Justice and comprises courts of limited jurisdiction called District Courts; courts of general jurisdiction called Circuit Courts; specialty courts such as Drug Court and Family Court; an intermediate appellate court, the Kentucky Court of Appeals; and a court of last resort, the Kentucky Supreme Court.
The Kentucky Court of Justice is headed by the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth. The chief justice is appointed by, and is an elected member of, the Supreme Court of Kentucky. The current chief justice is John D. Minton Jr.
Unlike federal judges, who are usually appointed, justices serving on Kentucky state courts are chosen by the state's populace in non-partisan elections.
Kentucky's two U.S. Senators are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, both Republicans. The state is divided into six Congressional Districts, represented by Republicans James Comer (1st), Brett Guthrie (2nd), Thomas Massie (4th), Hal Rogers (5th) and Andy Barr (6th) and Democrat Morgan McGarvey (3rd).
In the federal judiciary, Kentucky is served by two United States district courts: the Eastern District of Kentucky, with its primary seat in Lexington, and the Western District of Kentucky, with its primary seat in Louisville. Appeals are heard in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Kentucky's body of laws, known as the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS), were enacted in 1942 to better organize and clarify the whole of Kentucky law. The statutes are enforced by local police, sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, and constables and deputy constables. Unless they have completed a police academy elsewhere, these officers are required to complete Police Officer Professional Standards (POPS) training at the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training Center on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Additionally, in 1948, the Kentucky General Assembly established the Kentucky State Police, making it the 38th state to create a force whose jurisdiction extends throughout the given state.
Kentucky is one of the 32 states in the United States that sanctions the death penalty for certain murders defined as heinous. Those convicted of capital crimes after March 31, 1998, are always executed by lethal injection; those convicted on or before this date may opt for the electric chair. Only three people have been executed in Kentucky since the U.S. Supreme Court re-instituted the practice in 1976. The most notable execution in Kentucky was that of Rainey Bethea on August 14, 1936. Bethea was publicly hanged in Owensboro for the rape and murder of Lischia Edwards. Irregularities with the execution led to this becoming the last public execution in the United States.
Kentucky has been on the front lines of the debate over displaying the Ten Commandments on public property. In the 2005 case of McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that a display of the Ten Commandments in the Whitley City courthouse of McCreary County was unconstitutional. Later that year, Judge Richard Fred Suhrheinrich, writing for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of ACLU of Kentucky v. Mercer County, wrote that a display including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, The Star-Spangled Banner, and the national motto could be erected in the Mercer County courthouse.
Kentucky has also been known to have unusually high political candidacy age laws, especially compared to surrounding states. The origin of this is unknown, but it has been suggested it has to do with the commonwealth tradition.
A 2008 study found that Kentucky's Supreme Court to be the least influential high court in the nation with its decisions rarely being followed by other states.
Since the late 1990s, Kentucky has supported Republican candidates for most federal political offices, and, more recently, for state-level office as well. The state leaned toward the Democratic Party from 1860 (when the Whig Party dissolved) to the 1990s, and was considered a swing state at the presidential level for most of the latter half of the 20th century.
The southeastern region of the state aligned with the Union during the war and has consistently supported Republican candidates. The central and western portions of the state were heavily Democratic in the years leading to the Civil War, were pro-secessionist and pro-Confederate during the Civil War, and in the decades following the war. Kentucky was part of the Democratic Solid South in the second half of the nineteenth century and through the majority of the twentieth century.
Mirroring a broader national reversal of party composition, the Kentucky Democratic Party of the twenty-first century primarily consists of liberal whites, African Americans, and other minorities. Although most of the state's voters have reliably elected Republican candidates for federal office since the late 1990s, Democrats held an advantage in party registration until 2022. On July 15, 2022, the Kentucky Secretary of State's office announced that for the first time in its history, the commonwealth had more registered Republicans than registered Democrats, with 45.19% of the state's voters registered as Republicans, 45.12% registered as Democrats, and 9.69% registered with another political party or as independents.
From 1964 through 2004, Kentucky voted for the eventual winner of the election for President of the United States; however, in the 2008 election the state lost its bellwether status. Republican John McCain won Kentucky, but he lost the national popular and electoral vote to Democrat Barack Obama (McCain carried Kentucky 57% to 41%). 116 of Kentucky's 120 counties supported former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the 2012 election while he lost to Barack Obama nationwide.
Voters in the Commonwealth have supported the previous three Democratic candidates elected to the White House in the late 20th century, all from Southern states: Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas) in 1964, Jimmy Carter (Georgia) in 1976, and Bill Clinton (Arkansas) in 1992 and 1996. In the twenty-first century presidential elections, the state has become a Republican stronghold, supporting that party's presidential candidates by double-digit margins from 2000 through 2020. At the same time, voters have continued to elect Democratic candidates to state and local offices in many jurisdictions.
Elliott County, Kentucky is notable for having held the longest streak of any county in the United States voting Democratic. Founded in 1869, Elliott County supported the Democratic nominee in every presidential election from 1872 (the first in which it participated) until 2012. In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican to ever carry the county, and he did so in a 44-point landslide, highlighting the modern Republican Party's dominance among rural whites and many ancestrally Democratic, socially-conservative voters.
Kentucky is one of the most anti-abortion states in the United States. A 2014 poll conducted by Pew Research Center found that 57% of Kentucky's population thought that abortion should be illegal in all/most cases, while only 36% thought that abortion should be legal in all/most cases.
In a 2020 study, Kentucky was ranked as the 8th hardest state for citizens to vote in.
Kentucky culture is considered to be firmly Southern; it is unique in that it is also influenced by Southern Appalachia, blending with the native upper Southern culture in certain areas of the state. The state is known for bourbon and whiskey distilling, tobacco, horse racing, and college basketball. Kentucky is more similar to the Upland South in terms of ancestry that is predominantly American.
Nevertheless, during the 19th century, Kentucky did receive a substantial number of German immigrants, who settled mostly in the Midwest and parts of the Upper South, along the Ohio River primarily in Louisville, Covington and Newport. Only Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia have higher German ancestry percentages than Kentucky among Census-defined Southern states, although Kentucky's percentage is closer to Arkansas and Virginia's than the previously named state's percentages. Scottish Americans, English Americans and Scotch-Irish Americans have heavily influenced Kentucky culture, and are present in every part of the state. As of the 1980s the only counties in the United States where more than half the population cited "English" as their only ancestry group were all in the hills of eastern Kentucky (and made up virtually every county in this region).
Kentucky was a slave state, and Black people once composed over one-quarter of its population; however, it lacked the cotton plantation system though it did support significant and large scale tobacco plantation systems in the western and central parts of the state more similar to the plantations developed in Virginia and North Carolina than those in the Deep South, and never had the same high percentage of African Americans as most other slave states. While less than 8% of the total population is Black, Kentucky has a relatively significant rural African American population in the Central and Western areas of the state.
Kentucky adopted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in most public spheres after the Civil War. Louisville's 1914 ordinance for residential racial segregation was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1917. However, in 1908 Kentucky enacted the Day Law, "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Persons from Attending the Same School", which Berea College unsuccessfully challenged at the US Supreme Court in 1908; in 1948, Lyman T. Johnson filed suit for admission to the University of Kentucky; as a result in the summer of 1949, nearly thirty African American students entered UK graduate and professional programs. Kentucky integrated its schools after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education verdict, later adopting the first state civil rights act in the South in 1966.
Kentucky celebrates Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday on June 3, on the anniversary of Jefferson Davis's birthday. The biggest day in American horse racing, the Kentucky Derby, is preceded by the two-week Derby Festival in Louisville. The Derby Festival features many events, including Thunder Over Louisville, the Pegasus Parade, the Great Steamboat Race, Fest-a-Ville, the Chow Wagon, BalloonFest, BourbonVille, and many others leading up to the big race.
Louisville also plays host to the Kentucky State Fair and the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Bowling Green, the state's third-largest city and home to the only assembly plant in the world that manufactures the Chevrolet Corvette, opened the National Corvette Museum in 1994. The fourth-largest city, Owensboro, gives credence to its nickname of "Barbecue Capital of the World" by hosting the annual International Bar-B-Q Festival.
Old Louisville, the largest historic preservation district in the United States featuring Victorian architecture and the third largest overall, hosts the St. James Court Art Show, the largest outdoor art show in the United States. The neighborhood was also home to the Southern Exposition (1883–1887), which featured the first public display of Thomas Edison's light bulb, and was the setting of Alice Hegan Rice's novel, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.
Fairview, was the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, who would become President of the Confederate States of America and had the Jefferson Davis Memorial, a 351-foot concrete obelisk, built in 1917. Hodgenville, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, hosts the annual Lincoln Days Celebration, and also hosted the kick-off for the National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration in February 2008. Bardstown celebrates its heritage as a major bourbon-producing region with the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. Glasgow mimics Glasgow, Scotland by hosting the Glasgow Highland Games, its own version of the Highland Games, and Sturgis hosts "Little Sturgis", a mini version of Sturgis, South Dakota's annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
Winchester celebrates an original Kentucky creation, Beer Cheese, with its Beer Cheese Festival held annually in June. Beer Cheese was developed in Clark County at some point in the 1940s along the Kentucky River.
The residents of tiny Benton pay tribute to their favorite tuber, the sweet potato, by hosting Tater Day. Residents of Clarkson in Grayson County celebrate their city's ties to the honey industry by celebrating the Clarkson Honeyfest. The Clarkson Honeyfest is held the last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in September, and is the "Official State Honey Festival of Kentucky".
Renfro Valley, Kentucky is home to Renfro Valley Entertainment Center and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and is known as "Kentucky's Country Music Capital", a designation given it by the Kentucky State Legislature in the late 1980s. The Renfro Valley Barn Dance was where Renfro Valley's musical heritage began, in 1939, and influential country music luminaries like Red Foley, Homer & Jethro, Lily May Ledford & the Original Coon Creek Girls, Martha Carson and many others have performed as regular members of the shows there over the years. The Renfro Valley Gatherin' is today America's second-oldest continually broadcast radio program of any kind. It is broadcast on local radio station WRVK and a syndicated network of nearly 200 other stations across the United States and Canada every week.
Contemporary Christian music star Steven Curtis Chapman is a Paducah native, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Everly Brothers are closely connected with Muhlenberg County, where older brother Don was born. Merle Travis, Country & Western artist known for both his signature "Travis picking" guitar playing style, as well as his hit song "Sixteen Tons", was also born in Muhlenberg County. Kentucky was also home to Mildred and Patty Hill, the Louisville sisters credited with composing the tune to the ditty Happy Birthday to You in 1893; Loretta Lynn (Johnson County), Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys, and Billy Ray Cyrus (Flatwoods).
However, its depth lies in its signature sound – Bluegrass music. Bill Monroe, "The Father of Bluegrass", was born in the small Ohio County town of Rosine, while Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, David "Stringbean" Akeman, Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones, Sonny and Bobby Osborne, and Sam Bush (who has been compared to Monroe) all hail from Kentucky. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is located in Owensboro, while the annual Festival of the Bluegrass is held in Lexington.
Kentucky is also home to famed jazz musician and pioneer, Lionel Hampton. Blues legend W. C. Handy and R&B singer Wilson Pickett also spent considerable time in Kentucky. The R&B group Midnight Star and Hip-Hop group Nappy Roots were both formed in Kentucky, as were country acts The Kentucky Headhunters, Montgomery Gentry and Halfway to Hazard, The Judds, as well as Dove Award-winning Christian groups Audio Adrenaline (rock) and Bride (metal). Heavy Rock band Black Stone Cherry hails from rural Edmonton. Rock band My Morning Jacket with lead singer and guitarist Jim James originated out of Louisville, as well as bands Wax Fang, White Reaper, Tantric. Rock bands Cage the Elephant, Sleeper Agent, and Morning Teleportation are also from Bowling Green. The bluegrass groups Driftwood and Kentucky Rain, along with Nick Lachey of the pop band 98 Degrees are also from Kentucky. King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew is from Covington. Post rock band Slint also hails from Louisville. Noted singer and actress Rosemary Clooney was a native of Maysville, her legacy being celebrated at the annual music festival bearing her name. Noted songwriter and actor Will Oldham is from Louisville. More recently in the limelight are country artists Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, and Chris Knight.
In eastern Kentucky, old-time music carries on the tradition of ancient ballads and reels developed in historical Appalachia.
Kentucky has played a major role in Southern and American literature, producing works that often celebrate the working class, rural life, nature, and explore issues of class, extractive economy, and family. Major works from the state include Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, widely seen as one of the impetuses for the American Civil War; The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1908) by John Fox Jr., which was the first novel to sell a million copies in the United States; All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946), rated as the 36th best English-language novel of the 20th century; The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow; Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962) by Harry Caudill, which contributed to initiating the U.S. Government's War on poverty, and others.
Author Thomas Merton lived most of his life and wrote most of his books – including The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), ranked on National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century – during his time as a monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. Author Hunter S. Thompson is also a native of the state. Since the later part of the 20th century, several writers from Kentucky have published widely read and critically acclaimed books, including: Wendell Berry (fl. 1960–), Silas House (fl. 2001–), Barbara Kingsolver (fl. 1988–), poet Maurice Manning (fl. 2001–), and Bobbie Ann Mason (fl. 1988–).
Well-known playwrights from Kentucky include Marsha Norman (works include 'night, Mother, 1983), Naomi Wallace (works include One Flea Spare, 1995), and George C. Wolfe (works include Jelly's Last Jam, 1992).
Kentucky's cuisine is generally similar to and is a part of traditional southern cooking, although in some areas of the state it can blend elements of both the South and Appalachia, mixing Appalachian with the native Southern cuisine of the area. One original Kentucky dish is called the Hot Brown, a dish normally layered in this order: toasted bread, turkey, bacon, tomatoes and topped with mornay sauce. It was developed at the Brown Hotel in Louisville. The Pendennis Club in Louisville is the birthplace of the Old Fashioned cocktail. Also, Western Kentucky is known for its own regional style of Southern barbecue. Central Kentucky is the birthplace of Beer Cheese.
Harland Sanders, a Kentucky colonel, originated Kentucky Fried Chicken at his service station in North Corbin, though the first franchised KFC was located in South Salt Lake, Utah.
Kentucky is the home of several sports teams such as Minor League Baseball's Triple-A Louisville Bats and High-A Bowling Green Hot Rods. It is also home to the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball's Lexington Counter Clocks and the Frontier League's Florence Y'alls. The Lexington Horsemen and Louisville Fire of the now-defunct af2 had been interested in making a move up to the "major league" Arena Football League, but nothing has come of those plans.
The northern part of the state lies across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which is home to the National Football League's Cincinnati Bengals, Major League Baseball's Cincinnati Reds. It is not uncommon for fans to park in the city of Newport and use the Newport Southbank Pedestrian Bridge, locally known as the "Purple People Bridge", to walk to these games in Cincinnati. Also, Georgetown College in Georgetown was the location for the Bengals' summer training camp, until it was announced in 2012 that the Bengals would no longer use the facilities.
As in many states, especially those without major league professional sports teams, college athletics are prominent. This is especially true of the state's three Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs, including the Kentucky Wildcats, the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, and the Louisville Cardinals. The Wildcats, Hilltoppers, and Cardinals are among the most tradition-rich college men's basketball teams in the United States, combining for 11 National Championships and 24 NCAA Final Fours; all three are high on the lists of total all-time wins, wins per season, and average wins per season.
The Kentucky Wildcats are particularly notable, leading all Division I programs in all-time wins, win percentage, NCAA tournament appearances, and being second only to UCLA in NCAA championships. Louisville has also stepped onto the football scene in recent years, including winning the 2007 Orange Bowl as well as the 2013 Sugar Bowl, and also producing 2016 Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson. Western Kentucky, the 2002 national champion in Division I-AA football (now Football Championship Subdivision (FCS)), completed its transition to Division I FBS football in 2009.
The Kentucky Derby is a horse race held annually in Louisville on the first Saturday in May. The Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville has hosted several editions of the PGA Championship, Senior PGA Championship and Ryder Cup since the 1990s.
The NASCAR Cup Series held a race at the Kentucky Speedway in Sparta, Kentucky from 2011 to 2020. The NASCAR Nationwide Series and the Camping World Truck Series also raced there through 2020. The IndyCar Series previously raced there as well.
Ohio Valley Wrestling in Louisville was the primary location for training and rehab for WWE professional wrestlers from 2000 until 2008, when WWE moved its contracted talent to Florida Championship Wrestling. OVW later became the primary developmental territory for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) from 2011 to 2013.
In 2014 Louisville City FC, a professional soccer team in the league then known as USL Pro and now as the United Soccer League, was announced. The team made its debut in 2015, playing home games at Louisville Slugger Field. In its first season, Louisville City was the official reserve side for Orlando City SC, who made its debut in Major League Soccer at the same time. That arrangement ended in 2016 when Orlando City established a directly controlled reserve side in the USL.
The distinction of being named a Kentucky colonel is the highest title of honor bestowed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Commissions for Kentucky colonels are given by the Governor and the Secretary of State to individuals in recognition of noteworthy accomplishments and outstanding service to a community, state or the nation. The sitting governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky bestows the honor of a colonel's commission, by issuance of letters patent. Kentucky colonels are commissioned for life and act officially as the state's goodwill ambassadors.
37°N 86°W / 37°N 86°W / 37; -86 (Commonwealth of Kentucky)
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kentucky (US: /kənˈtʌki/ kən-TUK-ee, UK: /kɛn-/ ken-), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of several states considered a part of the Upland South. Kentucky borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort and its largest city is Louisville. Its population was approximately 4.5 million in 2020.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kentucky was admitted into the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, splitting from Virginia in the process. It is known as the \"Bluegrass State\", a nickname based on Kentucky bluegrass, a species of green grass introduced by European settlers for the purpose of grazing in pastures, which has supported the thoroughbred horse industry in the center of the state.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Historically, Kentucky had excellent farming conditions, which led to the development of large tobacco plantations similar to those in Virginia and North Carolina in the central and western parts of the state that utilized enslaved labor during the Antebellum South and Civil War periods. Kentucky ranks fifth nationally in goat farming, eight in beef cattle production, and 14th in corn production. While Kentucky has been a long-standing major center for the tobacco industry, the state's economy has diversified in multiple non-agricultural sectors, including auto manufacturing, energy fuel production, and medical facilities. The state ranks 4th among US states in the number of automobiles and trucks assembled.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The state is home to the world's longest cave system in Mammoth Cave National Park, the greatest length of navigable waterways and streams in the contiguous United States, and the two largest artificial lakes east of the Mississippi River. Kentucky is known for its distinct culture, which features horse racing, bourbon, moonshine, coal, My Old Kentucky Home State Park, automobile manufacturing, tobacco, southern cuisine, barbecue, bluegrass music, college basketball, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Kentucky Colonel.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the late 18th century, prior to 1769, Botetourt and successor counties of Virginia Colony whose geographical extent was south of the Ohio/Allegheny rivers beyond the Appalachian Mountains became known to European Americans as Kentucky (or Kentucke) country named for the Kentucky River, a tributary of the Ohio River in east central Kentucky. The precise etymology of the name is uncertain.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "One theory sees the word based on an Iroquoian name meaning \"(on) the meadow\" or \"(on) the prairie\" (cf. Mohawk kenhtà:ke, Seneca gëdá'geh (phonemic /kɛ̃taʔkɛh/), \"at the field\").",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Another theory suggests a derivation from the term Kenta Aki, which could have come from an Algonquian language, in particular from Shawnee. Folk etymology translates this as \"Land of Our Fathers\". The closest approximation in another Algonquian language, Ojibwe, translates as \"Land of Our In-Laws\", thus making a fairer English translation \"The Land of Those Who Became Our Fathers\". In any case, the word aki means \"land\" in most Algonquian languages.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The first archaeological evidence of human occupation of Kentucky is approximately 9500BCE, and it was Clovis culture, primitive hunter-gatherers with stone tools. Around 1800 BCE, a gradual transition began from a hunter-gatherer economy to agriculturalism. Around 900 CE, a Mississippian culture took root in western and central Kentucky; by contrast, a Fort Ancient culture appeared in eastern Kentucky. While the two had many similarities, the distinctive ceremonial earthwork mounds constructed in the former's centers were not part of the culture of the latter. Fort Ancient settlements depended largely on corn, beans, and squash, and practiced a system of agriculture that prevented ecological degradation by rotating crops, burning sections of forest to create ideal habitat for wild game, relocating villages every 10–30 years, and continually shifting the location of fields to maintain plots of land in various stages of ecological succession.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In about the 10th century, the Kentucky native people's variety of corn became highly productive, supplanting the Eastern Agricultural Complex, and replaced it with a maize-based agriculture in the Mississippian era. As of the 16th century, what became Kentucky was home to tribes from diverse linguistic groups. The Kispoko, an Algonquian-speaking tribe controlled much of the interior of the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "French explorers in the 17th century documented numerous tribes living in Kentucky until the Beaver Wars in the 1670s; however, by the time that European colonial explorers and settlers began entering Kentucky in greater numbers in the mid-18th century, there were no major Native American settlements in the region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Chickasaw had territory up to the confluence of Mississippi and Ohio rivers. During a period known as the Beaver Wars (1640–1680), another Algonquian tribe called the Maumee, or Mascouten was chased out of southern Michigan. The vast majority of them moved to Kentucky, pushing the Kispoko east and war broke out with the Tutelo of North Carolina and Virginia that pushed them further north and east. The Maumee were closely related to the Miami from Indiana. Later, the Kispoko merged with the Shawnee, who migrated from the east and the Ohio River valley.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "European explorers arrived in Kentucky possibly as early as 1671. While French explorers surely spied Kentucky during expeditions on the Mississippi, there is no evidence French or Spanish explorers set foot in the lands south of the Ohio, notwithstanding speculations about Hernando de Soto and Robert de la Salle. The terrain in those days was not surveyed, so there is some uncertainty whether and to what extent the early English explorers out of Virginia set foot on the land. Confounding the issue is that the region south of the Ohio/Allegheny later known as Kentucke country was larger than the state of Kentucky today, encompassing most of today's West Virginia and (vaguely) part of southwestern Pennsylvania. Notable expeditions were Batts and Fallam 1671, Needham and Arthur 1673. Dr. Thomas Walker and surveyor Christopher Gist surveyed the area now known as Kentucky in 1750 and 1751.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As more settlers entered the area, warfare broke out with the Native Americans over their traditional hunting grounds.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "June 16, 1774, James Harrod founded Harrod's Town (modern Harrodsburg). The settlement was abandoned during the conflict period of Dunmore's War, and resettled in March, 1775, becoming the first permanent European settlement in Kentucky. It was followed within months by Boone's Station, Logan's Fort and Lexington before Kentucky was organized.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "This period was the time of Daniel Boone's legendary expeditions starting in 1767 through the Cumberland Gap and down the Kentucky River to reach the bluegrass heartland of Kentucky.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "While the Cherokee did not settle in Kentucky, they hunted there. They relinquished their hunting rights there in an extra-legal private contract with speculator Richard Henderson called Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On December 31, 1776, by an act of the Virginia General Assembly, the portion of Fincastle County west of the Big Sandy River (including today's Tug Fork tributary) terminating at the North Carolina border (today Tennessee) extending to the Mississippi River, previously most of what was known as Kentucky (or Kentucke) country, was split off into its own county of Kentucky. Harrod's Town (Oldtown as it was known at the time) was named the county seat.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "A 1790 U.S. government report states that 1,500 Kentucky settlers had been killed by Native Americans since the end of the Revolutionary War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The county was subdivided into Jefferson, Lincoln and Fayette Counties in 1780, but continued to be administered as the District of Kentucky even as new counties were split off.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "On several occasions the region's residents petitioned the General Assembly and the Confederation Congress for separation from Virginia and statehood. Ten constitutional conventions were held in Danville between 1784 and 1792. One petition, which had Virginia's assent, came before the Confederation Congress in early July 1788. Unfortunately, its consideration came up a day after word of New Hampshire's all-important ninth ratification of the proposed Constitution, thus establishing it as the new framework of governance for the United States. In light of this development, Congress thought that it would be \"unadvisable\" to admit Kentucky into the Union, as it could do so \"under the Articles of Confederation\" only, but not \"under the Constitution\", and so declined to take action.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On December 18, 1789, Virginia again gave its consent to Kentucky statehood. The United States Congress gave its approval on February 4, 1791. (This occurred two weeks before Congress approved Vermont's petition for statehood.) Kentucky officially became the fifteenth state in the Union on June 1, 1792. Isaac Shelby, a military veteran from Virginia, was elected its first Governor.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Central Kentucky, the bluegrass region, as well as western Kentucky, were the areas of the state with the most slave owners. Planters cultivated tobacco and hemp (see Hemp in Kentucky) on plantations with the use of enslaved labor, and were noted for their quality livestock. During the 19th century, Kentucky slaveholders began to sell unneeded slaves to the Deep South, with Louisville becoming a major slave market and departure port for slaves being transported downriver.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kentucky was one of the Southern border states during the American Civil War, and it remained neutral within the Union. Despite this, representatives from 68 of 110 counties met at Russellville calling themselves the \"Convention of the People of Kentucky\" and passed an Ordinance of Secession on November 20, 1861. They established a Confederate government of Kentucky with its capital in Bowling Green, and Kentucky was officially admitted into the Confederacy on December 10, 1861, as the 13th Confederate state with full recognition in Richmond. The Confederate shadow government was never popularly elected statewide, though 116 delegates were sent representing 68 Kentucky counties which at the time made up a little over half the territory of the Commonwealth to the Russellville Convention in 1861, and were occupied and governed by the Confederacy at some point in the duration of the war, and Kentucky had full representation within the Confederate Government. Although Confederate forces briefly controlled Frankfort, they were expelled by Union forces before a Confederate government could be installed in the state capital. After the expulsion of Confederate forces after the Battle of Perryville, this government operated in-exile. Though it existed throughout the war, Kentucky's provisional government only had governing authority in areas of Kentucky under direct Confederate control and had very little effect on the events in the Commonwealth or in the war once they were driven out of the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kentucky remained officially \"neutral\" throughout the war due to the Southern Unionists sympathies of a majority of the Commonwealth's citizens who were split between the struggle of Kentucky's sister Southern States fully in the Confederate States of America and a continued loyalty to the Unionist cause that was also prevalent in other areas of the South such as in East Tennessee, West Virginia, Western North Carolina, and others. Despite this, some 21st-century Kentuckians observe Confederate Memorial Day on Confederate leader Jefferson Davis' birthday, June 3, and participate in Confederate battle re-enactments. Both Davis and U.S. president Abraham Lincoln were born in Kentucky. John C. Breckinridge, the 14th and youngest-ever Vice President was born in Lexington, Kentucky at Cabell's Dale Farm. Breckenridge was expelled from the U. S. Senate for his support of the Confederacy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On January 30, 1900, Governor William Goebel, flanked by two bodyguards, was mortally wounded by an assassin while walking to the State Capitol in downtown Frankfort. Goebel was contesting the Kentucky gubernatorial election of 1899, which William S. Taylor was initially believed to have won. For several months, J. C. W. Beckham, Goebel's running mate, and Taylor fought over who was the legal governor until the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in May in favor of Beckham. After fleeing to Indiana, Taylor was indicted as a co-conspirator in Goebel's assassination. Goebel is the only governor of a U.S. state to have been assassinated while in office.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Black Patch Tobacco Wars, a vigilante action, occurred in Western Kentucky in the early 20th century. As a result of the tobacco industry monopoly, tobacco farmers in the area were forced to sell their crops at prices that were too low. Many local farmers and activists united in a refusal to sell their crops to the major tobacco companies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "An Association meeting occurred in downtown Guthrie, where a vigilante wing of \"Night Riders\", formed. The riders terrorized farmers who sold their tobacco at the low prices demanded by the tobacco corporations. They burned several tobacco warehouses throughout the area, stretching as far west as Hopkinsville to Princeton. In the later period of their operation, they were known to physically assault farmers who broke the boycott. Governor Augustus E. Willson declared martial law and deployed the Kentucky National Guard to end the wars.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kentucky is situated in the Upland South. A significant portion of eastern Kentucky is part of Appalachia.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kentucky borders seven states, from the Midwest and the Southeast. West Virginia lies to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, Missouri to the west, Illinois to the northwest, and Indiana and Ohio to the north. Only Missouri and Tennessee, both of which border eight states, touch more.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kentucky's northern border is formed by the Ohio River and its western border by the Mississippi River; however, the official border is based on the courses of the rivers as they existed when Kentucky became a state in 1792. For instance, northbound travelers on U.S. 41 from Henderson, after crossing the Ohio River, will be in Kentucky for about two miles (3.2 km). Ellis Park, a thoroughbred racetrack, is located in this small piece of Kentucky. Waterworks Road is part of the only land border between Indiana and Kentucky.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kentucky has a non-contiguous part known as Kentucky Bend, at the far west corner of the state. It exists as an exclave surrounded completely by Missouri and Tennessee, and is included in the boundaries of Fulton County. Road access to this small part of Kentucky on the Mississippi River (populated by 18 people as of 2010) requires a trip through Tennessee.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The epicenter of the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes was near this area, causing the Mississippi River to flow backwards in some places. Though the series of quakes changed the area geologically and affected the small number of inhabitants of the area at the time, the Kentucky Bend is the result of a surveying error, not the New Madrid earthquake.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kentucky can be divided into five primary regions: the Cumberland Plateau in the east, which is wholly underlain by coal and constitutes the Eastern Coal Field; the north-central Bluegrass region, where the major cities and the capital are located; the south-central and western Pennyroyal Plateau (a Mississippian-age plateau that is divided into eastern, central and western sub-regions, the latter known as the Pennyrile); the Western Coal Field; and the far-western Jackson Purchase, the northernmost extension of the Mississippian Embayment, west and south of the Tennessee River.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Bluegrass region is commonly divided into two regions, the Inner Bluegrass encircling 90 miles (140 km) around Lexington, and the Outer Bluegrass that contains most of the northern portion of the state, above the Knobs. Much of the outer Bluegrass is in the Eden Shale Hills sub-region, made up of short, steep, and very narrow hills. The alluvial plain of the Ohio River is another geological region, as is the area south and east of Pine Mountain, part of the Ridge and Valley Belt of Appalachia.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Located within the southeastern interior portion of North America, Kentucky has a climate that is best described as a humid subtropical climate (Köppen: Cfa), only small higher areas of the southeast of the state has an oceanic climate (Cfb) influenced by the Appalachians. Temperatures in Kentucky usually range from daytime summer highs of 87 °F (31 °C) to the winter low of 23 °F (−5 °C). The average precipitation is 46 inches (1,200 mm) a year. Kentucky has four distinct seasons, with substantial variations in the severity of summer and winter. The highest recorded temperature was 114 °F (46 °C) at Greensburg on July 28, 1930, while the lowest recorded temperature was −37 °F (−38 °C) at Shelbyville on January 19, 1994. The state rarely experiences the extreme cold of far northern states, nor the high heat of the states in the Deep South. Temperatures seldom drop below 0 degrees or rise above 100 degrees. Rain and snowfall totals about 45 inches per year.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The climate varies markedly within the state. The northern parts tend to be about five degrees cooler than those in the western parts of the state. Somerset in the south-central part receives ten more inches of rain per year than, for instance, Covington to the north. Average temperatures for the entire Commonwealth range from the low 30s in January to the high 80s in mid-July. The annual average temperature varies from 55 to 60 °F (13 to 16 °C): of 55 °F (13 °C) in the far north as an average annual temperature and of 60 °F (16 °C) in the extreme southwest.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In general, Kentucky has relatively hot, humid, rainy summers, and moderately cold and rainy winters. Mean maximum temperatures in July vary from 83 to 90 °F (28 to 32 °C); the mean minimum July temperatures are 61 to 69 °F (16 to 21 °C). In January the mean maximum temperatures range from 36 to 44 °F (2 to 7 °C); the mean minimum temperatures range from 19 to 26 °F (−7 to −3 °C). Temperature means vary with northern and far-eastern mountain regions averaging five degrees cooler year-round, compared to the relatively warmer areas of the southern and western regions of the state. Precipitation also varies north to south with the north averaging of 38 to 40 inches (970 to 1,020 mm), and the south averaging of 50 inches (1,300 mm). Days per year below the freezing point vary from about sixty days in the southwest to more than a hundred days in the far-north and far-east.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Kentucky has more navigable miles of water than any other state in the union, other than Alaska.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Kentucky is the only U.S. state to have a continuous border of rivers running along three of its sides – the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio River to the north, and the Big Sandy River and Tug Fork to the east. Its major internal rivers include the Kentucky River, Tennessee River, Cumberland River, Green River and Licking River.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Though it has only three major natural lakes, Kentucky is home to many artificial lakes. Kentucky has both the largest artificial lake east of the Mississippi in water volume (Lake Cumberland) and surface area (Kentucky Lake). Kentucky Lake's 2,064 miles (3,322 km) of shoreline, 160,300 acres (64,900 hectares) of water surface, and 4,008,000 acre-feet (4.9 billion cubic meters) of flood storage are the most of any lake in the TVA system.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Kentucky's 90,000 miles (140,000 km) of streams provides one of the most expansive and complex stream systems in the nation.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Kentucky hosts multiple habitats with a high number of endemic species, including some of the most extensive cave systems in the world. 102 species are known to be endemic to the state. The Bluegrass region, which is believed to have once been a lush open woodland environment similar to oak savanna with abundant thickets of river cane, a species of bamboo, was once described by E. Lucy Braun as having the most \"anomalous\" plant life of the whole Eastern United States. Kentucky's natural environment has suffered greatly from destructive human activities that began after European colonization, particularly the conversion of natural habitat to farmland and coal mining.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Kentucky has an expansive park system, which includes one national park, two National Recreation Areas, two National Historic Parks, two national forests, two National Wildlife Refuges, 45 state parks, 37,896 acres (153 km) of state forest, and 82 wildlife management areas.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Kentucky has been part of two of the most successful wildlife reintroduction projects in United States history. In the winter of 1997, the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources began to re-stock elk in the state's eastern counties, which had been extirpated from the area for over 150 years. As of 2009, the herd had reached the project goal of 10,000 animals, making it the largest herd east of the Mississippi River.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The state also stocked wild turkeys in the 1950s. There were reported to be fewer than 900 at one point. Once nearly extinct here, wild turkeys thrive throughout today's Kentucky. Hunters officially reported a record 29,006 birds taken during the 23-day season in spring 2009.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In 1991 the Land Between the Lakes partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the Red Wolf Recovery Program, a captive breeding program.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Kentucky is subdivided into 120 counties, the largest being Pike County at 787.6 square miles (2,040 km), and the most populous being Jefferson County (which coincides with the Louisville Metro governmental area) with 741,096 residents as of 2010.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "County government, under the Kentucky Constitution of 1891, is vested in the County Judge/Executive, (formerly called the County Judge) who serves as the executive head of the county, and a legislature called a Fiscal Court. Despite the unusual name, the Fiscal Court no longer has judicial functions.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Kentucky's two most populous counties, Jefferson and Fayette, have their governments consolidated with the governments of their largest cities. Louisville-Jefferson County Government (Louisville Metro) and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (Lexington Metro) are unique in that their city councils and county Fiscal Court structures have been merged into a single entity with a single chief executive, the Metro Mayor and Urban County Mayor, respectively. Although the counties still exist as subdivisions of the state, in reference the names Louisville and Lexington are used to refer to the entire area coextensive with the former cities and counties.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Metro Louisville government area has a 2018 population of 1,298,990. Under United States Census Bureau methodology, the population of Louisville was 623,867. The latter figure is the population of the so-called \"balance\" – the parts of Jefferson County that were either unincorporated or within the City of Louisville before the formation of the merged government in 2003. In 2018 the Louisville Combined Statistical Area (CSA) had a population of 1,569,112; including 1,209,191 in Kentucky, which means more than 25% of the state's population now lives in the Louisville CSA. Since 2000, over one-third of the state's population growth has occurred in the Louisville CSA. In addition, the top 28 wealthiest places in Kentucky are in Jefferson County and seven of the 15 wealthiest counties in the state are located in the Louisville CSA.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The second-largest city is Lexington with a 2018 census population of 323,780, its metro had a population of 516,697, and its CSA, which includes the Frankfort and Richmond statistical areas, having a population of 746,310. The Northern Kentucky area, which comprises the seven Kentucky counties in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky metropolitan area, had a population of 447,457 in 2018. The metropolitan areas of Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky have a combined population of 2,402,958 as of 2018, which is 54% of the state's total population on only about 19% of the state's land. This area is often referred to as the Golden triangle as it contains a majority of the state's wealth, population, population growth, and economic growth, it is also where most of the state's largest cities by population are located. It is referred to as the Golden triangle as the metro areas of Lexington, Louisville, and Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati outline a triangle shape. Interstates I-71, I-75, and I-64 form the triangle shape. Additionally, all counties in Kentucky that are part of an MSA or CSA have a total population of 2,970,694, which is 67% of the state's population.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "As of 2017 Bowling Green had a population of 67,067, making it the third most populous city in the state. The Bowling Green metropolitan area had an estimated population of 174,835; and the combined statistical area it shares with Glasgow has an estimated population of 228,743.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The two other fast-growing urban areas in Kentucky are the Bowling Green area and the \"Tri-Cities Region\" of southeastern Kentucky, comprising Somerset, London and Corbin.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Although only one town in the \"Tri-Cities\" (Somerset) currently has more than 12,000 people, the area has been experiencing heightened population and job growth since the 1990s. Growth has been especially rapid in Laurel County, which outgrew areas such as Scott and Jessamine counties around Lexington or Shelby and Nelson Counties around Louisville. London significantly grew in population in the 2000s, from 5,692 in 2000 to 7,993 in 2010. London also landed a Wal-Mart distribution center in 1997, bringing thousands of jobs to the community.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In northeast Kentucky, the greater Ashland area is an important transportation, manufacturing, and medical center. Iron and petroleum production, as well as the transport of coal by rail and barge, have been historical pillars of the region's economy. Due to a decline in the area's industrial base, Ashland has seen a sizable reduction in its population since 1990; however, the population of the area has since stabilized with the medical service industry taking a greater role in the local economy. The Ashland area, including the counties of Boyd and Greenup, is part of the Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH, Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). As of the 2000 census, the MSA had a population of 288,649. More than 21,000 of those people (as of 2010) reside within the city limits of Ashland.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The largest county in Kentucky by area is Pike, which contains Pikeville and suburb Coal Run Village. The county and surrounding area is the most populated region in the state that is not part of a Micropolitan Statistical Area or a Metropolitan Statistical Area containing nearly 200,000 people in five counties: Floyd County, Martin County, Letcher County, and neighboring Mingo County, West Virginia. Pike County contains slightly more than 68,000 people.",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Only three U.S. states have capitals with smaller populations than Kentucky's Frankfort (pop. 25,527): Augusta, Maine (pop. 18,560), Pierre, South Dakota (pop. 13,876), and Montpelier, Vermont (pop. 8,035).",
"title": "Administrative divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The United States Census Bureau determined that the population of Kentucky was 4,505,836 in 2020, increasing since the 2010 United States census.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "As of July 1, 2016, Kentucky had an estimated population of 4,436,974, which is an increase of 12,363 from the prior year and an increase of 97,607, or 2.2%, since the year 2010. This includes a natural increase since the last census of 73,541 people (that is 346,968 births minus 273,427 deaths) and an increase due to net migration of 26,135 people into the state. Immigration from outside the United States resulted in a net increase of 40,051 people, and migration within the country produced a net decrease of 13,916 people. As of 2015, Kentucky's population included about 149,016 foreign-born persons (3.4%). In 2016 the population density of the state was 110 people per square mile (42 people/km). Mexico, India, Cuba, China, and Guatemala are the top countries of origin for Kentucky's immigrants.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Kentucky's population has grown during every decade since records have been kept. But during most decades of the 20th century there was also net out-migration from Kentucky. Since 1900, rural Kentucky counties have had a net loss of more than a million people to migration, while urban areas have experienced a slight net gain.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Kentucky's center of population is in Washington County, in the city of Willisburg.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 3,984 homeless people in Kentucky.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Life expectancy in Kentucky is 72.5 years in 2021.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "According to U.S. Census Bureau official statistics, the largest ancestry in 2013 was American totalling 20.2%. In 1980, before the status of ethnic American was an available option on the official census, the largest claimed ancestries in the commonwealth were English (49.6%), Irish (26.3%), and German (24.2%). In the state's most urban counties of Jefferson, Oldham, Fayette, Boone, Kenton, and Campbell, German is the largest reported ancestry. Americans of Scots-Irish and English stock are present throughout the entire state. Many residents claim Irish ancestry because of known \"Scots-Irish\" among their ancestors, who immigrated from Ireland, where their ancestors had moved for a period from Scotland during the plantation period.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "As of the 1980s, the only counties in the United States where over half of the population cited \"English\" as their only ancestry group were in the hills of eastern Kentucky (virtually every county in this region had a majority of residents identifying as exclusively English in ancestry).",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In the 2000 census, some 20,000 people (0.49%) in the state self-identified as Native American. The state has no federally recognized tribes or state-recognized tribes.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "African Americans, who were mostly enslaved at the time, made up 25% of Kentucky's population before the Civil War; they were held and worked primarily in the central Bluegrass region, an area of hemp and tobacco cultivation, as well as raising blooded livestock. The number of African Americans living in Kentucky declined during the 20th century. Many migrated during the early part of the century to the industrial North and Midwest during the Great Migration for jobs and the chance to leave the segregated, oppressive societies. Today, less than 9% of the state's total population is African-American.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The state's African-American population is highly urbanized and 52% of them live in the Louisville metropolitan area; 44.2% of them reside in Jefferson County. The county's population is 20% African American. Other areas with high concentrations, besides Christian and Fulton counties and the Bluegrass region, are the cities of Paducah and Lexington.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Hispanic and Asian population in Kentucky are small but have grown significantly since the late 20th century. Most of Kentucky's Hispanic residents are of Mexican ancestry. Most of Kentucky's Asian residents of Chinese and Indian heritage.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 2000 96.1% of all residents five years old and older spoke only English at home, a decrease from 97.5% in 1990.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Speech patterns in the state generally reflect the first settlers' Virginia and Kentucky backgrounds. South Midland features are best preserved in the mountains, with Southern in most other areas of Kentucky, but some common to Midland and Southern are widespread. After a vowel, the /r/ may be weak or missing. For instance, Coop has the vowel of put, but the root rhymes with boot. In southern Kentucky, earthworms are called redworms, a burlap bag is known as a tow sack or the Southern grass sack, and green beans are called snap beans. In Kentucky English, a young man may carry, not escort, his girlfriend to a party.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Spanish is the second-most-spoken language in Kentucky, after English.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "As of 2010, the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) reported the following groupings of Kentucky's 4,339,367 residents:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Kentucky being a Southern state in the Bible Belt is predominantly Christian and is home to several seminaries. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville is the principal seminary for the Southern Baptist Convention. Louisville is also the home of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an institution of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Lexington has one seminary, Lexington Theological Seminary (affiliated with the Disciples of Christ). The Baptist Seminary of Kentucky is located on the campus of Georgetown College in Georgetown. Asbury Theological Seminary, a multi-denominational seminary in the Methodist tradition, is located in nearby Wilmore.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In addition to seminaries, there are several colleges affiliated with denominations:",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Louisville is home to the Cathedral of the Assumption, the third-oldest Catholic cathedral in continuous use in the United States. The city also holds the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and their printing press. Reflecting late 19th, 20th and 21st-century immigration from different countries, Louisville also has Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu communities.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "In 1996 the Center for Interfaith Relations established the Festival of Faiths, the first and oldest annual interfaith festival to be held in the United States.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The Christian creationist apologetics group, Answers in Genesis, along with its Creation Museum, is headquartered in Petersburg, Kentucky.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Early in its history, Kentucky gained recognition for its excellent farming conditions. It was the site of the first commercial winery in the United States (started in present-day Jessamine County in 1799) and due to the high calcium content of the soil in the Bluegrass region quickly became a major horse breeding (and later racing) area. Today Kentucky ranks 5th nationally in goat farming, 8th in beef cattle production, and 14th in corn production. Kentucky has also been a long-standing major center of the tobacco industry – both as a center of business and tobacco farming.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Today Kentucky's economy has expanded to importance in non-agricultural terms as well, especially in auto manufacturing, energy fuel production, and medical facilities.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Kentucky ranks 4th among U.S. states in the number of automobiles and trucks assembled. The Chevrolet Corvette, Cadillac XLR (2004–2009), Ford Escape, Ford Super Duty trucks, Ford Expedition, Lincoln Navigator, Toyota Camry, Toyota Avalon, Toyota Solara, Toyota Venza, and Lexus ES 350 are assembled in Kentucky.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Kentucky has historically been a major coal producer, but the coal industry has been in decline since the 1980s, and the number of people employed in the coal industry there dropped by more than half between 2011 and 2015.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "As of 2010, 24% of electricity produced in the U.S. depended on either enriched uranium rods coming from the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant (the only domestic site of low-grade uranium enrichment), or from the 107,336 tons of coal extracted from the state's two coal fields (which combined produce 4% percent of the electricity in the United States).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Kentucky produces 95% of the world's supply of bourbon whiskey, and the number of barrels of bourbon being aged in Kentucky (more than 5.7 million) exceeds the state's population. Bourbon has been a growing market – with production of Kentucky bourbon rising 170 percent between 1999 and 2015. In 2019 the state had more than fifty distilleries for bourbon production.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Kentucky exports reached a record $22.1 billion in 2012, with products and services going to 199 countries.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "According to the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, the primary state agency in Kentucky responsible for creating new jobs and new investment in the state, new business investment in Kentucky in 2012 totaled nearly $2.7 billion, with the creation of more than 14,000 new jobs. One such investment was L'Oréal in Northern Kentucky, which added 200 jobs on top of the 280 already in existing facilities in Florence and Walton.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Fort Knox, a United States Army post best known as the site of the United States Bullion Depository, which is used to house a large portion of the United States official gold reserves, is located in Kentucky between Louisville and Elizabethtown. In May 2010, the Army Human Resource Center of Excellence, the largest office building in the state at nearly 900,000 square feet (84,000 m) opened at Fort Knox. The complex employs nearly 4,300 soldiers and civilians.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Kentucky contains two of the twenty U.S. Federal Penitentiaries: USP Big Sandy (in the east in Martin County near Inez) and USP McCreary (in the south in McCreary County in the Daniel Boone National Forest).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The total gross state product for 2020 was $212.539 billion. Its per capita income was $25,888 in 2017. An organization called the Institute for Truth in Accounting estimated that the state government's debts exceeded its available assets by $26,300 per taxpayer as of 2011, ranking the state as having the 5th highest such debt burden in the nation.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "As of October 2023, the state's unemployment rate is 4.2%. In 2014 Kentucky was found to be the most affordable U.S. state in which to live.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Tax is collected by the Kentucky Department of Revenue.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Kentucky has a flat 4.5% individual income tax rate. The rate will decrease to 4.0% effective January 1, 2024. The sales tax rate in Kentucky is 6%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Kentucky has a broadly based classified property tax system. All classes of property, unless exempted by the Constitution, are taxed by the state, although at widely varying rates. Many of these classes are exempted from taxation by local government. Of the classes that are subject to local taxation, three have special rates set by the General Assembly, one by the Kentucky Supreme Court and the remaining classes are subject to the full local rate, which includes the tax rate set by the local taxing bodies plus all voted levies. Real property is assessed on 100% of the fair market value and property taxes are due by December 31. Once the primary source of state and local government revenue, property taxes now account for only about 6% of the Kentucky's annual General Fund revenues.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Until January 1, 2006, Kentucky imposed a tax on intangible personal property held by a taxpayer on January 1 of each year. The Kentucky intangible tax was repealed under House Bill 272. Intangible property consisted of any property or investment that represents evidence of value or the right to value. Some types of intangible property included: bonds, notes, retail repurchase agreements, accounts receivable, trusts, enforceable contracts sale of real estate (land contracts), money in hand, money in safe deposit boxes, annuities, interests in estates, loans to stockholders, and commercial paper.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In 2023, Kentucky launched a regulated local and online sports betting industry. Taxing sportsbooks at 9.75% (in person) and 14.25% (online), the first two months of action saw the state collect $7.94 million.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "In December 2002, the Kentucky governor Paul Patton unveiled the state slogan \"It's that friendly\", in hope of drawing more people into the state based on the idea of southern hospitality. This campaign was neither a failure nor a success. Though it was meant to embrace southern values, many Kentuckians rejected the slogan as cheesy and generic. It was quickly seen that the slogan did not encourage tourism as much as initially hoped for. So government decided to create a different slogan to embrace Kentucky as a whole while also encouraging more people to visit the Bluegrass.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "In 2004, then Governor Ernie Fletcher launched a comprehensive branding campaign with the hope of making the state's $12–14 million advertising budget more effective. The resulting \"Unbridled Spirit\" brand was the result of a $500,000 contract with New West, a Kentucky-based public relations advertising and marketing firm, to develop a viable brand and tag line. The Fletcher administration aggressively marketed the brand in both the public and private sectors. Since that time, the \"Welcome to Kentucky\" signs at border areas have an \"Unbridled Spirit\" symbol on them.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Tourism has become an increasingly important part of the Kentucky economy. In 2019 tourism grew to $7.6 billion in economic impact. Key attractions include horse racing with events like the Kentucky Derby and the Keeneland Fall and Spring Meets, bourbon distillery tours, including along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail and Louisville Urban Bourbon Trail, and natural attractions such as the state's many lakes and parks to include Mammoth Cave, Lake Cumberland and Red River Gorge.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The state also has several religious destinations such as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter of Answers in Genesis.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Horse Racing has long been associated with Kentucky. Churchill Downs, the home of the Derby, is a large venue with a capacity exceeding 165,000. The track hosts multiple events throughout the year and is a significant draw to the city of Louisville. Keeneland Race Course, in Lexington, hosts two major meets, the Spring and Fall running. Beyond hosting races Keeneland also hosts a significant horse auction drawing buyers from around the world. In 2019 $360 million was spent on the September Yearling sale. The Kentucky Horse Park in Georgetown hosts multiple events throughout the year, including international equestrian competitions and also offers horseback riding from April to October.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Kentucky maintains eight public four-year universities. There are two general tiers: major research institutions (the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville) and regional universities, which encompass the remaining six schools. The regional schools have specific target counties that many of their programs are targeted towards (such as Forestry at Eastern Kentucky University or Cave Management at Western Kentucky University), however, most of their curriculum varies little from any other public university.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The University of Kentucky (UK) and the University of Louisville (UofL) have the highest academic rankings and admissions standards although the regional schools are not without their national recognized departments – examples being Western Kentucky University's nationally ranked Journalism Department or Morehead State University offering one of the nation's only Space Science degrees. UK is the flagship and land grant of the system and has agriculture extension services in every county. The two research schools split duties related to the medical field, UK handles all medical outreach programs in the eastern half of the state while UofL does all medical outreach in the state's western half.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "The state's sixteen public two-year colleges have been governed by the Kentucky Community and Technical College System since the passage of the Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997, commonly referred to as House Bill 1. Before the passage of House Bill 1, most of these colleges were under the control of the University of Kentucky.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Transylvania University, a liberal arts university located in Lexington, was founded in 1780 as the oldest university west of the Allegheny Mountains.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Berea College, located at the extreme southern edge of the Bluegrass below the Cumberland Plateau, was the first coeducational college in the South to admit both Black and white students, doing so from its very establishment in 1855. A state law in 1904 ended integration, and the law was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Berea College v. Kentucky in 1908.The state law was repealed in 1950 and Berea resumed integration.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "There are 173 school districts and 1,233 public schools in Kentucky. For the 2010 to 2011 school year, there were approximately 647,827 students enrolled in public school.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Kentucky has been the site of much educational reform over the past two decades. In 1989 the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled the state's education system was unconstitutional. The response of the General Assembly was passage of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) the following year. Years later, Kentucky has shown progress, but most agree that further reform is needed.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The West Virginia teachers' strike in 2018 inspired teachers in other states, including Kentucky, to take similar action.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Kentucky is served by six major Interstate highways (I-24, I-64, I-65, I-69, I-71, and I-75), seven parkways, and six bypasses and spurs (I-165, I-169, I-264, I-265, I-275, and I-471). The parkways were originally toll roads, but on November 22, 2006, Governor Ernie Fletcher ended the toll charges on the William H. Natcher Parkway and the Audubon Parkway, the last two parkways in Kentucky to charge tolls for access. The related toll booths have been demolished.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Ending the tolls some seven months ahead of schedule was generally agreed to have been a positive economic development for transportation in Kentucky. In June 2007, a law went into effect raising the speed limit on rural portions of Kentucky Interstates and parkways from 65 to 70 miles per hour (105 to 113 km/h).",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Road tunnels include the interstate Cumberland Gap Tunnel and the rural Nada Tunnel.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Amtrak, the national passenger rail system, provides service to Ashland, South Portsmouth, Maysville and Fulton. The Cardinal (trains 50 and 51) is the line that offers Amtrak service to Ashland, South Shore, Maysville and South Portsmouth. The City of New Orleans (trains 58 and 59) serve Fulton. The Northern Kentucky area is served by the Cardinal at Cincinnati Union Terminal. The terminal is just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Norfolk Southern Railway passes through the Central and Southern parts of the Commonwealth, via its Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Texas Pacific (CNO&TP) subsidiary. The line originates in Cincinnati and terminates 338 miles south in Chattanooga, Tennessee.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "As of 2004, there were approximately 2,640 miles (4,250 km) of railways in Kentucky, with about 65% of those being operated by CSX Transportation. Coal was by far the most common cargo, accounting for 76% of cargo loaded and 61% of cargo delivered.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Bardstown features a tourist attraction known as My Old Kentucky Dinner Train. Run along a 20-mile (30 km) stretch of rail purchased from CSX in 1987, guests are served a four-course meal as they make a two-and-a-half-hour round-trip between Bardstown and Limestone Springs. The Kentucky Railway Museum is located in nearby New Haven.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Other areas in Kentucky are reclaiming old railways in rail trail projects. One such project is Louisville's Big Four Bridge. When the bridge's Indiana approach ramps opened in 2014, completing the pedestrian connection across the Ohio River, the Big Four Bridge rail trail became the second-longest pedestrian-only bridge in the world. The longest pedestrian-only bridge is also found in Kentucky – the Newport Southbank Bridge, popularly known as the \"Purple People Bridge\", connecting Newport to Cincinnati, Ohio.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Kentucky's primary airports include Louisville International Airport (Standiford Field (SDF)) of Louisville, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG) of Cincinnati/Covington, and Blue Grass Airport (LEX) in Lexington. Louisville International Airport is home to UPS's Worldport, its international air-sorting hub. Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is the largest airport in the state, and is a focus city for passenger airline Delta Air Lines and headquarters of its Delta Private Jets. The airport is one of DHL Aviation's three super-hubs, serving destinations throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, making it the 7th busiest airport in the U.S. and 36th in the world based on passenger and cargo operations. CVG is also a focus city for Frontier Airlines and is the largest O&D airport and base for Allegiant Air, along with home to a maintenance for American Airlines subsidiary PSA Airlines and Delta Air Lines subsidiary Endeavor Air. There are also a number of regional airports scattered across the state.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "On August 27, 2006, Blue Grass Airport was the site of a crash that killed 47 passengers and 2 crew members aboard a Bombardier CRJ designated Comair Flight 191, or Delta Air Lines Flight 5191, sometimes mistakenly identified by the press as Comair Flight 5191. The lone survivor was the flight's first officer, James Polehinke, who doctors determined to be brain damaged and unable to recall the crash at all.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "As the state is bounded by two of the largest rivers in North America, water transportation has historically played a major role in Kentucky's economy. Louisville was a major port for steamships in the nineteenth century. Today, most barge traffic on Kentucky waterways consists of coal that is shipped from both the Eastern and Western Coalfields, about half of which is used locally to power many power plants located directly off the Ohio River, with the rest being exported to other countries, most notably Japan.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Many of the largest ports in the United States are located in or adjacent to Kentucky, including:",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "As a state, Kentucky ranks 10th overall in port tonnage.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "The only natural obstacle along the entire length of the Ohio River is the Falls of the Ohio, located just west of Downtown Louisville.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Kentucky is one of four U.S. states to officially use the term commonwealth. The term was used for Kentucky as it had also been used by Virginia, from which Kentucky was created. The term has no particular significance in its meaning and was chosen to emphasize the distinction from the status of royal colonies as a place governed for the general welfare of the populace. Kentucky was originally styled as the \"State of Kentucky\" in the act admitting it to the union since that is how it was referred to in Kentucky's first constitution.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "The commonwealth term was used in citizen petitions submitted between 1786 and 1792 for the creation of the state. It was also used in the title of a history of the state that was published in 1834 and was used in various places within that book in references to Virginia and Kentucky. The other three states officially called \"commonwealths\" are Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands are also formally commonwealths.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Kentucky is one of only five states that elect their state officials in odd-numbered years (the others being Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia). Kentucky holds elections for these offices every four years in the years preceding Presidential election years. Thus, Kentucky held gubernatorial elections in 2015, 2019 and 2023.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "The executive branch is headed by the governor, who serves as both head of state and head of government. The lieutenant governor may or may not have executive authority depending on whether the person is a member of the Governor's cabinet. Under the current Kentucky Constitution, the lieutenant governor assumes the duties of the governor only if the governor is incapacitated. (Before 1992 the lieutenant governor assumed power any time the governor was out of the state.) The governor and lieutenant governor usually run on a single ticket (also per a 1992 constitutional amendment) and are elected to four-year terms. The current governor is Andy Beshear, and the lieutenant governor is Jacqueline Coleman. Both are Democrats.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "The executive branch is organized into the following \"cabinets\", each headed by a secretary who is also a member of the governor's cabinet:",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The cabinet system was introduced in 1972 by Governor Wendell Ford to consolidate hundreds of government entities that reported directly to the governor's office.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Other elected constitutional offices include the Secretary of State, Attorney General, Auditor of Public Accounts, State Treasurer and Commissioner of Agriculture. Currently, Republican Michael G. Adams serves as the Secretary of State. The commonwealth's chief prosecutor, law enforcement officer, and law officer is the Attorney General, currently Republican Daniel Cameron. The Auditor of Public Accounts is Republican Mike Harmon. Republican Allison Ball is the current Treasurer. Republican Ryan Quarles is the current Commissioner of Agriculture.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Kentucky's legislative branch consists of a bicameral body known as the Kentucky General Assembly.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The Senate is considered the upper house. It has 38 members and is led by the President of the Senate, currently Robert Stivers (R).",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The House of Representatives has 100 members, and is led by the Speaker of the House, currently David Osborne of the Republican Party.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "In November 2016, Republicans won control of the House for the first time since 1922, and currently have supermajorities in both the House and Senate.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "The judicial branch of Kentucky is called the Kentucky Court of Justice and comprises courts of limited jurisdiction called District Courts; courts of general jurisdiction called Circuit Courts; specialty courts such as Drug Court and Family Court; an intermediate appellate court, the Kentucky Court of Appeals; and a court of last resort, the Kentucky Supreme Court.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "The Kentucky Court of Justice is headed by the Chief Justice of the Commonwealth. The chief justice is appointed by, and is an elected member of, the Supreme Court of Kentucky. The current chief justice is John D. Minton Jr.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "Unlike federal judges, who are usually appointed, justices serving on Kentucky state courts are chosen by the state's populace in non-partisan elections.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "Kentucky's two U.S. Senators are Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, both Republicans. The state is divided into six Congressional Districts, represented by Republicans James Comer (1st), Brett Guthrie (2nd), Thomas Massie (4th), Hal Rogers (5th) and Andy Barr (6th) and Democrat Morgan McGarvey (3rd).",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "In the federal judiciary, Kentucky is served by two United States district courts: the Eastern District of Kentucky, with its primary seat in Lexington, and the Western District of Kentucky, with its primary seat in Louisville. Appeals are heard in the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, based in Cincinnati, Ohio.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Kentucky's body of laws, known as the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS), were enacted in 1942 to better organize and clarify the whole of Kentucky law. The statutes are enforced by local police, sheriffs and deputy sheriffs, and constables and deputy constables. Unless they have completed a police academy elsewhere, these officers are required to complete Police Officer Professional Standards (POPS) training at the Kentucky Department of Criminal Justice Training Center on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Additionally, in 1948, the Kentucky General Assembly established the Kentucky State Police, making it the 38th state to create a force whose jurisdiction extends throughout the given state.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Kentucky is one of the 32 states in the United States that sanctions the death penalty for certain murders defined as heinous. Those convicted of capital crimes after March 31, 1998, are always executed by lethal injection; those convicted on or before this date may opt for the electric chair. Only three people have been executed in Kentucky since the U.S. Supreme Court re-instituted the practice in 1976. The most notable execution in Kentucky was that of Rainey Bethea on August 14, 1936. Bethea was publicly hanged in Owensboro for the rape and murder of Lischia Edwards. Irregularities with the execution led to this becoming the last public execution in the United States.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Kentucky has been on the front lines of the debate over displaying the Ten Commandments on public property. In the 2005 case of McCreary County v. ACLU of Kentucky, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that a display of the Ten Commandments in the Whitley City courthouse of McCreary County was unconstitutional. Later that year, Judge Richard Fred Suhrheinrich, writing for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of ACLU of Kentucky v. Mercer County, wrote that a display including the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Ten Commandments, the Magna Carta, The Star-Spangled Banner, and the national motto could be erected in the Mercer County courthouse.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Kentucky has also been known to have unusually high political candidacy age laws, especially compared to surrounding states. The origin of this is unknown, but it has been suggested it has to do with the commonwealth tradition.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "A 2008 study found that Kentucky's Supreme Court to be the least influential high court in the nation with its decisions rarely being followed by other states.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Since the late 1990s, Kentucky has supported Republican candidates for most federal political offices, and, more recently, for state-level office as well. The state leaned toward the Democratic Party from 1860 (when the Whig Party dissolved) to the 1990s, and was considered a swing state at the presidential level for most of the latter half of the 20th century.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "The southeastern region of the state aligned with the Union during the war and has consistently supported Republican candidates. The central and western portions of the state were heavily Democratic in the years leading to the Civil War, were pro-secessionist and pro-Confederate during the Civil War, and in the decades following the war. Kentucky was part of the Democratic Solid South in the second half of the nineteenth century and through the majority of the twentieth century.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Mirroring a broader national reversal of party composition, the Kentucky Democratic Party of the twenty-first century primarily consists of liberal whites, African Americans, and other minorities. Although most of the state's voters have reliably elected Republican candidates for federal office since the late 1990s, Democrats held an advantage in party registration until 2022. On July 15, 2022, the Kentucky Secretary of State's office announced that for the first time in its history, the commonwealth had more registered Republicans than registered Democrats, with 45.19% of the state's voters registered as Republicans, 45.12% registered as Democrats, and 9.69% registered with another political party or as independents.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 146,
"text": "From 1964 through 2004, Kentucky voted for the eventual winner of the election for President of the United States; however, in the 2008 election the state lost its bellwether status. Republican John McCain won Kentucky, but he lost the national popular and electoral vote to Democrat Barack Obama (McCain carried Kentucky 57% to 41%). 116 of Kentucky's 120 counties supported former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in the 2012 election while he lost to Barack Obama nationwide.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 147,
"text": "Voters in the Commonwealth have supported the previous three Democratic candidates elected to the White House in the late 20th century, all from Southern states: Lyndon B. Johnson (Texas) in 1964, Jimmy Carter (Georgia) in 1976, and Bill Clinton (Arkansas) in 1992 and 1996. In the twenty-first century presidential elections, the state has become a Republican stronghold, supporting that party's presidential candidates by double-digit margins from 2000 through 2020. At the same time, voters have continued to elect Democratic candidates to state and local offices in many jurisdictions.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 148,
"text": "Elliott County, Kentucky is notable for having held the longest streak of any county in the United States voting Democratic. Founded in 1869, Elliott County supported the Democratic nominee in every presidential election from 1872 (the first in which it participated) until 2012. In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican to ever carry the county, and he did so in a 44-point landslide, highlighting the modern Republican Party's dominance among rural whites and many ancestrally Democratic, socially-conservative voters.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 149,
"text": "Kentucky is one of the most anti-abortion states in the United States. A 2014 poll conducted by Pew Research Center found that 57% of Kentucky's population thought that abortion should be illegal in all/most cases, while only 36% thought that abortion should be legal in all/most cases.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 150,
"text": "In a 2020 study, Kentucky was ranked as the 8th hardest state for citizens to vote in.",
"title": "Law and government"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 151,
"text": "Kentucky culture is considered to be firmly Southern; it is unique in that it is also influenced by Southern Appalachia, blending with the native upper Southern culture in certain areas of the state. The state is known for bourbon and whiskey distilling, tobacco, horse racing, and college basketball. Kentucky is more similar to the Upland South in terms of ancestry that is predominantly American.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 152,
"text": "Nevertheless, during the 19th century, Kentucky did receive a substantial number of German immigrants, who settled mostly in the Midwest and parts of the Upper South, along the Ohio River primarily in Louisville, Covington and Newport. Only Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia have higher German ancestry percentages than Kentucky among Census-defined Southern states, although Kentucky's percentage is closer to Arkansas and Virginia's than the previously named state's percentages. Scottish Americans, English Americans and Scotch-Irish Americans have heavily influenced Kentucky culture, and are present in every part of the state. As of the 1980s the only counties in the United States where more than half the population cited \"English\" as their only ancestry group were all in the hills of eastern Kentucky (and made up virtually every county in this region).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 153,
"text": "Kentucky was a slave state, and Black people once composed over one-quarter of its population; however, it lacked the cotton plantation system though it did support significant and large scale tobacco plantation systems in the western and central parts of the state more similar to the plantations developed in Virginia and North Carolina than those in the Deep South, and never had the same high percentage of African Americans as most other slave states. While less than 8% of the total population is Black, Kentucky has a relatively significant rural African American population in the Central and Western areas of the state.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 154,
"text": "Kentucky adopted the Jim Crow system of racial segregation in most public spheres after the Civil War. Louisville's 1914 ordinance for residential racial segregation was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 1917. However, in 1908 Kentucky enacted the Day Law, \"An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Persons from Attending the Same School\", which Berea College unsuccessfully challenged at the US Supreme Court in 1908; in 1948, Lyman T. Johnson filed suit for admission to the University of Kentucky; as a result in the summer of 1949, nearly thirty African American students entered UK graduate and professional programs. Kentucky integrated its schools after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education verdict, later adopting the first state civil rights act in the South in 1966.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 155,
"text": "Kentucky celebrates Confederate Memorial Day as a state holiday on June 3, on the anniversary of Jefferson Davis's birthday. The biggest day in American horse racing, the Kentucky Derby, is preceded by the two-week Derby Festival in Louisville. The Derby Festival features many events, including Thunder Over Louisville, the Pegasus Parade, the Great Steamboat Race, Fest-a-Ville, the Chow Wagon, BalloonFest, BourbonVille, and many others leading up to the big race.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 156,
"text": "Louisville also plays host to the Kentucky State Fair and the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. Bowling Green, the state's third-largest city and home to the only assembly plant in the world that manufactures the Chevrolet Corvette, opened the National Corvette Museum in 1994. The fourth-largest city, Owensboro, gives credence to its nickname of \"Barbecue Capital of the World\" by hosting the annual International Bar-B-Q Festival.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 157,
"text": "Old Louisville, the largest historic preservation district in the United States featuring Victorian architecture and the third largest overall, hosts the St. James Court Art Show, the largest outdoor art show in the United States. The neighborhood was also home to the Southern Exposition (1883–1887), which featured the first public display of Thomas Edison's light bulb, and was the setting of Alice Hegan Rice's novel, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 158,
"text": "Fairview, was the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, who would become President of the Confederate States of America and had the Jefferson Davis Memorial, a 351-foot concrete obelisk, built in 1917. Hodgenville, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, hosts the annual Lincoln Days Celebration, and also hosted the kick-off for the National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration in February 2008. Bardstown celebrates its heritage as a major bourbon-producing region with the Kentucky Bourbon Festival. Glasgow mimics Glasgow, Scotland by hosting the Glasgow Highland Games, its own version of the Highland Games, and Sturgis hosts \"Little Sturgis\", a mini version of Sturgis, South Dakota's annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 159,
"text": "Winchester celebrates an original Kentucky creation, Beer Cheese, with its Beer Cheese Festival held annually in June. Beer Cheese was developed in Clark County at some point in the 1940s along the Kentucky River.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 160,
"text": "The residents of tiny Benton pay tribute to their favorite tuber, the sweet potato, by hosting Tater Day. Residents of Clarkson in Grayson County celebrate their city's ties to the honey industry by celebrating the Clarkson Honeyfest. The Clarkson Honeyfest is held the last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in September, and is the \"Official State Honey Festival of Kentucky\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 161,
"text": "Renfro Valley, Kentucky is home to Renfro Valley Entertainment Center and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and is known as \"Kentucky's Country Music Capital\", a designation given it by the Kentucky State Legislature in the late 1980s. The Renfro Valley Barn Dance was where Renfro Valley's musical heritage began, in 1939, and influential country music luminaries like Red Foley, Homer & Jethro, Lily May Ledford & the Original Coon Creek Girls, Martha Carson and many others have performed as regular members of the shows there over the years. The Renfro Valley Gatherin' is today America's second-oldest continually broadcast radio program of any kind. It is broadcast on local radio station WRVK and a syndicated network of nearly 200 other stations across the United States and Canada every week.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 162,
"text": "Contemporary Christian music star Steven Curtis Chapman is a Paducah native, and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Everly Brothers are closely connected with Muhlenberg County, where older brother Don was born. Merle Travis, Country & Western artist known for both his signature \"Travis picking\" guitar playing style, as well as his hit song \"Sixteen Tons\", was also born in Muhlenberg County. Kentucky was also home to Mildred and Patty Hill, the Louisville sisters credited with composing the tune to the ditty Happy Birthday to You in 1893; Loretta Lynn (Johnson County), Brian Littrell and Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys, and Billy Ray Cyrus (Flatwoods).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 163,
"text": "However, its depth lies in its signature sound – Bluegrass music. Bill Monroe, \"The Father of Bluegrass\", was born in the small Ohio County town of Rosine, while Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, David \"Stringbean\" Akeman, Louis Marshall \"Grandpa\" Jones, Sonny and Bobby Osborne, and Sam Bush (who has been compared to Monroe) all hail from Kentucky. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is located in Owensboro, while the annual Festival of the Bluegrass is held in Lexington.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 164,
"text": "Kentucky is also home to famed jazz musician and pioneer, Lionel Hampton. Blues legend W. C. Handy and R&B singer Wilson Pickett also spent considerable time in Kentucky. The R&B group Midnight Star and Hip-Hop group Nappy Roots were both formed in Kentucky, as were country acts The Kentucky Headhunters, Montgomery Gentry and Halfway to Hazard, The Judds, as well as Dove Award-winning Christian groups Audio Adrenaline (rock) and Bride (metal). Heavy Rock band Black Stone Cherry hails from rural Edmonton. Rock band My Morning Jacket with lead singer and guitarist Jim James originated out of Louisville, as well as bands Wax Fang, White Reaper, Tantric. Rock bands Cage the Elephant, Sleeper Agent, and Morning Teleportation are also from Bowling Green. The bluegrass groups Driftwood and Kentucky Rain, along with Nick Lachey of the pop band 98 Degrees are also from Kentucky. King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew is from Covington. Post rock band Slint also hails from Louisville. Noted singer and actress Rosemary Clooney was a native of Maysville, her legacy being celebrated at the annual music festival bearing her name. Noted songwriter and actor Will Oldham is from Louisville. More recently in the limelight are country artists Chris Stapleton, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, and Chris Knight.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 165,
"text": "In eastern Kentucky, old-time music carries on the tradition of ancient ballads and reels developed in historical Appalachia.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 166,
"text": "Kentucky has played a major role in Southern and American literature, producing works that often celebrate the working class, rural life, nature, and explore issues of class, extractive economy, and family. Major works from the state include Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe, widely seen as one of the impetuses for the American Civil War; The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1908) by John Fox Jr., which was the first novel to sell a million copies in the United States; All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946), rated as the 36th best English-language novel of the 20th century; The Dollmaker (1954) by Harriette Arnow; Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962) by Harry Caudill, which contributed to initiating the U.S. Government's War on poverty, and others.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 167,
"text": "Author Thomas Merton lived most of his life and wrote most of his books – including The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), ranked on National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century – during his time as a monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Bardstown, Kentucky. Author Hunter S. Thompson is also a native of the state. Since the later part of the 20th century, several writers from Kentucky have published widely read and critically acclaimed books, including: Wendell Berry (fl. 1960–), Silas House (fl. 2001–), Barbara Kingsolver (fl. 1988–), poet Maurice Manning (fl. 2001–), and Bobbie Ann Mason (fl. 1988–).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 168,
"text": "Well-known playwrights from Kentucky include Marsha Norman (works include 'night, Mother, 1983), Naomi Wallace (works include One Flea Spare, 1995), and George C. Wolfe (works include Jelly's Last Jam, 1992).",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 169,
"text": "Kentucky's cuisine is generally similar to and is a part of traditional southern cooking, although in some areas of the state it can blend elements of both the South and Appalachia, mixing Appalachian with the native Southern cuisine of the area. One original Kentucky dish is called the Hot Brown, a dish normally layered in this order: toasted bread, turkey, bacon, tomatoes and topped with mornay sauce. It was developed at the Brown Hotel in Louisville. The Pendennis Club in Louisville is the birthplace of the Old Fashioned cocktail. Also, Western Kentucky is known for its own regional style of Southern barbecue. Central Kentucky is the birthplace of Beer Cheese.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 170,
"text": "Harland Sanders, a Kentucky colonel, originated Kentucky Fried Chicken at his service station in North Corbin, though the first franchised KFC was located in South Salt Lake, Utah.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 171,
"text": "Kentucky is the home of several sports teams such as Minor League Baseball's Triple-A Louisville Bats and High-A Bowling Green Hot Rods. It is also home to the independent Atlantic League of Professional Baseball's Lexington Counter Clocks and the Frontier League's Florence Y'alls. The Lexington Horsemen and Louisville Fire of the now-defunct af2 had been interested in making a move up to the \"major league\" Arena Football League, but nothing has come of those plans.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 172,
"text": "The northern part of the state lies across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which is home to the National Football League's Cincinnati Bengals, Major League Baseball's Cincinnati Reds. It is not uncommon for fans to park in the city of Newport and use the Newport Southbank Pedestrian Bridge, locally known as the \"Purple People Bridge\", to walk to these games in Cincinnati. Also, Georgetown College in Georgetown was the location for the Bengals' summer training camp, until it was announced in 2012 that the Bengals would no longer use the facilities.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 173,
"text": "As in many states, especially those without major league professional sports teams, college athletics are prominent. This is especially true of the state's three Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs, including the Kentucky Wildcats, the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, and the Louisville Cardinals. The Wildcats, Hilltoppers, and Cardinals are among the most tradition-rich college men's basketball teams in the United States, combining for 11 National Championships and 24 NCAA Final Fours; all three are high on the lists of total all-time wins, wins per season, and average wins per season.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 174,
"text": "The Kentucky Wildcats are particularly notable, leading all Division I programs in all-time wins, win percentage, NCAA tournament appearances, and being second only to UCLA in NCAA championships. Louisville has also stepped onto the football scene in recent years, including winning the 2007 Orange Bowl as well as the 2013 Sugar Bowl, and also producing 2016 Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson. Western Kentucky, the 2002 national champion in Division I-AA football (now Football Championship Subdivision (FCS)), completed its transition to Division I FBS football in 2009.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 175,
"text": "The Kentucky Derby is a horse race held annually in Louisville on the first Saturday in May. The Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville has hosted several editions of the PGA Championship, Senior PGA Championship and Ryder Cup since the 1990s.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 176,
"text": "The NASCAR Cup Series held a race at the Kentucky Speedway in Sparta, Kentucky from 2011 to 2020. The NASCAR Nationwide Series and the Camping World Truck Series also raced there through 2020. The IndyCar Series previously raced there as well.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 177,
"text": "Ohio Valley Wrestling in Louisville was the primary location for training and rehab for WWE professional wrestlers from 2000 until 2008, when WWE moved its contracted talent to Florida Championship Wrestling. OVW later became the primary developmental territory for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) from 2011 to 2013.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 178,
"text": "In 2014 Louisville City FC, a professional soccer team in the league then known as USL Pro and now as the United Soccer League, was announced. The team made its debut in 2015, playing home games at Louisville Slugger Field. In its first season, Louisville City was the official reserve side for Orlando City SC, who made its debut in Major League Soccer at the same time. That arrangement ended in 2016 when Orlando City established a directly controlled reserve side in the USL.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 179,
"text": "The distinction of being named a Kentucky colonel is the highest title of honor bestowed by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Commissions for Kentucky colonels are given by the Governor and the Secretary of State to individuals in recognition of noteworthy accomplishments and outstanding service to a community, state or the nation. The sitting governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky bestows the honor of a colonel's commission, by issuance of letters patent. Kentucky colonels are commissioned for life and act officially as the state's goodwill ambassadors.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 180,
"text": "37°N 86°W / 37°N 86°W / 37; -86 (Commonwealth of Kentucky)",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kentucky, officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of several states considered a part of the Upland South. Kentucky borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the northeast, Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri to the west. Its northern border is defined by the Ohio River. Its capital is Frankfort and its largest city is Louisville. Its population was approximately 4.5 million in 2020. Kentucky was admitted into the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, splitting from Virginia in the process. It is known as the "Bluegrass State", a nickname based on Kentucky bluegrass, a species of green grass introduced by European settlers for the purpose of grazing in pastures, which has supported the thoroughbred horse industry in the center of the state. Historically, Kentucky had excellent farming conditions, which led to the development of large tobacco plantations similar to those in Virginia and North Carolina in the central and western parts of the state that utilized enslaved labor during the Antebellum South and Civil War periods. Kentucky ranks fifth nationally in goat farming, eight in beef cattle production, and 14th in corn production. While Kentucky has been a long-standing major center for the tobacco industry, the state's economy has diversified in multiple non-agricultural sectors, including auto manufacturing, energy fuel production, and medical facilities. The state ranks 4th among US states in the number of automobiles and trucks assembled. The state is home to the world's longest cave system in Mammoth Cave National Park, the greatest length of navigable waterways and streams in the contiguous United States, and the two largest artificial lakes east of the Mississippi River. Kentucky is known for its distinct culture, which features horse racing, bourbon, moonshine, coal, My Old Kentucky Home State Park, automobile manufacturing, tobacco, southern cuisine, barbecue, bluegrass music, college basketball, Louisville Slugger baseball bats, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and the Kentucky Colonel.
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2001-10-11T22:12:59Z
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2023-12-23T09:14:53Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky
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16,848 |
Kurtosis
|
In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis (from Greek: κυρτός, kyrtos or kurtos, meaning "curved, arching") is a measure of the "tailedness" of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable. Like skewness, kurtosis describes a particular aspect of a probability distribution. There are different ways to quantify kurtosis for a theoretical distribution, and there are corresponding ways of estimating it using a sample from a population. Different measures of kurtosis may have different interpretations.
The standard measure of a distribution's kurtosis, originating with Karl Pearson, is a scaled version of the fourth moment of the distribution. This number is related to the tails of the distribution, not its peak; hence, the sometimes-seen characterization of kurtosis as "peakedness" is incorrect. For this measure, higher kurtosis corresponds to greater extremity of deviations (or outliers), and not the configuration of data near the mean.
It is common to compare the excess kurtosis (defined below) of a distribution to 0. This value 0 is the excess kurtosis of any univariate normal distribution. Distributions with negative excess kurtosis are said to be platykurtic, although this does not imply the distribution is "flat-topped" as is sometimes stated. Rather, it means the distribution produces fewer and/or less extreme outliers than the normal distribution. An example of a platykurtic distribution is the uniform distribution, which does not produce outliers. Distributions with a positive excess kurtosis are said to be leptokurtic. An example of a leptokurtic distribution is the Laplace distribution, which has tails that asymptotically approach zero more slowly than a Gaussian, and therefore produces more outliers than the normal distribution. It is common practice to use excess kurtosis, which is defined as Pearson's kurtosis minus 3, to provide a simple comparison to the normal distribution. Some authors and software packages use "kurtosis" by itself to refer to the excess kurtosis. For clarity and generality, however, this article explicitly indicates where non-excess kurtosis is meant.
Alternative measures of kurtosis are: the L-kurtosis, which is a scaled version of the fourth L-moment; measures based on four population or sample quantiles. These are analogous to the alternative measures of skewness that are not based on ordinary moments.
The kurtosis is the fourth standardized moment, defined as
where μ4 is the fourth central moment and σ is the standard deviation. Several letters are used in the literature to denote the kurtosis. A very common choice is κ, which is fine as long as it is clear that it does not refer to a cumulant. Other choices include γ2, to be similar to the notation for skewness, although sometimes this is instead reserved for the excess kurtosis.
The kurtosis is bounded below by the squared skewness plus 1:
where μ3 is the third central moment. The lower bound is realized by the Bernoulli distribution. There is no upper limit to the kurtosis of a general probability distribution, and it may be infinite.
A reason why some authors favor the excess kurtosis is that cumulants are extensive. Formulas related to the extensive property are more naturally expressed in terms of the excess kurtosis. For example, let X1, ..., Xn be independent random variables for which the fourth moment exists, and let Y be the random variable defined by the sum of the Xi. The excess kurtosis of Y is
where σ i {\displaystyle \sigma _{i}} is the standard deviation of X i {\displaystyle X_{i}} . In particular if all of the Xi have the same variance, then this simplifies to
The reason not to subtract 3 is that the bare fourth moment better generalizes to multivariate distributions, especially when independence is not assumed. The cokurtosis between pairs of variables is an order four tensor. For a bivariate normal distribution, the cokurtosis tensor has off-diagonal terms that are neither 0 nor 3 in general, so attempting to "correct" for an excess becomes confusing. It is true, however, that the joint cumulants of degree greater than two for any multivariate normal distribution are zero.
For two random variables, X and Y, not necessarily independent, the kurtosis of the sum, X + Y, is
Note that the fourth-power binomial coefficients (1, 4, 6, 4, 1) appear in the above equation.
The exact interpretation of the Pearson measure of kurtosis (or excess kurtosis) used to be disputed, but is now settled. As Westfall notes in 2014, "...its only unambiguous interpretation is in terms of tail extremity; i.e., either existing outliers (for the sample kurtosis) or propensity to produce outliers (for the kurtosis of a probability distribution)." The logic is simple: Kurtosis is the average (or expected value) of the standardized data raised to the fourth power. Standardized values that are less than 1 (i.e., data within one standard deviation of the mean, where the "peak" would be) contribute virtually nothing to kurtosis, since raising a number that is less than 1 to the fourth power makes it closer to zero. The only data values (observed or observable) that contribute to kurtosis in any meaningful way are those outside the region of the peak; i.e., the outliers. Therefore, kurtosis measures outliers only; it measures nothing about the "peak".
Many incorrect interpretations of kurtosis that involve notions of peakedness have been given. One is that kurtosis measures both the "peakedness" of the distribution and the heaviness of its tail. Various other incorrect interpretations have been suggested, such as "lack of shoulders" (where the "shoulder" is defined vaguely as the area between the peak and the tail, or more specifically as the area about one standard deviation from the mean) or "bimodality". Balanda and MacGillivray assert that the standard definition of kurtosis "is a poor measure of the kurtosis, peakedness, or tail weight of a distribution" and instead propose to "define kurtosis vaguely as the location- and scale-free movement of probability mass from the shoulders of a distribution into its center and tails".
In 1986 Moors gave an interpretation of kurtosis. Let
where X is a random variable, μ is the mean and σ is the standard deviation.
Now by definition of the kurtosis κ {\displaystyle \kappa } , and by the well-known identity E [ V 2 ] = var [ V ] + [ E [ V ] ] 2 , {\displaystyle E\left[V^{2}\right]=\operatorname {var} [V]+[E[V]]^{2},}
The kurtosis can now be seen as a measure of the dispersion of Z around its expectation. Alternatively it can be seen to be a measure of the dispersion of Z around +1 and −1. κ attains its minimal value in a symmetric two-point distribution. In terms of the original variable X, the kurtosis is a measure of the dispersion of X around the two values μ ± σ.
High values of κ arise in two circumstances:
The entropy of a distribution is ∫ p ( x ) ln p ( x ) d x {\displaystyle \int p(x)\ln p(x)dx} .
For any μ ∈ R n , Σ ∈ R n × n {\displaystyle \mu \in \mathbb {R} ^{n},\Sigma \in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times n}} with Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } positive definite, among all probability distributions on R n {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}} with mean μ {\displaystyle \mu } and covariance Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } , the normal distribution N ( μ , Σ ) {\displaystyle {\mathcal {N}}(\mu ,\Sigma )} has the largest entropy.
Since mean μ {\displaystyle \mu } and covariance Σ {\displaystyle \Sigma } are the first two moments, it is natural to consider extension to higher moments. In fact, by Lagrange multiplier method, for any prescribed first n moments, if there exists some probability distribution of form p ( x ) ∝ e ∑ i a i x i + ∑ i j b i j x i x j + ⋯ + ∑ i 1 ⋯ i n x i 1 ⋯ x i n {\displaystyle p(x)\propto e^{\sum _{i}a_{i}x_{i}+\sum _{ij}b_{ij}x_{i}x_{j}+\cdots +\sum _{i_{1}\cdots i_{n}}x_{i_{1}}\cdots x_{i_{n}}}} that has the prescribed moments (if it is feasible), then it is the maximal entropy distribution under the given constraints.
By serial expansion,
so if a random variable has probability distribution p ( x ) = e − 1 2 x 2 − 1 4 g x 4 / Z {\displaystyle p(x)=e^{-{\frac {1}{2}}x^{2}-{\frac {1}{4}}gx^{4}}/Z} , where Z {\displaystyle Z} is a normalization constant, then its kurtosis is 3 − 6 g + O ( g 2 ) {\displaystyle 3-6g+O(g^{2})} .
The excess kurtosis is defined as kurtosis minus 3. There are 3 distinct regimes as described below.
Distributions with zero excess kurtosis are called mesokurtic, or mesokurtotic. The most prominent example of a mesokurtic distribution is the normal distribution family, regardless of the values of its parameters. A few other well-known distributions can be mesokurtic, depending on parameter values: for example, the binomial distribution is mesokurtic for p = 1 / 2 ± 1 / 12 {\displaystyle p=1/2\pm {\sqrt {1/12}}} .
A distribution with positive excess kurtosis is called leptokurtic, or leptokurtotic. "Lepto-" means "slender". In terms of shape, a leptokurtic distribution has fatter tails. Examples of leptokurtic distributions include the Student's t-distribution, Rayleigh distribution, Laplace distribution, exponential distribution, Poisson distribution and the logistic distribution. Such distributions are sometimes termed super-Gaussian.
A distribution with negative excess kurtosis is called platykurtic, or platykurtotic. "Platy-" means "broad". In terms of shape, a platykurtic distribution has thinner tails. Examples of platykurtic distributions include the continuous and discrete uniform distributions, and the raised cosine distribution. The most platykurtic distribution of all is the Bernoulli distribution with p = 1/2 (for example the number of times one obtains "heads" when flipping a coin once, a coin toss), for which the excess kurtosis is −2.
The effects of kurtosis are illustrated using a parametric family of distributions whose kurtosis can be adjusted while their lower-order moments and cumulants remain constant. Consider the Pearson type VII family, which is a special case of the Pearson type IV family restricted to symmetric densities. The probability density function is given by
where a is a scale parameter and m is a shape parameter.
All densities in this family are symmetric. The kth moment exists provided m > (k + 1)/2. For the kurtosis to exist, we require m > 5/2. Then the mean and skewness exist and are both identically zero. Setting a = 2m − 3 makes the variance equal to unity. Then the only free parameter is m, which controls the fourth moment (and cumulant) and hence the kurtosis. One can reparameterize with m = 5 / 2 + 3 / γ 2 {\displaystyle m=5/2+3/\gamma _{2}} , where γ 2 {\displaystyle \gamma _{2}} is the excess kurtosis as defined above. This yields a one-parameter leptokurtic family with zero mean, unit variance, zero skewness, and arbitrary non-negative excess kurtosis. The reparameterized density is
In the limit as γ 2 → ∞ {\displaystyle \gamma _{2}\to \infty } one obtains the density
which is shown as the red curve in the images on the right.
In the other direction as γ 2 → 0 {\displaystyle \gamma _{2}\to 0} one obtains the standard normal density as the limiting distribution, shown as the black curve.
In the images on the right, the blue curve represents the density x ↦ g ( x ; 2 ) {\displaystyle x\mapsto g(x;2)} with excess kurtosis of 2. The top image shows that leptokurtic densities in this family have a higher peak than the mesokurtic normal density, although this conclusion is only valid for this select family of distributions. The comparatively fatter tails of the leptokurtic densities are illustrated in the second image, which plots the natural logarithm of the Pearson type VII densities: the black curve is the logarithm of the standard normal density, which is a parabola. One can see that the normal density allocates little probability mass to the regions far from the mean ("has thin tails"), compared with the blue curve of the leptokurtic Pearson type VII density with excess kurtosis of 2. Between the blue curve and the black are other Pearson type VII densities with γ2 = 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16. The red curve again shows the upper limit of the Pearson type VII family, with γ 2 = ∞ {\displaystyle \gamma _{2}=\infty } (which, strictly speaking, means that the fourth moment does not exist). The red curve decreases the slowest as one moves outward from the origin ("has fat tails").
Several well-known, unimodal, and symmetric distributions from different parametric families are compared here. Each has a mean and skewness of zero. The parameters have been chosen to result in a variance equal to 1 in each case. The images on the right show curves for the following seven densities, on a linear scale and logarithmic scale:
Note that in these cases the platykurtic densities have bounded support, whereas the densities with positive or zero excess kurtosis are supported on the whole real line.
One cannot infer that high or low kurtosis distributions have the characteristics indicated by these examples. There exist platykurtic densities with infinite support,
and there exist leptokurtic densities with finite support.
Also, there exist platykurtic densities with infinite peakedness,
and there exist leptokurtic densities that appear flat-topped,
For a sample of n values, a method of moments estimator of the population excess kurtosis can be defined as
where m4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean, m2 is the second sample moment about the mean (that is, the sample variance), xi is the i value, and x ¯ {\displaystyle {\overline {x}}} is the sample mean.
This formula has the simpler representation,
where the z i {\displaystyle z_{i}} values are the standardized data values using the standard deviation defined using n rather than n − 1 in the denominator.
For example, suppose the data values are 0, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 0, 2, 1, 3, 2, 0, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 999.
Then the z i {\displaystyle z_{i}} values are −0.239, −0.225, −0.221, −0.234, −0.230, −0.225, −0.239, −0.230, −0.234, −0.225, −0.230, −0.239, −0.230, −0.230, −0.225, −0.230, −0.216, −0.230, −0.225, 4.359
and the z i 4 {\displaystyle z_{i}^{4}} values are 0.003, 0.003, 0.002, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.002, 0.003, 0.003, 360.976.
The average of these values is 18.05 and the excess kurtosis is thus 18.05 − 3 = 15.05. This example makes it clear that data near the "middle" or "peak" of the distribution do not contribute to the kurtosis statistic, hence kurtosis does not measure "peakedness". It is simply a measure of the outlier, 999 in this example.
Given a sub-set of samples from a population, the sample excess kurtosis g 2 {\displaystyle g_{2}} above is a biased estimator of the population excess kurtosis. An alternative estimator of the population excess kurtosis, which is unbiased in random samples of a normal distribution, is defined as follows:
where k4 is the unique symmetric unbiased estimator of the fourth cumulant, k2 is the unbiased estimate of the second cumulant (identical to the unbiased estimate of the sample variance), m4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean, m2 is the second sample moment about the mean, xi is the i value, and x ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {x}}} is the sample mean. This adjusted Fisher–Pearson standardized moment coefficient G 2 {\displaystyle G_{2}} is the version found in Excel and several statistical packages including Minitab, SAS, and SPSS.
Unfortunately, in nonnormal samples G 2 {\displaystyle G_{2}} is itself generally biased.
An upper bound for the sample kurtosis of n (n > 2) real numbers is
where g 1 = m 3 / m 2 3 / 2 {\displaystyle g_{1}=m_{3}/m_{2}^{3/2}} is the corresponding sample skewness.
The variance of the sample kurtosis of a sample of size n from the normal distribution is
Stated differently, under the assumption that the underlying random variable X {\displaystyle X} is normally distributed, it can be shown that n g 2 → d N ( 0 , 24 ) {\displaystyle {\sqrt {n}}g_{2}\,\xrightarrow {d} \,{\mathcal {N}}(0,24)} .
The sample kurtosis is a useful measure of whether there is a problem with outliers in a data set. Larger kurtosis indicates a more serious outlier problem, and may lead the researcher to choose alternative statistical methods.
D'Agostino's K-squared test is a goodness-of-fit normality test based on a combination of the sample skewness and sample kurtosis, as is the Jarque–Bera test for normality.
For non-normal samples, the variance of the sample variance depends on the kurtosis; for details, please see variance.
Pearson's definition of kurtosis is used as an indicator of intermittency in turbulence. It is also used in magnetic resonance imaging to quantify non-Gaussian diffusion.
A concrete example is the following lemma by He, Zhang, and Zhang: Assume a random variable X {\displaystyle X} has expectation E [ X ] = μ {\displaystyle E[X]=\mu } , variance E [ ( X − μ ) 2 ] = σ 2 {\displaystyle E\left[(X-\mu )^{2}\right]=\sigma ^{2}} and kurtosis κ = 1 σ 4 E [ ( X − μ ) 4 ] {\displaystyle \kappa ={\tfrac {1}{\sigma ^{4}}}E\left[(X-\mu )^{4}\right]} . Assume we sample n = 2 3 + 3 3 κ log 1 δ {\displaystyle n={\tfrac {2{\sqrt {3}}+3}{3}}\kappa \log {\tfrac {1}{\delta }}} many independent copies. Then
This shows that with Θ ( κ log 1 δ ) {\displaystyle \Theta (\kappa \log {\tfrac {1}{\delta }})} many samples, we will see one that is above the expectation with probability at least 1 − δ {\displaystyle 1-\delta } . In other words: If the kurtosis is large, we might see a lot values either all below or above the mean.
Applying band-pass filters to digital images, kurtosis values tend to be uniform, independent of the range of the filter. This behavior, termed kurtosis convergence, can be used to detect image splicing in forensic analysis.
A different measure of "kurtosis" is provided by using L-moments instead of the ordinary moments.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis (from Greek: κυρτός, kyrtos or kurtos, meaning \"curved, arching\") is a measure of the \"tailedness\" of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable. Like skewness, kurtosis describes a particular aspect of a probability distribution. There are different ways to quantify kurtosis for a theoretical distribution, and there are corresponding ways of estimating it using a sample from a population. Different measures of kurtosis may have different interpretations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The standard measure of a distribution's kurtosis, originating with Karl Pearson, is a scaled version of the fourth moment of the distribution. This number is related to the tails of the distribution, not its peak; hence, the sometimes-seen characterization of kurtosis as \"peakedness\" is incorrect. For this measure, higher kurtosis corresponds to greater extremity of deviations (or outliers), and not the configuration of data near the mean.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "It is common to compare the excess kurtosis (defined below) of a distribution to 0. This value 0 is the excess kurtosis of any univariate normal distribution. Distributions with negative excess kurtosis are said to be platykurtic, although this does not imply the distribution is \"flat-topped\" as is sometimes stated. Rather, it means the distribution produces fewer and/or less extreme outliers than the normal distribution. An example of a platykurtic distribution is the uniform distribution, which does not produce outliers. Distributions with a positive excess kurtosis are said to be leptokurtic. An example of a leptokurtic distribution is the Laplace distribution, which has tails that asymptotically approach zero more slowly than a Gaussian, and therefore produces more outliers than the normal distribution. It is common practice to use excess kurtosis, which is defined as Pearson's kurtosis minus 3, to provide a simple comparison to the normal distribution. Some authors and software packages use \"kurtosis\" by itself to refer to the excess kurtosis. For clarity and generality, however, this article explicitly indicates where non-excess kurtosis is meant.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Alternative measures of kurtosis are: the L-kurtosis, which is a scaled version of the fourth L-moment; measures based on four population or sample quantiles. These are analogous to the alternative measures of skewness that are not based on ordinary moments.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The kurtosis is the fourth standardized moment, defined as",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "where μ4 is the fourth central moment and σ is the standard deviation. Several letters are used in the literature to denote the kurtosis. A very common choice is κ, which is fine as long as it is clear that it does not refer to a cumulant. Other choices include γ2, to be similar to the notation for skewness, although sometimes this is instead reserved for the excess kurtosis.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The kurtosis is bounded below by the squared skewness plus 1:",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "where μ3 is the third central moment. The lower bound is realized by the Bernoulli distribution. There is no upper limit to the kurtosis of a general probability distribution, and it may be infinite.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A reason why some authors favor the excess kurtosis is that cumulants are extensive. Formulas related to the extensive property are more naturally expressed in terms of the excess kurtosis. For example, let X1, ..., Xn be independent random variables for which the fourth moment exists, and let Y be the random variable defined by the sum of the Xi. The excess kurtosis of Y is",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "where σ i {\\displaystyle \\sigma _{i}} is the standard deviation of X i {\\displaystyle X_{i}} . In particular if all of the Xi have the same variance, then this simplifies to",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The reason not to subtract 3 is that the bare fourth moment better generalizes to multivariate distributions, especially when independence is not assumed. The cokurtosis between pairs of variables is an order four tensor. For a bivariate normal distribution, the cokurtosis tensor has off-diagonal terms that are neither 0 nor 3 in general, so attempting to \"correct\" for an excess becomes confusing. It is true, however, that the joint cumulants of degree greater than two for any multivariate normal distribution are zero.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "For two random variables, X and Y, not necessarily independent, the kurtosis of the sum, X + Y, is",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Note that the fourth-power binomial coefficients (1, 4, 6, 4, 1) appear in the above equation.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The exact interpretation of the Pearson measure of kurtosis (or excess kurtosis) used to be disputed, but is now settled. As Westfall notes in 2014, \"...its only unambiguous interpretation is in terms of tail extremity; i.e., either existing outliers (for the sample kurtosis) or propensity to produce outliers (for the kurtosis of a probability distribution).\" The logic is simple: Kurtosis is the average (or expected value) of the standardized data raised to the fourth power. Standardized values that are less than 1 (i.e., data within one standard deviation of the mean, where the \"peak\" would be) contribute virtually nothing to kurtosis, since raising a number that is less than 1 to the fourth power makes it closer to zero. The only data values (observed or observable) that contribute to kurtosis in any meaningful way are those outside the region of the peak; i.e., the outliers. Therefore, kurtosis measures outliers only; it measures nothing about the \"peak\".",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Many incorrect interpretations of kurtosis that involve notions of peakedness have been given. One is that kurtosis measures both the \"peakedness\" of the distribution and the heaviness of its tail. Various other incorrect interpretations have been suggested, such as \"lack of shoulders\" (where the \"shoulder\" is defined vaguely as the area between the peak and the tail, or more specifically as the area about one standard deviation from the mean) or \"bimodality\". Balanda and MacGillivray assert that the standard definition of kurtosis \"is a poor measure of the kurtosis, peakedness, or tail weight of a distribution\" and instead propose to \"define kurtosis vaguely as the location- and scale-free movement of probability mass from the shoulders of a distribution into its center and tails\".",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 1986 Moors gave an interpretation of kurtosis. Let",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "where X is a random variable, μ is the mean and σ is the standard deviation.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Now by definition of the kurtosis κ {\\displaystyle \\kappa } , and by the well-known identity E [ V 2 ] = var [ V ] + [ E [ V ] ] 2 , {\\displaystyle E\\left[V^{2}\\right]=\\operatorname {var} [V]+[E[V]]^{2},}",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The kurtosis can now be seen as a measure of the dispersion of Z around its expectation. Alternatively it can be seen to be a measure of the dispersion of Z around +1 and −1. κ attains its minimal value in a symmetric two-point distribution. In terms of the original variable X, the kurtosis is a measure of the dispersion of X around the two values μ ± σ.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "High values of κ arise in two circumstances:",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The entropy of a distribution is ∫ p ( x ) ln p ( x ) d x {\\displaystyle \\int p(x)\\ln p(x)dx} .",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "For any μ ∈ R n , Σ ∈ R n × n {\\displaystyle \\mu \\in \\mathbb {R} ^{n},\\Sigma \\in \\mathbb {R} ^{n\\times n}} with Σ {\\displaystyle \\Sigma } positive definite, among all probability distributions on R n {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {R} ^{n}} with mean μ {\\displaystyle \\mu } and covariance Σ {\\displaystyle \\Sigma } , the normal distribution N ( μ , Σ ) {\\displaystyle {\\mathcal {N}}(\\mu ,\\Sigma )} has the largest entropy.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Since mean μ {\\displaystyle \\mu } and covariance Σ {\\displaystyle \\Sigma } are the first two moments, it is natural to consider extension to higher moments. In fact, by Lagrange multiplier method, for any prescribed first n moments, if there exists some probability distribution of form p ( x ) ∝ e ∑ i a i x i + ∑ i j b i j x i x j + ⋯ + ∑ i 1 ⋯ i n x i 1 ⋯ x i n {\\displaystyle p(x)\\propto e^{\\sum _{i}a_{i}x_{i}+\\sum _{ij}b_{ij}x_{i}x_{j}+\\cdots +\\sum _{i_{1}\\cdots i_{n}}x_{i_{1}}\\cdots x_{i_{n}}}} that has the prescribed moments (if it is feasible), then it is the maximal entropy distribution under the given constraints.",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By serial expansion,",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "so if a random variable has probability distribution p ( x ) = e − 1 2 x 2 − 1 4 g x 4 / Z {\\displaystyle p(x)=e^{-{\\frac {1}{2}}x^{2}-{\\frac {1}{4}}gx^{4}}/Z} , where Z {\\displaystyle Z} is a normalization constant, then its kurtosis is 3 − 6 g + O ( g 2 ) {\\displaystyle 3-6g+O(g^{2})} .",
"title": "Pearson moments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The excess kurtosis is defined as kurtosis minus 3. There are 3 distinct regimes as described below.",
"title": "Excess kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Distributions with zero excess kurtosis are called mesokurtic, or mesokurtotic. The most prominent example of a mesokurtic distribution is the normal distribution family, regardless of the values of its parameters. A few other well-known distributions can be mesokurtic, depending on parameter values: for example, the binomial distribution is mesokurtic for p = 1 / 2 ± 1 / 12 {\\displaystyle p=1/2\\pm {\\sqrt {1/12}}} .",
"title": "Excess kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "A distribution with positive excess kurtosis is called leptokurtic, or leptokurtotic. \"Lepto-\" means \"slender\". In terms of shape, a leptokurtic distribution has fatter tails. Examples of leptokurtic distributions include the Student's t-distribution, Rayleigh distribution, Laplace distribution, exponential distribution, Poisson distribution and the logistic distribution. Such distributions are sometimes termed super-Gaussian.",
"title": "Excess kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A distribution with negative excess kurtosis is called platykurtic, or platykurtotic. \"Platy-\" means \"broad\". In terms of shape, a platykurtic distribution has thinner tails. Examples of platykurtic distributions include the continuous and discrete uniform distributions, and the raised cosine distribution. The most platykurtic distribution of all is the Bernoulli distribution with p = 1/2 (for example the number of times one obtains \"heads\" when flipping a coin once, a coin toss), for which the excess kurtosis is −2.",
"title": "Excess kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The effects of kurtosis are illustrated using a parametric family of distributions whose kurtosis can be adjusted while their lower-order moments and cumulants remain constant. Consider the Pearson type VII family, which is a special case of the Pearson type IV family restricted to symmetric densities. The probability density function is given by",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "where a is a scale parameter and m is a shape parameter.",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "All densities in this family are symmetric. The kth moment exists provided m > (k + 1)/2. For the kurtosis to exist, we require m > 5/2. Then the mean and skewness exist and are both identically zero. Setting a = 2m − 3 makes the variance equal to unity. Then the only free parameter is m, which controls the fourth moment (and cumulant) and hence the kurtosis. One can reparameterize with m = 5 / 2 + 3 / γ 2 {\\displaystyle m=5/2+3/\\gamma _{2}} , where γ 2 {\\displaystyle \\gamma _{2}} is the excess kurtosis as defined above. This yields a one-parameter leptokurtic family with zero mean, unit variance, zero skewness, and arbitrary non-negative excess kurtosis. The reparameterized density is",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In the limit as γ 2 → ∞ {\\displaystyle \\gamma _{2}\\to \\infty } one obtains the density",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "which is shown as the red curve in the images on the right.",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the other direction as γ 2 → 0 {\\displaystyle \\gamma _{2}\\to 0} one obtains the standard normal density as the limiting distribution, shown as the black curve.",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In the images on the right, the blue curve represents the density x ↦ g ( x ; 2 ) {\\displaystyle x\\mapsto g(x;2)} with excess kurtosis of 2. The top image shows that leptokurtic densities in this family have a higher peak than the mesokurtic normal density, although this conclusion is only valid for this select family of distributions. The comparatively fatter tails of the leptokurtic densities are illustrated in the second image, which plots the natural logarithm of the Pearson type VII densities: the black curve is the logarithm of the standard normal density, which is a parabola. One can see that the normal density allocates little probability mass to the regions far from the mean (\"has thin tails\"), compared with the blue curve of the leptokurtic Pearson type VII density with excess kurtosis of 2. Between the blue curve and the black are other Pearson type VII densities with γ2 = 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16. The red curve again shows the upper limit of the Pearson type VII family, with γ 2 = ∞ {\\displaystyle \\gamma _{2}=\\infty } (which, strictly speaking, means that the fourth moment does not exist). The red curve decreases the slowest as one moves outward from the origin (\"has fat tails\").",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Several well-known, unimodal, and symmetric distributions from different parametric families are compared here. Each has a mean and skewness of zero. The parameters have been chosen to result in a variance equal to 1 in each case. The images on the right show curves for the following seven densities, on a linear scale and logarithmic scale:",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Note that in these cases the platykurtic densities have bounded support, whereas the densities with positive or zero excess kurtosis are supported on the whole real line.",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "One cannot infer that high or low kurtosis distributions have the characteristics indicated by these examples. There exist platykurtic densities with infinite support,",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "and there exist leptokurtic densities with finite support.",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Also, there exist platykurtic densities with infinite peakedness,",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "and there exist leptokurtic densities that appear flat-topped,",
"title": "Graphical examples"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "For a sample of n values, a method of moments estimator of the population excess kurtosis can be defined as",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "where m4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean, m2 is the second sample moment about the mean (that is, the sample variance), xi is the i value, and x ¯ {\\displaystyle {\\overline {x}}} is the sample mean.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "This formula has the simpler representation,",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "where the z i {\\displaystyle z_{i}} values are the standardized data values using the standard deviation defined using n rather than n − 1 in the denominator.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "For example, suppose the data values are 0, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 0, 2, 1, 3, 2, 0, 2, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 3, 999.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Then the z i {\\displaystyle z_{i}} values are −0.239, −0.225, −0.221, −0.234, −0.230, −0.225, −0.239, −0.230, −0.234, −0.225, −0.230, −0.239, −0.230, −0.230, −0.225, −0.230, −0.216, −0.230, −0.225, 4.359",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "and the z i 4 {\\displaystyle z_{i}^{4}} values are 0.003, 0.003, 0.002, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.003, 0.002, 0.003, 0.003, 360.976.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The average of these values is 18.05 and the excess kurtosis is thus 18.05 − 3 = 15.05. This example makes it clear that data near the \"middle\" or \"peak\" of the distribution do not contribute to the kurtosis statistic, hence kurtosis does not measure \"peakedness\". It is simply a measure of the outlier, 999 in this example.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Given a sub-set of samples from a population, the sample excess kurtosis g 2 {\\displaystyle g_{2}} above is a biased estimator of the population excess kurtosis. An alternative estimator of the population excess kurtosis, which is unbiased in random samples of a normal distribution, is defined as follows:",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "where k4 is the unique symmetric unbiased estimator of the fourth cumulant, k2 is the unbiased estimate of the second cumulant (identical to the unbiased estimate of the sample variance), m4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean, m2 is the second sample moment about the mean, xi is the i value, and x ¯ {\\displaystyle {\\bar {x}}} is the sample mean. This adjusted Fisher–Pearson standardized moment coefficient G 2 {\\displaystyle G_{2}} is the version found in Excel and several statistical packages including Minitab, SAS, and SPSS.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Unfortunately, in nonnormal samples G 2 {\\displaystyle G_{2}} is itself generally biased.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "An upper bound for the sample kurtosis of n (n > 2) real numbers is",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "where g 1 = m 3 / m 2 3 / 2 {\\displaystyle g_{1}=m_{3}/m_{2}^{3/2}} is the corresponding sample skewness.",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The variance of the sample kurtosis of a sample of size n from the normal distribution is",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Stated differently, under the assumption that the underlying random variable X {\\displaystyle X} is normally distributed, it can be shown that n g 2 → d N ( 0 , 24 ) {\\displaystyle {\\sqrt {n}}g_{2}\\,\\xrightarrow {d} \\,{\\mathcal {N}}(0,24)} .",
"title": "Sample kurtosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The sample kurtosis is a useful measure of whether there is a problem with outliers in a data set. Larger kurtosis indicates a more serious outlier problem, and may lead the researcher to choose alternative statistical methods.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "D'Agostino's K-squared test is a goodness-of-fit normality test based on a combination of the sample skewness and sample kurtosis, as is the Jarque–Bera test for normality.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "For non-normal samples, the variance of the sample variance depends on the kurtosis; for details, please see variance.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Pearson's definition of kurtosis is used as an indicator of intermittency in turbulence. It is also used in magnetic resonance imaging to quantify non-Gaussian diffusion.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "A concrete example is the following lemma by He, Zhang, and Zhang: Assume a random variable X {\\displaystyle X} has expectation E [ X ] = μ {\\displaystyle E[X]=\\mu } , variance E [ ( X − μ ) 2 ] = σ 2 {\\displaystyle E\\left[(X-\\mu )^{2}\\right]=\\sigma ^{2}} and kurtosis κ = 1 σ 4 E [ ( X − μ ) 4 ] {\\displaystyle \\kappa ={\\tfrac {1}{\\sigma ^{4}}}E\\left[(X-\\mu )^{4}\\right]} . Assume we sample n = 2 3 + 3 3 κ log 1 δ {\\displaystyle n={\\tfrac {2{\\sqrt {3}}+3}{3}}\\kappa \\log {\\tfrac {1}{\\delta }}} many independent copies. Then",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "This shows that with Θ ( κ log 1 δ ) {\\displaystyle \\Theta (\\kappa \\log {\\tfrac {1}{\\delta }})} many samples, we will see one that is above the expectation with probability at least 1 − δ {\\displaystyle 1-\\delta } . In other words: If the kurtosis is large, we might see a lot values either all below or above the mean.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Applying band-pass filters to digital images, kurtosis values tend to be uniform, independent of the range of the filter. This behavior, termed kurtosis convergence, can be used to detect image splicing in forensic analysis.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "A different measure of \"kurtosis\" is provided by using L-moments instead of the ordinary moments.",
"title": "Other measures"
}
] |
In probability theory and statistics, kurtosis is a measure of the "tailedness" of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable. Like skewness, kurtosis describes a particular aspect of a probability distribution. There are different ways to quantify kurtosis for a theoretical distribution, and there are corresponding ways of estimating it using a sample from a population. Different measures of kurtosis may have different interpretations. The standard measure of a distribution's kurtosis, originating with Karl Pearson, is a scaled version of the fourth moment of the distribution. This number is related to the tails of the distribution, not its peak; hence, the sometimes-seen characterization of kurtosis as "peakedness" is incorrect. For this measure, higher kurtosis corresponds to greater extremity of deviations, and not the configuration of data near the mean. It is common to compare the excess kurtosis of a distribution to 0. This value 0 is the excess kurtosis of any univariate normal distribution. Distributions with negative excess kurtosis are said to be platykurtic, although this does not imply the distribution is "flat-topped" as is sometimes stated. Rather, it means the distribution produces fewer and/or less extreme outliers than the normal distribution. An example of a platykurtic distribution is the uniform distribution, which does not produce outliers. Distributions with a positive excess kurtosis are said to be leptokurtic. An example of a leptokurtic distribution is the Laplace distribution, which has tails that asymptotically approach zero more slowly than a Gaussian, and therefore produces more outliers than the normal distribution. It is common practice to use excess kurtosis, which is defined as Pearson's kurtosis minus 3, to provide a simple comparison to the normal distribution. Some authors and software packages use "kurtosis" by itself to refer to the excess kurtosis. For clarity and generality, however, this article explicitly indicates where non-excess kurtosis is meant. Alternative measures of kurtosis are: the L-kurtosis, which is a scaled version of the fourth L-moment; measures based on four population or sample quantiles. These are analogous to the alternative measures of skewness that are not based on ordinary moments.
|
2001-09-23T11:14:12Z
|
2023-12-20T18:37:55Z
|
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"Template:Cite journal",
"Template:Short description",
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"Template:Lang-el",
"Template:Commons category",
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurtosis
|
16,849 |
Kon Ichikawa
|
Kon Ichikawa (市川 崑, Ichikawa Kon, 20 November 1915 – 13 February 2008) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge (1963). His film Odd Obsession (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.
At his death in 2008, The New York Times recalled that "The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”"
Ichikawa was born in Ise, Mie Prefecture as Giichi Ichikawa (市川儀一). His father died when he was four years old, and the family kimono shop went bankrupt, so he went to live with his sister. He was given the name "Kon" by an uncle who thought the characters in the kanji 崑 signified good luck, because the two halves of the Chinese character look the same when it is split in half vertically. As a child he loved drawing and his ambition was to become an artist. He also loved films and was a fan of "chambara" or samurai films. In his teens he was fascinated by Walt Disney's "Silly Symphonies" and decided to become an animator. He attended a technical school in Osaka. Upon graduation, in 1933, he found a job with a local rental film studio, J.O Studio, in their animation department. Decades later, he told the American writer on Japanese film Donald Richie, "I'm still a cartoonist and I think that the greatest influence on my films (besides Chaplin, particularly The Gold Rush) is probably Disney."
He moved to the feature film department as an assistant director when the company closed its animation department, working under directors including Yutaka Abe and Nobuo Aoyagi.
In the early 1940s J.O Studio merged with P.C.L. and Toho Film Distribution to form the Toho Film Company. Ichikawa moved to Tokyo. His first film was a puppet play short, A Girl at Dojo Temple (Musume Dojoji 1946), which was confiscated by the interim U.S. Occupation authorities under the pretext that it was too "feudal", though some sources suggest the script had not been approved by the occupying authorities. Thought lost for many years, it is now archived at the Cinémathèque Française.
It was at Toho that he met Natto Wada. Wada was a translator for Toho. They agreed to marry sometime after Ichikawa completed his first film as director. Natto Wada's original name was Yumiko Mogi (born 13 September 1920 in Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan); the couple both had failed marriages behind them. She graduated with a degree in English literature from Tokyo Woman's Christian University. She married Kon Ichikawa on 10 April 1948, and died on 18 February 1983 of breast cancer.
Ichikawa was among the first group of Toho staff that broke from the labor union during the Toho strikes, which went on to become part of Shintoho. Due to a shortage of directorial talent at the new company, he made his debut as director with A Thousand and One Nights with Toho.
It was after Ichikawa's marriage to Wada that the two began collaborating, first on Design of a Human Being (Ningen moyo) and Endless Passion (Hateshinaki jonetsu) in 1949. The period 1950–1965 is often referred to as Ichikawa's Natto Wada period. It's the period that contains the majority of Ichikawa's most highly respected works, such as Tokyo Olympiad (Tōkyō Orinpikku), for which he was awarded the Olympic Diploma of Merit, as well as the BAFTA United Nations Award and the Robert Flaherty Award (now known as the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary). It is also during this period that Wada wrote 34 screenplays, most of which were adaptations.
He gained Western recognition during the 1950s and 1960s with two anti-war films, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, and the technically formidable period-piece An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo henge) about a kabuki actor.
Among his many literary adaptations were Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's The Key (Kagi), Natsume Sōseki's The Heart (Kokoro) and I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru), in which a teacher's cat critiques the foibles of the humans surrounding him, and Yukio Mishima's Conflagration (Enjo), in which a priest burns down his temple to save it from spiritual pollution. The Key, released in the United States as Odd Obsession, was entered in the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Jury Prize with Antonioni's L'Avventura.
After Tokyo Olympiad Wada retired from screenwriting, and it marked a significant change in Ichikawa's films from that point onward. Concerning her retirement, he said "She doesn't like the new film grammar, the method of presentation of the material; she says there's no heart in it anymore, that people no longer take human love seriously."
His final film, 2006's Inugamis, a remake of Ichikawa's own 1976 film The Inugami Family, was entered into the 29th Moscow International Film Festival.
Also in 2006, Ichikawa was the subject of a feature-length documentary, The Kon Ichikawa Story, directed by Shunji Iwai.
Ichikawa died of pneumonia on 13 February 2008 in a Tokyo hospital. He was 92 years old.
The Magic Hour marked Ichikawa's last appearance and was dedicated to his memory. (This message can be seen in the end of this film.) In this film, a movie director played by Ichikawa is shooting Kuroi Hyaku-ichi-nin no Onna (a hundred and one dark women), a parody of Ten Dark Women.
Ichikawa's films are marked with a certain darkness and bleakness, punctuated with sparks of humanity.
It can be said that his main trait is technical expertise, irony, detachment and a drive for realism married with a complete spectrum of genres. Some critics class him with Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu as one of the masters of Japanese cinema.
The Kon Ichikawa Memorial Room, a small museum dedicated to him and his wife Natto Wada displaying materials from his personal collection, was opened in Shibuya in 2015, on the site of his former home.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kon Ichikawa (市川 崑, Ichikawa Kon, 20 November 1915 – 13 February 2008) was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge (1963). His film Odd Obsession (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "At his death in 2008, The New York Times recalled that \"The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”\"",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ichikawa was born in Ise, Mie Prefecture as Giichi Ichikawa (市川儀一). His father died when he was four years old, and the family kimono shop went bankrupt, so he went to live with his sister. He was given the name \"Kon\" by an uncle who thought the characters in the kanji 崑 signified good luck, because the two halves of the Chinese character look the same when it is split in half vertically. As a child he loved drawing and his ambition was to become an artist. He also loved films and was a fan of \"chambara\" or samurai films. In his teens he was fascinated by Walt Disney's \"Silly Symphonies\" and decided to become an animator. He attended a technical school in Osaka. Upon graduation, in 1933, he found a job with a local rental film studio, J.O Studio, in their animation department. Decades later, he told the American writer on Japanese film Donald Richie, \"I'm still a cartoonist and I think that the greatest influence on my films (besides Chaplin, particularly The Gold Rush) is probably Disney.\"",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He moved to the feature film department as an assistant director when the company closed its animation department, working under directors including Yutaka Abe and Nobuo Aoyagi.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the early 1940s J.O Studio merged with P.C.L. and Toho Film Distribution to form the Toho Film Company. Ichikawa moved to Tokyo. His first film was a puppet play short, A Girl at Dojo Temple (Musume Dojoji 1946), which was confiscated by the interim U.S. Occupation authorities under the pretext that it was too \"feudal\", though some sources suggest the script had not been approved by the occupying authorities. Thought lost for many years, it is now archived at the Cinémathèque Française.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "It was at Toho that he met Natto Wada. Wada was a translator for Toho. They agreed to marry sometime after Ichikawa completed his first film as director. Natto Wada's original name was Yumiko Mogi (born 13 September 1920 in Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan); the couple both had failed marriages behind them. She graduated with a degree in English literature from Tokyo Woman's Christian University. She married Kon Ichikawa on 10 April 1948, and died on 18 February 1983 of breast cancer.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ichikawa was among the first group of Toho staff that broke from the labor union during the Toho strikes, which went on to become part of Shintoho. Due to a shortage of directorial talent at the new company, he made his debut as director with A Thousand and One Nights with Toho.",
"title": "Early life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "It was after Ichikawa's marriage to Wada that the two began collaborating, first on Design of a Human Being (Ningen moyo) and Endless Passion (Hateshinaki jonetsu) in 1949. The period 1950–1965 is often referred to as Ichikawa's Natto Wada period. It's the period that contains the majority of Ichikawa's most highly respected works, such as Tokyo Olympiad (Tōkyō Orinpikku), for which he was awarded the Olympic Diploma of Merit, as well as the BAFTA United Nations Award and the Robert Flaherty Award (now known as the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary). It is also during this period that Wada wrote 34 screenplays, most of which were adaptations.",
"title": "1950–1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "He gained Western recognition during the 1950s and 1960s with two anti-war films, The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, and the technically formidable period-piece An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojo henge) about a kabuki actor.",
"title": "1950–1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Among his many literary adaptations were Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's The Key (Kagi), Natsume Sōseki's The Heart (Kokoro) and I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa neko de aru), in which a teacher's cat critiques the foibles of the humans surrounding him, and Yukio Mishima's Conflagration (Enjo), in which a priest burns down his temple to save it from spiritual pollution. The Key, released in the United States as Odd Obsession, was entered in the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, and won the Jury Prize with Antonioni's L'Avventura.",
"title": "1950–1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After Tokyo Olympiad Wada retired from screenwriting, and it marked a significant change in Ichikawa's films from that point onward. Concerning her retirement, he said \"She doesn't like the new film grammar, the method of presentation of the material; she says there's no heart in it anymore, that people no longer take human love seriously.\"",
"title": "After 1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "His final film, 2006's Inugamis, a remake of Ichikawa's own 1976 film The Inugami Family, was entered into the 29th Moscow International Film Festival.",
"title": "After 1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Also in 2006, Ichikawa was the subject of a feature-length documentary, The Kon Ichikawa Story, directed by Shunji Iwai.",
"title": "After 1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Ichikawa died of pneumonia on 13 February 2008 in a Tokyo hospital. He was 92 years old.",
"title": "After 1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Magic Hour marked Ichikawa's last appearance and was dedicated to his memory. (This message can be seen in the end of this film.) In this film, a movie director played by Ichikawa is shooting Kuroi Hyaku-ichi-nin no Onna (a hundred and one dark women), a parody of Ten Dark Women.",
"title": "After 1965"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Ichikawa's films are marked with a certain darkness and bleakness, punctuated with sparks of humanity.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "It can be said that his main trait is technical expertise, irony, detachment and a drive for realism married with a complete spectrum of genres. Some critics class him with Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu as one of the masters of Japanese cinema.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Kon Ichikawa Memorial Room, a small museum dedicated to him and his wife Natto Wada displaying materials from his personal collection, was opened in Shibuya in 2015, on the site of his former home.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kon Ichikawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge (1963). His film Odd Obsession (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. At his death in 2008, The New York Times recalled that "The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper, called him in 2001 “the last living link between the golden age of Japanese cinema, the spunky New Wave that followed and contemporary Japanese film.”"
|
2001-09-29T15:30:51Z
|
2023-12-05T02:23:32Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon_Ichikawa
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16,850 |
Karel van het Reve
|
Karel van het Reve (19 May 1921 – 4 March 1999) was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature.
He was born in Amsterdam and was raised as a communist. He lost his 'faith' in his twenties and became an active critic and opponent of the Soviet regime. With his help, work of dissident Andrei Sakharov was smuggled to the west, and his Alexander Herzen Foundation published dissident Soviet literature.
He is considered to be one of the finest Dutch essayists, his interests ranging from the fallacies of Marxism to nude beach etiquette. His works include a history of Russian literature, 2 novels and several collections of essays. In 1978, Karel van het Reve delivered the Huizinga Lecture, under the title: Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid (Literary studies: the enigma of unreadability).
His brother, Gerard Reve, was a prominent prose writer.
The main-belt asteroid 12174 van het Reve, discovered by the Palomar–Leiden Survey in 1977, was named in his honor.
|
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},
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"text": "He is considered to be one of the finest Dutch essayists, his interests ranging from the fallacies of Marxism to nude beach etiquette. His works include a history of Russian literature, 2 novels and several collections of essays. In 1978, Karel van het Reve delivered the Huizinga Lecture, under the title: Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid (Literary studies: the enigma of unreadability).",
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"text": "The main-belt asteroid 12174 van het Reve, discovered by the Palomar–Leiden Survey in 1977, was named in his honor.",
"title": ""
}
] |
Karel van het Reve was a Dutch writer, translator and literary historian, teaching and writing on Russian literature. He was born in Amsterdam and was raised as a communist. He lost his 'faith' in his twenties and became an active critic and opponent of the Soviet regime. With his help, work of dissident Andrei Sakharov was smuggled to the west, and his Alexander Herzen Foundation published dissident Soviet literature. He is considered to be one of the finest Dutch essayists, his interests ranging from the fallacies of Marxism to nude beach etiquette. His works include a history of Russian literature, 2 novels and several collections of essays. In 1978, Karel van het Reve delivered the Huizinga Lecture, under the title: Literatuurwetenschap: het raadsel der onleesbaarheid. His brother, Gerard Reve, was a prominent prose writer. The main-belt asteroid 12174 van het Reve, discovered by the Palomar–Leiden Survey in 1977, was named in his honor.
|
2021-07-27T17:11:55Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karel_van_het_Reve
|
|
16,851 |
Katakana
|
Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ, IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).
The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka" (katakana カ); or "n" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician.
In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals and often Japanese companies.
Katakana evolved from Japanese Buddhist monks transliterating Chinese texts into Japanese.
The complete katakana script consists of 48 characters, not counting functional and diacritic marks:
These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, literally "fifty sounds"), as shown in the adjacent table, read ア (a), イ (i), ウ (u), エ (e), オ (o), カ (ka), キ (ki), ク (ku), ケ (ke), コ (ko) and so on. The gojūon inherits its vowel and consonant order from Sanskrit practice. In vertical text contexts, which used to be the default case, the grid is usually presented as 10 columns by 5 rows, with vowels on the right hand side and ア (a) on top. Katakana glyphs in the same row or column do not share common graphic characteristics. Three of the syllabograms to be expected, yi, ye and wu, may have been used idiosyncratically with varying glyphs, but never became conventional in any language and are not present at all in modern Japanese.
The 50-sound table is often amended with an extra character, the nasal ン (n). This can appear in several positions, most often next to the N signs or, because it developed from one of many mu hentaigana, below the u column. It may also be appended to the vowel row or the a column. Here, it is shown in a table of its own.
The script includes two diacritic marks placed at the upper right of the base character that change the initial sound of a syllabogram. A double dot, called dakuten, indicates a primary alteration; most often it voices the consonant: k→g, s→z, t→d and h→b; for example, カ (ka) becomes ガ (ga). Secondary alteration, where possible, is shown by a circular handakuten: h→p; For example; ハ (ha) becomes パ (pa). Diacritics, though used for over a thousand years, only became mandatory in the Japanese writing system in the second half of the 20th century. Their application is strictly limited in proper writing systems, but may be more extensive in academic transcriptions.
Furthermore, some characters may have special semantics when used in smaller sizes after a normal one (see below), but this does not make the script truly bicameral.
The layout of the gojūon table promotes a systematic view of kana syllabograms as being always pronounced with the same single consonant followed by a vowel, but this is not exactly the case (and never has been). Existing schemes for the romanization of Japanese either are based on the systematic nature of the script, e.g. nihon-shiki チ ti, or they apply some Western graphotactics, usually the English one, to the common Japanese pronunciation of the kana signs, e.g. Hepburn-shiki チ chi. Both approaches conceal the fact, though, that many consonant-based katakana signs, especially those canonically ending in u, can be used in coda position, too, where the vowel is unvoiced and therefore barely perceptible.
Of the 48 katakana syllabograms described above, only 46 are used in modern Japanese, and one of these is preserved for only a single use:
A small version of the katakana for ya, yu or yo (ャ, ュ or ョ, respectively) may be added to katakana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o, e.g. キャ (ki + ya) /kja/. Addition of the small y kana is called yōon.
A character called a sokuon, which is visually identical to a small tsu ッ, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). This is represented in rōmaji by doubling the consonant that follows the sokuon. In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka "hill" with サッカ sakka "author". Geminated consonants are common in transliterations of foreign loanwords; for example, English "bed" is represented as ベッド (beddo). The sokuon also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop. However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables' consonants; to double these, the singular n (ン) is added in front of the syllable. The sokuon may also be used to approximate a non-native sound: Bach is written バッハ (Bahha); Mach as マッハ (Mahha).
Both katakana and hiragana usually spell native long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana. However, in foreign loanwords, katakana instead uses a vowel extender mark, called a chōonpu ("long vowel mark"). This is a short line (ー) following the direction of the text, horizontal for yokogaki (horizontal text), and vertical for tategaki (vertical text). For example, メール mēru is the gairaigo for e-mail taken from the English word "mail"; the ー lengthens the e. There are some exceptions, such as ローソク (rōsoku (蝋燭, "candle")) or ケータイ(kētai (携帯, "mobile phone")), where Japanese words written in katakana use the elongation mark, too.
Standard and voiced iteration marks are written in katakana as ヽ and ヾ, respectively.
Small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds (ハァ haa, ネェ nee), but in katakana they are more often used in yōon-like extended digraphs designed to represent phonemes not present in Japanese; examples include チェ (che) in チェンジ chenji ("change"), ファ (fa) in ファミリー famirī ("family") and ウィ (wi) and ディ (di) in ウィキペディア Wikipedia; see below for the full list.
In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages or loanwords (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo. For example, "ice cream" is written アイスクリーム (aisukurīmu). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and foreign personal names. For example, the United States is usually referred to as アメリカ (Amerika), rather than in its ateji kanji spelling of 亜米利加 (Amerika).
Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds – for example, ピンポン (pinpon), the "ding-dong" sound of a doorbell.
Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. Homo sapiens, as a species, is written ヒト (hito), rather than its kanji 人.
Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ, and Toyota is written トヨタ. As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing. Katakana are commonly used on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards), for example, ココ (koko, "here"), ゴミ (gomi, "trash"), or メガネ (megane, "glasses"). Words the writer wishes to emphasize in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the usage of italics in European languages.
Pre–World War II official documents mix katakana and kanji in the same way that hiragana and kanji are mixed in modern Japanese texts, that is, katakana were used for okurigana and particles such as wa or o.
Katakana was also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems – before the introduction of multibyte characters – in the 1980s. Most computers of that era used katakana instead of kanji or hiragana for output.
Although words borrowed from ancient Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects that are borrowed directly use katakana instead.
The very common Chinese loanword rāmen, written in katakana as ラーメン, is rarely written with its kanji (拉麺).
There are rare instances where the opposite has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally written in katakana. An example of this is コーヒー kōhī, ("coffee"), which can alternatively be written as 珈琲. This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty.
Katakana is used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary. For instance, the kanji 人 has a Japanese pronunciation, written in hiragana as ひと hito (person), as well as a Chinese derived pronunciation, written in katakana as ジン jin (used to denote groups of people). Katakana is sometimes used instead of hiragana as furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original.
Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by コンニチワ konnichiwa ("hello") instead of the more typical hiragana こんにちは. Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. This was particularly common among women in the Meiji and Taishō periods, when many poor, illiterate parents were unwilling to pay a scholar to give their daughters names in kanji. Katakana is also used to denote the fact that a character is speaking a foreign language, and what is displayed in katakana is only the Japanese "translation" of their words.
Some frequently used words may also be written in katakana in dialogs to convey an informal, conversational tone. Some examples include マンガ ("manga"), アイツ aitsu ("that guy or girl; he/him; she/her"), バカ baka ("fool"), etc.
Words with difficult-to-read kanji are sometimes written in katakana (hiragana is also used for this purpose). This phenomenon is often seen with medical terminology. For example, in the word 皮膚科 hifuka ("dermatology"), the second kanji, 膚, is considered difficult to read, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written 皮フ科 or ヒフ科, mixing kanji and katakana. Similarly, difficult-to-read kanji such as 癌 gan ("cancer") are often written in katakana or hiragana.
Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ryū of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku ensembles with koto, shamisen and shakuhachi.
Some instructors teaching Japanese as a foreign language "introduce katakana after the students have learned to read and write sentences in hiragana without difficulty and know the rules." Most students who have learned hiragana "do not have great difficulty in memorizing" katakana as well. Other instructors introduce katakana first, because these are used with loanwords. This gives students a chance to practice reading and writing kana with meaningful words. This was the approach taken by the influential American linguistics scholar Eleanor Harz Jorden in Japanese: The Written Language (parallel to Japanese: The Spoken Language).
Katakana is commonly used by Japanese linguists to write the Ainu language. In Ainu katakana usage, the consonant that comes at the end of a syllable is represented by a small version of a katakana that corresponds to that final consonant followed by a vowel (for details of which vowel, please see the table at Ainu language § Special katakana for the Ainu language). For instance, the Ainu word up is represented by ウㇷ゚ (ウプ [u followed by small pu]). Ainu also uses three handakuten modified katakana: セ゚ ([tse]) and either ツ゚ or ト゚ ([tu̜]). In Unicode, the Katakana Phonetic Extensions block (U+31F0–U+31FF) exists for Ainu language support. These characters are used for the Ainu language only.
Taiwanese kana (タイ ヲァヌ ギイ カア ビェン) is a katakana-based writing system once used to write Holo Taiwanese, when Taiwan was under Japanese control. It functioned as a phonetic guide for Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhùyīn fúhào in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages.
Unlike Japanese or Ainu, Taiwanese kana are used similarly to the zhùyīn fúhào characters, with kana serving as initials, vowel medials and consonant finals, marked with tonal marks. A dot below the initial kana represents aspirated consonants, and チ, ツ, サ, セ, ソ, ウ and オ with a superpositional bar represent sounds found only in Taiwanese.
Katakana is used as a phonetic guide for the Okinawan language, unlike the various other systems to represent Okinawan, which use hiragana with extensions. The system was devised by the Okinawa Center of Language Study of the University of the Ryukyus. It uses many extensions and yōon to show the many non-Japanese sounds of Okinawan.
This is a table of katakana together with their Hepburn romanization and rough IPA transcription for their use in Japanese. Katakana with dakuten or handakuten follow the gojūon kana without them.
Characters shi シ and tsu ツ, and so ソ and n(g) ン, look very similar in print except for the slant and stroke shape. These differences in slant and shape are more prominent when written with an ink brush.
Notes
Using small versions of the five vowel kana, many digraphs have been devised, mainly to represent the sounds in words of other languages.
Digraphs with orange backgrounds are the general ones used for loanwords or foreign places or names, and those with blue backgrounds are used for more accurate transliterations of foreign sounds, both suggested by the Cabinet of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Katakana combinations with beige backgrounds are suggested by the American National Standards Institute and the British Standards Institution as possible uses. Ones with purple backgrounds appear on the 1974 version of the Hyōjun-shiki formatting.
Pronunciations are shown in Hepburn romanization.
Katakana was developed in the 9th century (during the early Heian period) by Buddhist monks in Nara in order to transliterate texts and works of arts from India, by taking parts of man'yōgana characters as a form of shorthand, hence this kana is so-called kata (片, "partial, fragmented"). For example, ka (カ) comes from the left side of ka (加, lit. "increase", but the original meaning is no longer applicable to kana). The adjacent table shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character (used as man'yōgana) eventually became each corresponding symbol. Katakana is also heavily influenced by Sanskrit due to the original creators having travelled and worked with Indian Buddhists based in East Asia during the era.
Official documents of the Empire of Japan were written exclusively with kyūjitai and katakana.
Katakana have variant forms. For example, (ネ) and (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's ones. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization.
The following table shows the method for writing each katakana character. It is arranged in a traditional manner, where characters are organized by the sounds that make them up. The numbers and arrows indicate the stroke order and direction, respectively.
In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS), many fonts intended for Chinese (such as MS Song) and Korean (such as Batang) also include katakana.
In addition to the usual full-width (全角, zenkaku) display forms of characters, katakana has a second form, half-width (半角, hankaku) (there are no kanji). The half-width forms were originally associated with the JIS X 0201 encoding. Although their display form is not specified in the standard, in practice they were designed to fit into the same rectangle of pixels as Roman letters to enable easy implementation on the computer equipment of the day. This space is narrower than the square space traditionally occupied by Japanese characters, hence the name "half-width". In this scheme, diacritics (dakuten and handakuten) are separate characters. When originally devised, the half-width katakana were represented by a single byte each, as in JIS X 0201, again in line with the capabilities of contemporary computer technology.
In the late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as JIS X 0208 were introduced to support the full range of Japanese characters, including katakana, hiragana and kanji. Their display forms were designed to fit into an approximately square array of pixels, hence the name "full-width". For backward compatibility, separate support for half-width katakana has continued to be available in modern multi-byte encoding schemes such as Unicode, by having two separate blocks of characters – one displayed as usual (full-width) katakana, the other displayed as half-width katakana.
Although often said to be obsolete, the half-width katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or half-width katakana, and half-width katakana are commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as EUC-JP, Unicode and Shift JIS have half-width katakana code as well as full-width. By contrast, ISO-2022-JP has no half-width katakana, and is mainly used over SMTP and NNTP.
Katakana was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.
The Unicode block for (full-width) katakana is U+30A0–U+30FF.
Encoded in this block along with the katakana are the nakaguro word-separation middle dot, the chōon vowel extender, the katakana iteration marks, and a ligature of コト sometimes used in vertical writing.
Half-width equivalents to the usual full-width katakana also exist in Unicode. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF) (which also includes full-width forms of Latin characters, for instance), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are half-width punctuation marks). This block also includes the half-width dakuten and handakuten. The full-width versions of these characters are found in the Hiragana block.
Circled katakana are code points U+32D0–U+32FE in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block (U+3200–U+32FF). A circled ン (n) is not included.
Extensions to Katakana for phonetic transcription of Ainu and other languages were added to the Unicode standard in March 2002 with the release of version 3.2.
The Unicode block for Katakana Phonetic Extensions is U+31F0–U+31FF:
Historic and variant forms of Japanese kana characters were added to the Unicode standard in October 2010 with the release of version 6.0.
The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:
The Unicode block for Small Kana Extension is U+1B130–U+1B16F:
The Kana Extended-A Unicode block is U+1B100–1B12F. It contains hentaigana (non-standard hiragana) and historic kana characters.
The Kana Extended-B Unicode block is U+1AFF0–1AFFF. It contains kana originally created by Japanese linguists to write Taiwanese Hokkien known as Taiwanese kana.
Katakana in other Unicode blocks:
Furthermore, as of Unicode 15.1, the following combinatory sequences have been explicitly named, despite having no precomposed symbols in the katakana block. Font designers may want to optimize the display of these composed glyphs. Some of them are mostly used for writing the Ainu language, the others are called bidakuon in Japanese. Other, arbitrary combinations with U+309A handakuten are also possible.
|
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"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Katakana (片仮名、カタカナ, IPA: [katakaꜜna, kataꜜkana]) is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The word katakana means \"fragmentary kana\", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable (strictly mora) in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as \"a\" (katakana ア); a consonant followed by a vowel such as \"ka\" (katakana カ); or \"n\" (katakana ン), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo); for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals and often Japanese companies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Katakana evolved from Japanese Buddhist monks transliterating Chinese texts into Japanese.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The complete katakana script consists of 48 characters, not counting functional and diacritic marks:",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "These are conceived as a 5×10 grid (gojūon, 五十音, literally \"fifty sounds\"), as shown in the adjacent table, read ア (a), イ (i), ウ (u), エ (e), オ (o), カ (ka), キ (ki), ク (ku), ケ (ke), コ (ko) and so on. The gojūon inherits its vowel and consonant order from Sanskrit practice. In vertical text contexts, which used to be the default case, the grid is usually presented as 10 columns by 5 rows, with vowels on the right hand side and ア (a) on top. Katakana glyphs in the same row or column do not share common graphic characteristics. Three of the syllabograms to be expected, yi, ye and wu, may have been used idiosyncratically with varying glyphs, but never became conventional in any language and are not present at all in modern Japanese.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The 50-sound table is often amended with an extra character, the nasal ン (n). This can appear in several positions, most often next to the N signs or, because it developed from one of many mu hentaigana, below the u column. It may also be appended to the vowel row or the a column. Here, it is shown in a table of its own.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The script includes two diacritic marks placed at the upper right of the base character that change the initial sound of a syllabogram. A double dot, called dakuten, indicates a primary alteration; most often it voices the consonant: k→g, s→z, t→d and h→b; for example, カ (ka) becomes ガ (ga). Secondary alteration, where possible, is shown by a circular handakuten: h→p; For example; ハ (ha) becomes パ (pa). Diacritics, though used for over a thousand years, only became mandatory in the Japanese writing system in the second half of the 20th century. Their application is strictly limited in proper writing systems, but may be more extensive in academic transcriptions.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Furthermore, some characters may have special semantics when used in smaller sizes after a normal one (see below), but this does not make the script truly bicameral.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The layout of the gojūon table promotes a systematic view of kana syllabograms as being always pronounced with the same single consonant followed by a vowel, but this is not exactly the case (and never has been). Existing schemes for the romanization of Japanese either are based on the systematic nature of the script, e.g. nihon-shiki チ ti, or they apply some Western graphotactics, usually the English one, to the common Japanese pronunciation of the kana signs, e.g. Hepburn-shiki チ chi. Both approaches conceal the fact, though, that many consonant-based katakana signs, especially those canonically ending in u, can be used in coda position, too, where the vowel is unvoiced and therefore barely perceptible.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Of the 48 katakana syllabograms described above, only 46 are used in modern Japanese, and one of these is preserved for only a single use:",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A small version of the katakana for ya, yu or yo (ャ, ュ or ョ, respectively) may be added to katakana ending in i. This changes the i vowel sound to a glide (palatalization) to a, u or o, e.g. キャ (ki + ya) /kja/. Addition of the small y kana is called yōon.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A character called a sokuon, which is visually identical to a small tsu ッ, indicates that the following consonant is geminated (doubled). This is represented in rōmaji by doubling the consonant that follows the sokuon. In Japanese this is an important distinction in pronunciation; for example, compare サカ saka \"hill\" with サッカ sakka \"author\". Geminated consonants are common in transliterations of foreign loanwords; for example, English \"bed\" is represented as ベッド (beddo). The sokuon also sometimes appears at the end of utterances, where it denotes a glottal stop. However, it cannot be used to double the na, ni, nu, ne, no syllables' consonants; to double these, the singular n (ン) is added in front of the syllable. The sokuon may also be used to approximate a non-native sound: Bach is written バッハ (Bahha); Mach as マッハ (Mahha).",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Both katakana and hiragana usually spell native long vowels with the addition of a second vowel kana. However, in foreign loanwords, katakana instead uses a vowel extender mark, called a chōonpu (\"long vowel mark\"). This is a short line (ー) following the direction of the text, horizontal for yokogaki (horizontal text), and vertical for tategaki (vertical text). For example, メール mēru is the gairaigo for e-mail taken from the English word \"mail\"; the ー lengthens the e. There are some exceptions, such as ローソク (rōsoku (蝋燭, \"candle\")) or ケータイ(kētai (携帯, \"mobile phone\")), where Japanese words written in katakana use the elongation mark, too.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Standard and voiced iteration marks are written in katakana as ヽ and ヾ, respectively.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Small versions of the five vowel kana are sometimes used to represent trailing off sounds (ハァ haa, ネェ nee), but in katakana they are more often used in yōon-like extended digraphs designed to represent phonemes not present in Japanese; examples include チェ (che) in チェンジ chenji (\"change\"), ファ (fa) in ファミリー famirī (\"family\") and ウィ (wi) and ディ (di) in ウィキペディア Wikipedia; see below for the full list.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In modern Japanese, katakana is most often used for transcription of words from foreign languages or loanwords (other than words historically imported from Chinese), called gairaigo. For example, \"ice cream\" is written アイスクリーム (aisukurīmu). Similarly, katakana is usually used for country names, foreign places, and foreign personal names. For example, the United States is usually referred to as アメリカ (Amerika), rather than in its ateji kanji spelling of 亜米利加 (Amerika).",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Katakana are also used for onomatopoeia, words used to represent sounds – for example, ピンポン (pinpon), the \"ding-dong\" sound of a doorbell.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Technical and scientific terms, such as the names of animal and plant species and minerals, are also commonly written in katakana. Homo sapiens, as a species, is written ヒト (hito), rather than its kanji 人.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Katakana are often (but not always) used for transcription of Japanese company names. For example, Suzuki is written スズキ, and Toyota is written トヨタ. As these are common family names, Suzuki being the second most common in Japan, using katakana helps distinguish company names from surnames in writing. Katakana are commonly used on signs, advertisements, and hoardings (i.e., billboards), for example, ココ (koko, \"here\"), ゴミ (gomi, \"trash\"), or メガネ (megane, \"glasses\"). Words the writer wishes to emphasize in a sentence are also sometimes written in katakana, mirroring the usage of italics in European languages.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Pre–World War II official documents mix katakana and kanji in the same way that hiragana and kanji are mixed in modern Japanese texts, that is, katakana were used for okurigana and particles such as wa or o.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Katakana was also used for telegrams in Japan before 1988, and for computer systems – before the introduction of multibyte characters – in the 1980s. Most computers of that era used katakana instead of kanji or hiragana for output.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Although words borrowed from ancient Chinese are usually written in kanji, loanwords from modern Chinese dialects that are borrowed directly use katakana instead.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The very common Chinese loanword rāmen, written in katakana as ラーメン, is rarely written with its kanji (拉麺).",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "There are rare instances where the opposite has occurred, with kanji forms created from words originally written in katakana. An example of this is コーヒー kōhī, (\"coffee\"), which can alternatively be written as 珈琲. This kanji usage is occasionally employed by coffee manufacturers or coffee shops for novelty.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Katakana is used to indicate the on'yomi (Chinese-derived readings) of a kanji in a kanji dictionary. For instance, the kanji 人 has a Japanese pronunciation, written in hiragana as ひと hito (person), as well as a Chinese derived pronunciation, written in katakana as ジン jin (used to denote groups of people). Katakana is sometimes used instead of hiragana as furigana to give the pronunciation of a word written in Roman characters, or for a foreign word, which is written as kanji for the meaning, but intended to be pronounced as the original.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Katakana are also sometimes used to indicate words being spoken in a foreign or otherwise unusual accent. For example, in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot may be represented by コンニチワ konnichiwa (\"hello\") instead of the more typical hiragana こんにちは. Some Japanese personal names are written in katakana. This was more common in the past, hence elderly women often have katakana names. This was particularly common among women in the Meiji and Taishō periods, when many poor, illiterate parents were unwilling to pay a scholar to give their daughters names in kanji. Katakana is also used to denote the fact that a character is speaking a foreign language, and what is displayed in katakana is only the Japanese \"translation\" of their words.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Some frequently used words may also be written in katakana in dialogs to convey an informal, conversational tone. Some examples include マンガ (\"manga\"), アイツ aitsu (\"that guy or girl; he/him; she/her\"), バカ baka (\"fool\"), etc.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Words with difficult-to-read kanji are sometimes written in katakana (hiragana is also used for this purpose). This phenomenon is often seen with medical terminology. For example, in the word 皮膚科 hifuka (\"dermatology\"), the second kanji, 膚, is considered difficult to read, and thus the word hifuka is commonly written 皮フ科 or ヒフ科, mixing kanji and katakana. Similarly, difficult-to-read kanji such as 癌 gan (\"cancer\") are often written in katakana or hiragana.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Katakana is also used for traditional musical notations, as in the Tozan-ryū of shakuhachi, and in sankyoku ensembles with koto, shamisen and shakuhachi.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Some instructors teaching Japanese as a foreign language \"introduce katakana after the students have learned to read and write sentences in hiragana without difficulty and know the rules.\" Most students who have learned hiragana \"do not have great difficulty in memorizing\" katakana as well. Other instructors introduce katakana first, because these are used with loanwords. This gives students a chance to practice reading and writing kana with meaningful words. This was the approach taken by the influential American linguistics scholar Eleanor Harz Jorden in Japanese: The Written Language (parallel to Japanese: The Spoken Language).",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Katakana is commonly used by Japanese linguists to write the Ainu language. In Ainu katakana usage, the consonant that comes at the end of a syllable is represented by a small version of a katakana that corresponds to that final consonant followed by a vowel (for details of which vowel, please see the table at Ainu language § Special katakana for the Ainu language). For instance, the Ainu word up is represented by ウㇷ゚ (ウプ [u followed by small pu]). Ainu also uses three handakuten modified katakana: セ゚ ([tse]) and either ツ゚ or ト゚ ([tu̜]). In Unicode, the Katakana Phonetic Extensions block (U+31F0–U+31FF) exists for Ainu language support. These characters are used for the Ainu language only.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Taiwanese kana (タイ ヲァヌ ギイ カア ビェン) is a katakana-based writing system once used to write Holo Taiwanese, when Taiwan was under Japanese control. It functioned as a phonetic guide for Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese or Zhùyīn fúhào in Chinese. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Unlike Japanese or Ainu, Taiwanese kana are used similarly to the zhùyīn fúhào characters, with kana serving as initials, vowel medials and consonant finals, marked with tonal marks. A dot below the initial kana represents aspirated consonants, and チ, ツ, サ, セ, ソ, ウ and オ with a superpositional bar represent sounds found only in Taiwanese.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Katakana is used as a phonetic guide for the Okinawan language, unlike the various other systems to represent Okinawan, which use hiragana with extensions. The system was devised by the Okinawa Center of Language Study of the University of the Ryukyus. It uses many extensions and yōon to show the many non-Japanese sounds of Okinawan.",
"title": "Writing system"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "This is a table of katakana together with their Hepburn romanization and rough IPA transcription for their use in Japanese. Katakana with dakuten or handakuten follow the gojūon kana without them.",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Characters shi シ and tsu ツ, and so ソ and n(g) ン, look very similar in print except for the slant and stroke shape. These differences in slant and shape are more prominent when written with an ink brush.",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Notes",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Using small versions of the five vowel kana, many digraphs have been devised, mainly to represent the sounds in words of other languages.",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Digraphs with orange backgrounds are the general ones used for loanwords or foreign places or names, and those with blue backgrounds are used for more accurate transliterations of foreign sounds, both suggested by the Cabinet of Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Katakana combinations with beige backgrounds are suggested by the American National Standards Institute and the British Standards Institution as possible uses. Ones with purple backgrounds appear on the 1974 version of the Hyōjun-shiki formatting.",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Pronunciations are shown in Hepburn romanization.",
"title": "Table of katakana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Katakana was developed in the 9th century (during the early Heian period) by Buddhist monks in Nara in order to transliterate texts and works of arts from India, by taking parts of man'yōgana characters as a form of shorthand, hence this kana is so-called kata (片, \"partial, fragmented\"). For example, ka (カ) comes from the left side of ka (加, lit. \"increase\", but the original meaning is no longer applicable to kana). The adjacent table shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character (used as man'yōgana) eventually became each corresponding symbol. Katakana is also heavily influenced by Sanskrit due to the original creators having travelled and worked with Indian Buddhists based in East Asia during the era.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Official documents of the Empire of Japan were written exclusively with kyūjitai and katakana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Katakana have variant forms. For example, (ネ) and (ヰ). However, katakana's variant forms are fewer than hiragana's ones. Katakana's choices of man'yōgana segments had stabilized early on and established – with few exceptions – an unambiguous phonemic orthography (one symbol per sound) long before the 1900 script regularization.",
"title": "Obsolete kana"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The following table shows the method for writing each katakana character. It is arranged in a traditional manner, where characters are organized by the sounds that make them up. The numbers and arrows indicate the stroke order and direction, respectively.",
"title": "Stroke order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS), many fonts intended for Chinese (such as MS Song) and Korean (such as Batang) also include katakana.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In addition to the usual full-width (全角, zenkaku) display forms of characters, katakana has a second form, half-width (半角, hankaku) (there are no kanji). The half-width forms were originally associated with the JIS X 0201 encoding. Although their display form is not specified in the standard, in practice they were designed to fit into the same rectangle of pixels as Roman letters to enable easy implementation on the computer equipment of the day. This space is narrower than the square space traditionally occupied by Japanese characters, hence the name \"half-width\". In this scheme, diacritics (dakuten and handakuten) are separate characters. When originally devised, the half-width katakana were represented by a single byte each, as in JIS X 0201, again in line with the capabilities of contemporary computer technology.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In the late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as JIS X 0208 were introduced to support the full range of Japanese characters, including katakana, hiragana and kanji. Their display forms were designed to fit into an approximately square array of pixels, hence the name \"full-width\". For backward compatibility, separate support for half-width katakana has continued to be available in modern multi-byte encoding schemes such as Unicode, by having two separate blocks of characters – one displayed as usual (full-width) katakana, the other displayed as half-width katakana.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Although often said to be obsolete, the half-width katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or half-width katakana, and half-width katakana are commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as EUC-JP, Unicode and Shift JIS have half-width katakana code as well as full-width. By contrast, ISO-2022-JP has no half-width katakana, and is mainly used over SMTP and NNTP.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Katakana was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 1991 with the release of version 1.0.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Unicode block for (full-width) katakana is U+30A0–U+30FF.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Encoded in this block along with the katakana are the nakaguro word-separation middle dot, the chōon vowel extender, the katakana iteration marks, and a ligature of コト sometimes used in vertical writing.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Half-width equivalents to the usual full-width katakana also exist in Unicode. These are encoded within the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block (U+FF00–U+FFEF) (which also includes full-width forms of Latin characters, for instance), starting at U+FF65 and ending at U+FF9F (characters U+FF61–U+FF64 are half-width punctuation marks). This block also includes the half-width dakuten and handakuten. The full-width versions of these characters are found in the Hiragana block.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Circled katakana are code points U+32D0–U+32FE in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block (U+3200–U+32FF). A circled ン (n) is not included.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Extensions to Katakana for phonetic transcription of Ainu and other languages were added to the Unicode standard in March 2002 with the release of version 3.2.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Unicode block for Katakana Phonetic Extensions is U+31F0–U+31FF:",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Historic and variant forms of Japanese kana characters were added to the Unicode standard in October 2010 with the release of version 6.0.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Unicode block for Kana Supplement is U+1B000–U+1B0FF:",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Unicode block for Small Kana Extension is U+1B130–U+1B16F:",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Kana Extended-A Unicode block is U+1B100–1B12F. It contains hentaigana (non-standard hiragana) and historic kana characters.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Kana Extended-B Unicode block is U+1AFF0–1AFFF. It contains kana originally created by Japanese linguists to write Taiwanese Hokkien known as Taiwanese kana.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Katakana in other Unicode blocks:",
"title": "Computer encoding"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Furthermore, as of Unicode 15.1, the following combinatory sequences have been explicitly named, despite having no precomposed symbols in the katakana block. Font designers may want to optimize the display of these composed glyphs. Some of them are mostly used for writing the Ainu language, the others are called bidakuon in Japanese. Other, arbitrary combinations with U+309A handakuten are also possible.",
"title": "Computer encoding"
}
] |
is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script. The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived from components or fragments of more complex kanji. Katakana and hiragana are both kana systems. With one or two minor exceptions, each syllable in the Japanese language is represented by one character or kana in each system. Each kana represents either a vowel such as "a"; a consonant followed by a vowel such as "ka"; or "n", a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng or like the nasal vowels of Portuguese or Galician. In contrast to the hiragana syllabary, which is used for Japanese words not covered by kanji and for grammatical inflections, the katakana syllabary usage is comparable to italics in English; specifically, it is used for transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese and the writing of loan words; for emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia; for technical and scientific terms; and for names of plants, animals, minerals and often Japanese companies. Katakana evolved from Japanese Buddhist monks transliterating Chinese texts into Japanese.
|
2001-10-12T01:20:48Z
|
2023-12-29T22:01:51Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana
|
16,852 |
Kia Asamiya
|
Michitaka Kikuchi (菊池 通隆, Kikuchi Michitaka, born March 9, 1963), best known by the pen name Kia Asamiya (麻宮 騎亜, Asamiya Kia), is a Japanese manga artist whose work spans multiple genres and appeals to diverse audiences.
Before becoming a manga artist, Asamiya graduated from the Tokyo Designer School, then worked as a character designer for a number of anime series, and even designed models for some of the later Godzilla films (1980s). For this career, he used his real name, and maintained the two professional identities separately for many years. Several of the anime series that he worked on were very popular inside and outside Japan, most notably Sonic Soldier Borgman and Project A-ko. Even after focusing primarily on his manga career, Asamiya continued to do character designs and creative consultation on anime series based on his stories, occasionally under the Kikuchi name.
In the early 2000s, Asamiya shifted his focus from teenage and young-adult stories to stories designed for children and for an American audience. In the former case, he credits his children as a motivation but, in the latter case, he points to a long-standing desire to work with his favorite American characters. To that end, he has worked on projects with Image Comics, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics, with projects such as Batman: Child of Dreams, as well as developing a manga adaptation of the film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
He is well known for using influences from American comics, television, and films in his work, and describes himself as a big fan of Batman and Star Wars. One of the most widely published Japanese manga artist, nearly all of his stories have been translated into other languages, including English. His two most successful and popular manga series to-date are Martian Successor Nadesico and Silent Möbius.
While many Japanese artists (and artists in general) are quite reclusive, Asamiya often makes an effort to be available to his fans. He maintains a website with news and information about his studio, TRON (named after the Disney film Tron). He aids and assists his official fan club by sending them regular announcements and limited-edition merchandise. Despite these actions, he shunned all public photography and had the habit of depicting himself with a placeholder sign for a face. It has become a trademark feature of his books that instead of a picture of the artist, there is an elaborately decorated rectangle sporting the words "Now Printing" (a message used in Japan for placeholder images).
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Michitaka Kikuchi (菊池 通隆, Kikuchi Michitaka, born March 9, 1963), best known by the pen name Kia Asamiya (麻宮 騎亜, Asamiya Kia), is a Japanese manga artist whose work spans multiple genres and appeals to diverse audiences.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Before becoming a manga artist, Asamiya graduated from the Tokyo Designer School, then worked as a character designer for a number of anime series, and even designed models for some of the later Godzilla films (1980s). For this career, he used his real name, and maintained the two professional identities separately for many years. Several of the anime series that he worked on were very popular inside and outside Japan, most notably Sonic Soldier Borgman and Project A-ko. Even after focusing primarily on his manga career, Asamiya continued to do character designs and creative consultation on anime series based on his stories, occasionally under the Kikuchi name.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In the early 2000s, Asamiya shifted his focus from teenage and young-adult stories to stories designed for children and for an American audience. In the former case, he credits his children as a motivation but, in the latter case, he points to a long-standing desire to work with his favorite American characters. To that end, he has worked on projects with Image Comics, Marvel Comics, and DC Comics, with projects such as Batman: Child of Dreams, as well as developing a manga adaptation of the film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "He is well known for using influences from American comics, television, and films in his work, and describes himself as a big fan of Batman and Star Wars. One of the most widely published Japanese manga artist, nearly all of his stories have been translated into other languages, including English. His two most successful and popular manga series to-date are Martian Successor Nadesico and Silent Möbius.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "While many Japanese artists (and artists in general) are quite reclusive, Asamiya often makes an effort to be available to his fans. He maintains a website with news and information about his studio, TRON (named after the Disney film Tron). He aids and assists his official fan club by sending them regular announcements and limited-edition merchandise. Despite these actions, he shunned all public photography and had the habit of depicting himself with a placeholder sign for a face. It has become a trademark feature of his books that instead of a picture of the artist, there is an elaborately decorated rectangle sporting the words \"Now Printing\" (a message used in Japan for placeholder images).",
"title": "Biography"
}
] |
Michitaka Kikuchi, best known by the pen name Kia Asamiya, is a Japanese manga artist whose work spans multiple genres and appeals to diverse audiences.
|
2001-11-21T18:43:58Z
|
2023-11-01T15:02:37Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Asamiya
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16,853 |
Kitáb-i-Aqdas
|
The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Arabic: The Most Holy Book) is the central religious text of the Baháʼí Faith, written by Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the religion, in 1873. Though it is the main source of Baháʼí laws and practices, much of the content deals with other matters, like foundational principles of the religion, the establishment of Baháʼí institutions, mysticism, ethics, social principles, and prophecies. In Baha'i literature it is described as "the Mother-Book" of the Baháʼí teachings, and the "Charter of the future world civilization".
Baháʼu'lláh had manuscript copies sent to Baháʼís in Iran some years after its writing in 1873, and in 1890–91 (1308 AH, 47 BE) he arranged for its first publication in Bombay, India. Parts of the text were translated to English by Shoghi Effendi, which, along with a Synopsis and Codification were published in 1973 by the Universal House of Justice at the centennial anniversary of its writing. The full authoritative English translation, along with clarifying texts from Baháʼu'lláh and detailed explanatory notes from the Universal House of Justice, was first published in 1992.
The work was written in Arabic under the Arabic title al-Kitāb al-Aqdas (Arabic: الكتاب الأقدس), but in English it is commonly known by its Persian pronunciation Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Persian: کتاب اقدس), and is subtitled with the translation of "the Most Holy Book". The word Aqdas is a superlative form derived from the triconsonantal root Q-D-Š, denoting holiness or sanctity in Semitic languages. It is sometimes called "The Aqdas" for short.
The Kitáb-i-Aqdas was written by Bahá’u’lláh in Acre about the midpoint of his Ministry around 1873. Baháʼí regard it as "revealed" and part of scripture that makes up a revelation from God. It was written as a response to inquiry of the believers about the laws of God for the new religion and how to arrange their affairs. It is indicated by one of his Tablets that after its revelation the Aqdas was withheld by him for some time before sending it to the believers in Iran.
The Question and Answers portion which is included in most publications of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas is a compilation of answers written by Bahá’u’lláh to questions put to him by various believers. It was organized by Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín, a respected transcriber of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings and one of the nineteen Apostles of Bahá’u’lláh.
By the instruction of Bahá’u’lláh the Kitáb-i-Aqdas was first published in Bombay in 1891.
A copy of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas dated from January 1887, in the handwriting of Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín, is housed at the British Library. The library's description mentions, "His copies are highly regarded for their accuracy."
Rather than a narrative, the book is written as a series of short teachings or principles. A summary lends itself to a bullet-point list of the various ideas shared throughout the text. Main themes cover the appointment of Baháʼu'lláh's successor, who remains unnamed in the text; the layout of the future Baháʼí administration, including the mention of the Universal House of Justice and allusions to what would later be known as the Guardian; certain laws, particularly around prayer, fasting, marriage, divorce, and inheritance; admonitions toward certain individuals; and a variety of specific laws, ordinances, and prohibitions, ranging from tithes, to the Baháʼí calendar, to prohibitions on opium, slave trading, and gossip.
Besides the main themes above, the Synopsis and Codification lists the last of six themes as "Miscellaneous Subjects" and lists 33 topics:
While it is the core text on laws of the religion, it is not the exclusive source.
Baháʼu'lláh stated that the observance of the laws that he prescribed should be subject to "tact and wisdom", and that they do not cause "disturbance and dissension." He left for the progressive application of the laws to be decided by the Universal House of Justice; for example certain Baháʼí laws are currently only applicable to Iranian Baháʼís such as the limit to the period of engagement, while any Baháʼí may practice the laws if they so decide. Shoghi Effendi also stated that certain other laws, such as criminal laws, that are dependent upon the existence of a predominantly Baháʼí society would only be applicable in a possible future Baháʼí society. He also stated that if the laws were in conflict with the civil law of the country where a Baháʼí lives the laws could not be practiced. Baha'is believe the Aqdas supersedes and succeeds previous revelations such as the Quran and the Bible.
The text of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas consists of several hundred verses, which have been grouped in 189 numbered paragraphs in the English translation most of which are just a few sentences. The style combines elements of both poetry (shi'r) and rhymed prose (saj') and the text contains instances of literary devices like alliteration, assonance, repetition, onomatopoeia, juxtaposition and antithesis, metaphors, alternation of person and personification.
It is written to the individual reader, as there are no clergy in the religion. The text also moves between statements said to be plain and statements suggesting the key to understanding the book is to look at the text for clues to itself.
The Kitáb-i-Aqdas was completed by Baháʼu'lláh in 1873. It was published in the Arabic for circulation among Baháʼís speaking the language circa 1890. A Russian translation was undertaken by Alexander Tumansky in 1899 and was his most important contribution to Baháʼí studies. Around 1900 an informal English translation was made by Baháʼí Anton Haddad, which circulated among the early American Baháʼí community in a typewritten form. In 1961, an English scholar of Arabic, Dr. Earl E. Elder, and William McElwee Miller, published an English translation, "Al-Kitab Al-Aqdas", through the Royal Asiatic Society, however its translation of the notes section was problematic and overall lacked "poetic sensibility, and skill in Arabic translation". Miller only ever used it to further his polemical agenda. In 1973 a "Synopsis and Codification" of the book was published in English by the Universal House of Justice, with 21 passages of the Aqdas that had already been translated into English by Shoghi Effendi with additional terse lists of laws and ordinances contained in the book outside of any contextual prose. Finally, in 1992, a full and authorized Baháʼí translation in English was published. This version is used as the basis of translation into many other languages highlighting the practice of an indirect translation and how the purpose of the translation affects the act of translation. The Baháʼí Library Online provides a side-by-side comparison of the authorized translation with earlier translations of Anton Haddad and Earl Elder.
The Kitáb-i-Aqdas is supplemented by the
The book was divided into six main themes in the Synopsis and Codification by Shoghi Effendi:
Further, the laws were divided into four categories:
Scholarly review finds the Aqdas has themes of laws of worship, societal relations and administrative organization, or governance, of the religion. Through the authority vested in ʻAbdu'l-Bahá in the Aqdas there is an expanse of internationalism related to the law in works like The Secret of Divine Civilization and through his extended authority to Shoghi Effendi works like his World Order of Baháʼu'lláh further elaborates on the internationalism theme. This stands in some distinction from other scriptures by not using triumphal tones as the voice of God is given to be viewed but rather one of progressive development, social context, and outright delay in application until another day. It insists that divine law is applicable only in situations with requisite conditions, where it is likely to have certain social effects. The goal of application of the law and its methods are not to cause disturbance and dissension and requires an appreciation for context and intention. Additionally one is to eschew emphasis in the development of textualist and intentionalist arguments about the law though some of this is visible in scholarship on the Aqdas. Such methods of application of law in a religious context are, in the opinion of Roshan Danish, common in Islam and Judaism.
The Aqdas is understood by Baháʼís to be a factor in the process of ongoing developments in world order. This can be seen comparing the Baháʼí approach to history and the future to that of the theory of the Clash of Civilizations on the one hand and the development of a posthegemony system on the other (compared with work of Robert Cox, for example, in Approaches to World Order, (Robert Cox & Timonthy Sinclair eds, Cambridge University Press, 1996).)
Certain possible sources of law are specifically abrogated: laws of the Bábí religion, notably in the Persian Bayán, oral traditions (linked with pilgrim notes, and natural law, (that is to say God's sovereign will through revelation is the independent authority.) Divine revelation's law-making is both unconditioned in terms of the divine right to choose, and conditioned in the sense of the progress of history from one revelation to the next.
Baha'u'llah's statements about marriage in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas are brief. Marriage is highly recommended but is stated to not be obligatory. Baháʼu'lláh states that the maximum number of wives is two, but also states that having only one wife would add more tranquility to both partners. These statements were later interpreted by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá that having a second wife is conditional upon treating both wives with justice and equality and was not possible in practice, thus establishing monogamy.
That Baháʼu'lláh had three wives, while his religion teaches monogamy, has been the subject of criticism. The writing of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Baháʼí teachings on gender equality and monogamy post-date Baháʼu'lláh's marriages and are understood to be evolutionary in nature, slowly leading Baháʼís away from what had been a deeply rooted cultural practice.
The institutional status of the authority of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá and a House of Justice are specifically delineated. On the basis of the authority granted ʻAbdu'l-Bahá he extended forms of the authority vested in him to the Guardianship, whose sole member was Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal, or International, House of Justice through his Will and Testament. This was confirmed and amplified in other texts, notably the Kitáb-i-'Ahd. The Universal House of Justice is specifically empowered to write and rescind any laws it is felt necessary aside from those of the text of scripture and actual application of the laws of the Aqdas among Baháʼís are dependent on the choice of the Universal House of Justice.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Arabic: The Most Holy Book) is the central religious text of the Baháʼí Faith, written by Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the religion, in 1873. Though it is the main source of Baháʼí laws and practices, much of the content deals with other matters, like foundational principles of the religion, the establishment of Baháʼí institutions, mysticism, ethics, social principles, and prophecies. In Baha'i literature it is described as \"the Mother-Book\" of the Baháʼí teachings, and the \"Charter of the future world civilization\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Baháʼu'lláh had manuscript copies sent to Baháʼís in Iran some years after its writing in 1873, and in 1890–91 (1308 AH, 47 BE) he arranged for its first publication in Bombay, India. Parts of the text were translated to English by Shoghi Effendi, which, along with a Synopsis and Codification were published in 1973 by the Universal House of Justice at the centennial anniversary of its writing. The full authoritative English translation, along with clarifying texts from Baháʼu'lláh and detailed explanatory notes from the Universal House of Justice, was first published in 1992.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The work was written in Arabic under the Arabic title al-Kitāb al-Aqdas (Arabic: الكتاب الأقدس), but in English it is commonly known by its Persian pronunciation Kitáb-i-Aqdas (Persian: کتاب اقدس), and is subtitled with the translation of \"the Most Holy Book\". The word Aqdas is a superlative form derived from the triconsonantal root Q-D-Š, denoting holiness or sanctity in Semitic languages. It is sometimes called \"The Aqdas\" for short.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Kitáb-i-Aqdas was written by Bahá’u’lláh in Acre about the midpoint of his Ministry around 1873. Baháʼí regard it as \"revealed\" and part of scripture that makes up a revelation from God. It was written as a response to inquiry of the believers about the laws of God for the new religion and how to arrange their affairs. It is indicated by one of his Tablets that after its revelation the Aqdas was withheld by him for some time before sending it to the believers in Iran.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Question and Answers portion which is included in most publications of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas is a compilation of answers written by Bahá’u’lláh to questions put to him by various believers. It was organized by Zaynu’l-Muqarrabín, a respected transcriber of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings and one of the nineteen Apostles of Bahá’u’lláh.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "By the instruction of Bahá’u’lláh the Kitáb-i-Aqdas was first published in Bombay in 1891.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A copy of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas dated from January 1887, in the handwriting of Zaynu'l-Muqarrabín, is housed at the British Library. The library's description mentions, \"His copies are highly regarded for their accuracy.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Rather than a narrative, the book is written as a series of short teachings or principles. A summary lends itself to a bullet-point list of the various ideas shared throughout the text. Main themes cover the appointment of Baháʼu'lláh's successor, who remains unnamed in the text; the layout of the future Baháʼí administration, including the mention of the Universal House of Justice and allusions to what would later be known as the Guardian; certain laws, particularly around prayer, fasting, marriage, divorce, and inheritance; admonitions toward certain individuals; and a variety of specific laws, ordinances, and prohibitions, ranging from tithes, to the Baháʼí calendar, to prohibitions on opium, slave trading, and gossip.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Besides the main themes above, the Synopsis and Codification lists the last of six themes as \"Miscellaneous Subjects\" and lists 33 topics:",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "While it is the core text on laws of the religion, it is not the exclusive source.",
"title": "Laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Baháʼu'lláh stated that the observance of the laws that he prescribed should be subject to \"tact and wisdom\", and that they do not cause \"disturbance and dissension.\" He left for the progressive application of the laws to be decided by the Universal House of Justice; for example certain Baháʼí laws are currently only applicable to Iranian Baháʼís such as the limit to the period of engagement, while any Baháʼí may practice the laws if they so decide. Shoghi Effendi also stated that certain other laws, such as criminal laws, that are dependent upon the existence of a predominantly Baháʼí society would only be applicable in a possible future Baháʼí society. He also stated that if the laws were in conflict with the civil law of the country where a Baháʼí lives the laws could not be practiced. Baha'is believe the Aqdas supersedes and succeeds previous revelations such as the Quran and the Bible.",
"title": "Laws"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The text of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas consists of several hundred verses, which have been grouped in 189 numbered paragraphs in the English translation most of which are just a few sentences. The style combines elements of both poetry (shi'r) and rhymed prose (saj') and the text contains instances of literary devices like alliteration, assonance, repetition, onomatopoeia, juxtaposition and antithesis, metaphors, alternation of person and personification.",
"title": "Form and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "It is written to the individual reader, as there are no clergy in the religion. The text also moves between statements said to be plain and statements suggesting the key to understanding the book is to look at the text for clues to itself.",
"title": "Form and style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Kitáb-i-Aqdas was completed by Baháʼu'lláh in 1873. It was published in the Arabic for circulation among Baháʼís speaking the language circa 1890. A Russian translation was undertaken by Alexander Tumansky in 1899 and was his most important contribution to Baháʼí studies. Around 1900 an informal English translation was made by Baháʼí Anton Haddad, which circulated among the early American Baháʼí community in a typewritten form. In 1961, an English scholar of Arabic, Dr. Earl E. Elder, and William McElwee Miller, published an English translation, \"Al-Kitab Al-Aqdas\", through the Royal Asiatic Society, however its translation of the notes section was problematic and overall lacked \"poetic sensibility, and skill in Arabic translation\". Miller only ever used it to further his polemical agenda. In 1973 a \"Synopsis and Codification\" of the book was published in English by the Universal House of Justice, with 21 passages of the Aqdas that had already been translated into English by Shoghi Effendi with additional terse lists of laws and ordinances contained in the book outside of any contextual prose. Finally, in 1992, a full and authorized Baháʼí translation in English was published. This version is used as the basis of translation into many other languages highlighting the practice of an indirect translation and how the purpose of the translation affects the act of translation. The Baháʼí Library Online provides a side-by-side comparison of the authorized translation with earlier translations of Anton Haddad and Earl Elder.",
"title": "Translations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Kitáb-i-Aqdas is supplemented by the",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The book was divided into six main themes in the Synopsis and Codification by Shoghi Effendi:",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Further, the laws were divided into four categories:",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Scholarly review finds the Aqdas has themes of laws of worship, societal relations and administrative organization, or governance, of the religion. Through the authority vested in ʻAbdu'l-Bahá in the Aqdas there is an expanse of internationalism related to the law in works like The Secret of Divine Civilization and through his extended authority to Shoghi Effendi works like his World Order of Baháʼu'lláh further elaborates on the internationalism theme. This stands in some distinction from other scriptures by not using triumphal tones as the voice of God is given to be viewed but rather one of progressive development, social context, and outright delay in application until another day. It insists that divine law is applicable only in situations with requisite conditions, where it is likely to have certain social effects. The goal of application of the law and its methods are not to cause disturbance and dissension and requires an appreciation for context and intention. Additionally one is to eschew emphasis in the development of textualist and intentionalist arguments about the law though some of this is visible in scholarship on the Aqdas. Such methods of application of law in a religious context are, in the opinion of Roshan Danish, common in Islam and Judaism.",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Aqdas is understood by Baháʼís to be a factor in the process of ongoing developments in world order. This can be seen comparing the Baháʼí approach to history and the future to that of the theory of the Clash of Civilizations on the one hand and the development of a posthegemony system on the other (compared with work of Robert Cox, for example, in Approaches to World Order, (Robert Cox & Timonthy Sinclair eds, Cambridge University Press, 1996).)",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Certain possible sources of law are specifically abrogated: laws of the Bábí religion, notably in the Persian Bayán, oral traditions (linked with pilgrim notes, and natural law, (that is to say God's sovereign will through revelation is the independent authority.) Divine revelation's law-making is both unconditioned in terms of the divine right to choose, and conditioned in the sense of the progress of history from one revelation to the next.",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Baha'u'llah's statements about marriage in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas are brief. Marriage is highly recommended but is stated to not be obligatory. Baháʼu'lláh states that the maximum number of wives is two, but also states that having only one wife would add more tranquility to both partners. These statements were later interpreted by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá that having a second wife is conditional upon treating both wives with justice and equality and was not possible in practice, thus establishing monogamy.",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "That Baháʼu'lláh had three wives, while his religion teaches monogamy, has been the subject of criticism. The writing of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and Baháʼí teachings on gender equality and monogamy post-date Baháʼu'lláh's marriages and are understood to be evolutionary in nature, slowly leading Baháʼís away from what had been a deeply rooted cultural practice.",
"title": "Content"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The institutional status of the authority of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá and a House of Justice are specifically delineated. On the basis of the authority granted ʻAbdu'l-Bahá he extended forms of the authority vested in him to the Guardianship, whose sole member was Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal, or International, House of Justice through his Will and Testament. This was confirmed and amplified in other texts, notably the Kitáb-i-'Ahd. The Universal House of Justice is specifically empowered to write and rescind any laws it is felt necessary aside from those of the text of scripture and actual application of the laws of the Aqdas among Baháʼís are dependent on the choice of the Universal House of Justice.",
"title": "Content"
}
] |
The Kitáb-i-Aqdas is the central religious text of the Baháʼí Faith, written by Baháʼu'lláh, the founder of the religion, in 1873. Though it is the main source of Baháʼí laws and practices, much of the content deals with other matters, like foundational principles of the religion, the establishment of Baháʼí institutions, mysticism, ethics, social principles, and prophecies. In Baha'i literature it is described as "the Mother-Book" of the Baháʼí teachings, and the "Charter of the future world civilization". Baháʼu'lláh had manuscript copies sent to Baháʼís in Iran some years after its writing in 1873, and in 1890–91 he arranged for its first publication in Bombay, India. Parts of the text were translated to English by Shoghi Effendi, which, along with a Synopsis and Codification were published in 1973 by the Universal House of Justice at the centennial anniversary of its writing. The full authoritative English translation, along with clarifying texts from Baháʼu'lláh and detailed explanatory notes from the Universal House of Justice, was first published in 1992.
|
2001-09-24T20:04:13Z
|
2023-10-01T15:54:57Z
|
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|
16,854 |
Kuala Lumpur
|
Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian: [ˈkualə, -a ˈlumpo(r), -ʊ(r)]), officially the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur (Malay: Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur) (Tamil: கோலாலம்பூர் கூட்டரசு பிரதேசம்) and colloquially referred to as KL, is a federal territory and the capital city of Malaysia. It is one of the fastest-growing cities in Asia and the largest city in Malaysia, covering an area of 243 km (94 sq mi) with a census population of 1,982,112 as of 2020. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.564 million people as of 2018. It is among the fastest growing metropolitan regions in Southeast Asia, both in population and economic development.
The city serves as the cultural, financial, and economic centre of Malaysia. It is also home to the Parliament of Malaysia and the Istana Negara, the official residence of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (monarch of Malaysia). Kuala Lumpur first developed around 1857 as a town serving the tin mines of the region and served as the capital of Selangor from 1880 until 1978. Kuala Lumpur was the founding capital of the Federation of Malaya and its successor, Malaysia. The city remained the seat of the executive and judicial branches of the Malaysian federal government until these were relocated to Putrajaya in early 1999. However, some sections of the political bodies still remain in Kuala Lumpur. The city is one of the three federal territories of Malaysia, enclaved within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia.
Since the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events, including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the 2017 Southeast Asian Games. Kuala Lumpur has undergone rapid development in recent decades and is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers, which have since become an iconic symbol of Malaysian development. Kuala Lumpur is well connected with neighboring urban regions such as Petaling Jaya via the rapidly expanding Klang Valley Integrated Transit System. Residents of the city can also travel to other parts of Malaysia through KL Sentral.
Kuala Lumpur is one of the leading cities in the world for tourism and shopping and was the 6th most-visited city in the world in 2019. The city houses three of the world's ten largest shopping malls. Kuala Lumpur ranks 70th in the world and second in Southeast Asia for the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Ranking and ninth in ASPAC and second in Southeast Asia for KPMG's Leading Technology Innovation Hub 2021. Kuala Lumpur was named World Book Capital 2020 by UNESCO.
Kuala Lumpur means "muddy confluence" in Malay; Kuala is the point where two rivers join or an estuary, and lumpur means "mud". One suggestion is that it was named after Sungai Lumpur ("muddy river"); in the 1820s a place named Sungei Lumpoor was said to be the most important tin-producing settlement up the Klang River. However this derivation does not account for this: Kuala Lumpur lies at the confluence of Gombak River and Klang River, and therefore should be named Kuala Gombak, since the kuala is typically named after the river that joins a larger river or the sea. Some have argued that Sungai Lumpur in fact extended down to the confluence and therefore the point where it joined the Klang River would be Kuala Lumpur, although this Sungai Lumpur is said to be another river joining the Klang River 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) upstream from the Gombak confluence, or perhaps located to the north of the Batu Caves area.
It has also been proposed that Kuala Lumpur was originally named Pengkalan Lumpur ("muddy landing place") in the same way that Klang was once called Pengkalan Batu ("stone landing place"), but became corrupted into Kuala Lumpur. Another theory says that it was initially a Cantonese word, lam-pa, meaning 'flooded jungle' or 'decayed jungle'. There is no firm contemporary evidence for these suggestions other than anecdotes. The name may also be a corrupted form of an earlier forgotten name.
Sultanate of Selangor 1857–1974 Federated Malay States 1895–1942; 1945–1946 Empire of Japan 1942–1945 Malayan Union 1946–1948 Federation of Malaya 1948–1963 Malaysia 1963–present
The Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society states that Raja Abdullah (who was involved in the Klang War) founded Kuala Lumpur, aside from also opening up tin-mines up river and had introduced the Chinese into the region. Chinese miners were involved in tin mining up the Selangor River in the 1840s about 16 kilometres (10 miles) north of present-day Kuala Lumpur, and Mandailing Sumatrans led by Raja Asal [ms] and Sutan Puasa were also involved in tin mining and trade in the Ulu Klang region before 1860, and Sumatrans may have settled in the upper reaches of Klang River in the first quarter of the 19th century, or possibly earlier. Kuala Lumpur was originally a small hamlet of just a few houses and shops at the confluence of the Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River). Kuala Lumpur became established as a town c. 1857, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah bin Raja Jaafar, aided by his brother Raja Juma'at of Lukut, raised funds from Malaccan Chinese businessmen to hire Chinese miners from Lukut to open new tin mines there. The miners landed at Kuala Lumpur and continued on foot to Ampang, where they opened the first mine. Kuala Lumpur was the furthest point up the Klang River to which supplies could conveniently be brought by boat, and therefore became a collection and dispersal point serving the tin mines.
Despite a high death toll from the malarial conditions of the jungle, the Ampang mines succeeded, and exported the first tin in 1859. At that time, Sutan Puasa was already trading near Ampang. Two traders from Lukut, Hiu Siew and Yap Ah Sze, arrived in Kuala Lumpur and set up shops to sell provisions to miners in exchange for tin. The town, spurred on by tin-mining, started to develop around Old Market Square (Medan Pasar), with roads radiating out towards Ampang as well as Pudu and Batu (the destinations became the names of these roads: Ampang Road, Pudu Road, and Batu Road), where miners had also begun to settle in, and Petaling and Damansara. The miners formed gangs and the gangs frequently fought in this period, particularly factions of Kuala Lumpur and Kanching, mainly over control of the best tin mines. Leaders of the Chinese community were conferred the title of Kapitan Cina (Chinese headman) by the Malay chief, and Hiu Siew, the early Chinese trader, became the first Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur. The third Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, was appointed in 1868.
Important Malay figures of early Kuala Lumpur also included Haji Mohamed Tahir, who became the Dato Dagang ("chief of traders"). The Minangkabaus of Sumatra became another important group who traded and established tobacco plantations in the area. Notable Minangkabaus included their headman, Dato' Sati, Utsman Abdullah, and Haji Mohamed Taib, who was involved in the early development of Kampung Baru. The Minangkabaus were also significant socio-religious figures, for example Utsman bin Abdullah was the first kadi of Kuala Lumpur, as well as Muhammad Nur bin Ismail.
Early Kuala Lumpur was a small town that suffered from many social and political problems – the buildings were made of wood and 'atap' (palm frond thatching). The buildings were prone to catching fire, and due to a lack of proper sanitation the town was plagued with diseases. It also suffered from a constant threat of flooding due to its location. The town became embroiled in the Selangor Civil War in part over control of revenue from the tin mines. Yap Ah Loy allied himself with Tengku Kudin [ms] and the Hai San secret society, they fought against a rival secret society, Ghee Hin, whom allied themselves with Raja Mahdi. Raja Asal and Sutan Puasa switched sides to Raja Mahdi, and Kuala Lumpur was captured in 1872 and burnt to the ground. Yap escaped to Klang where he assembled another fighting force and recaptured Kuala Lumpur in March 1873, defeating Raja Mahdi's forces with the help of fighters from Pahang. The war and other setbacks, such as dropping tin prices, led to a slump. A major outbreak of cholera caused many to flee. The slump lasted until late 1879, when rising prices for tin allowed the town to recover. In late 1881, the town was severely flooded, after a fire that had destroyed the entire town in January. With the town being rebuilt a few times and having thrived, this was due in large to Yap Ah Loy. Yap, together with Frank Swettenham who was appointed the Resident in 1882, were the two most important figures of early Kuala Lumpur with Swettenham credited with its rapid growth and development and its transformation into a major urban centre.
The early Chinese and Malay settled along the east bank of the Klang River. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square. The Malays, and later Indian Chettiars and Muslims, resided in the Java Street area, now Jalan Tun Perak. In 1880, the colonial administration moved the state capital of Selangor from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur, and British Resident William Bloomfield Douglas decided to locate the government buildings and living quarters to the west of the river. Government offices and a new police headquarters were built on Bukit Aman, and the Padang initially created for police training. The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, would later become the centre of the British administrative offices when the colonial government offices moved to the Sultan Abdul Samad Building in 1897.
Frank Swettenham, on becoming the British Resident, began improving the town by cleaning up the streets. He also stipulated in 1884 that buildings should be constructed of brick and tile so that they would be less flammable, and that the town be rebuilt with wider streets to reduce fire risk. Kapitan Yap Ah Loy bought a sprawling piece of real estate to set up a brick factory for the rebuilding of Kuala Lumpur, the eponymous Brickfields. Demolished atap buildings were replaced with brick and tile buildings, and many of the new brick buildings had "five-foot ways" and Chinese carpentry work. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. Kapitan Yap Ah Loy expanded road access, linking tin mines with the city with the main arterial routes of the present Ampang Road, Pudu Road and Petaling Street. As Chinese Kapitan, he held wide powers on a par with Malay community leaders. Law reforms were implemented and new legal measures introduced to the assembly. Yap also presided over a small claims court. With a police force of six, he was able to uphold the rule of law, constructing a prison that could accommodate sixty prisoners at a time. Yap Ah Loy also built Kuala Lumpur's first school and a major tapioca mill in Petaling Street, in which the Selangor's Sultan Abdul Samad held an interest.
A railway line between Kuala Lumpur and Klang, initiated by Swettenham and completed in 1886, increased access and resulted in rapid growth. The population grew from 4,500 in 1884 to 20,000 in 1890. As development intensified in the 1880s, putting pressure on sanitation, waste disposal and other health measures. A Sanitary Board created on 14 May 1890 was responsible for sanitation, road upkeep, street lighting, and other functions. This would eventually become the Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.
Kuala Lumpur expanded considerably in the 20th century. It was 0.65 km (0.25 sq mi) in 1895, but was extended to encompass 20 km (7.7 sq mi) in 1903. By the time it became a municipality in 1948 it had expanded to 93 km (36 sq mi), and then to 243 km (94 sq mi) in 1974 as a Federal Territory.
The development of a rubber industry in Selangor fueled by the demand for car tyres in the early 20th century led to a boom, and the population of Kuala Lumpur increased from 30,000 in 1900 to 80,000 in 1920. The commercial activities of Kuala Lumpur had been run to a large extent by Chinese businessmen such as Loke Yew, who was then the richest and most influential Chinese in Kuala Lumpur. The growth of the rubber industry led to an influx of foreign capital and planters, with new companies and industries becoming established in Kuala Lumpur, and other companies previously based elsewhere also found a presence here.
During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army on 11 January 1942. Despite suffering little damage during the course of the battle, the wartime occupation of the city resulted in significant loss of lives; at least 5,000 Chinese were killed in Kuala Lumpur in just a few weeks of occupation by Japanese forces, and thousands of Indians were sent as forced labour to work on the Burma Railway where many died. They occupied the city until 15 August 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaysia, Seishirō Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew during the war, and continued after the war during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), during which Malaya was preoccupied with a communist insurgency and New Villages were established on the outskirts of the city.
The first municipal election in Kuala Lumpur was held on 16 February 1952. An ad hoc alliance between the Malay UMNO and Chinese MCA party candidates won a majority of the seats, and this led to the formation of the Alliance Party (later the Barisan Nasional). On 31 August 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. The British flag was lowered and the Malayan flag raised for the first time at the Padang at midnight on 30 August 1957, and on the morning of 31 August, the ceremony for the Declaration of Independence was held at the Merdeka Stadium by the first Prime Minister of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital after the formation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963. The Malaysian Houses of Parliament were completed at the edge of the Lake Gardens in 1963.
Kuala Lumpur had seen a number of civil disturbances over the years. A riot in 1897 was a relatively minor affair that began with the confiscation of faulty dacing (a scale used by traders), and in 1912, a more serious disturbance called the tauchang riot began during the Chinese New Year with the cutting of pigtails and ended with rioting and factional fighting lasting a number of days. The worst rioting on record in Malaysia, however, occurred on 13 May 1969, when race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur. The so-called 13 May Incident included violent conflicts between members of the Malay and the Chinese communities, the result of Malaysian dissatisfaction with their socio-political status. The riots caused the deaths of 196 people, according to official figures, and led to major changes in the country's economic policy to promote and prioritise Malay economic development over that of other ethnicities.
Kuala Lumpur achieved city status on 1 February 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on 1 February 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a federal territory. The territory of Kuala Lumpur expanded to 96 square miles by absorbing the surrounding areas. Kuala Lumpur was ceded by Selangor to be directly controlled by the central government, and it ceased to be capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared the new state capital.
On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur celebrated the centennial of the local council. The new federal territory Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced. Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory on 1 February 2001, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Constitutional King).
From the 1990s onwards, major urban developments in the Klang Valley extended the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area. This area, known as Greater Kuala Lumpur, extends from the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur westward to Port Klang, east to the edge of the Titiwangsa Mountains as well as to the north and south. The area covers other administratively separate towns and cities such as Klang, Shah Alam, Putrajaya and others, and is served by the Klang Valley Integrated Transit System. Notable projects undertaken within Kuala Lumpur itself include the development of a new Kuala Lumpur City Centre around Jalan Ampang and the Petronas Towers.
The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterised by the huge Klang Valley, bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south, and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term that translates to "muddy confluence" and is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers which flow into the Selangor River.
Located in the centre of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was a territory of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was split off from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian federal government. Its location in the most developed state on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia, which has a wider stretch of flat land than the east coast, has helped it develop faster than other cities in Malaysia. The municipality covers an area of 243 km (94 sq mi), with an average elevation of 81.95 m (268 ft 10 in) highest point being Bukit Nanas at 94 meters above sea level.
Protected by the Titiwangsa Range in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur is sheltered from strong winds and has a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification Af), hot, humid and sunny, with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between 32 and 35 °C (90 and 95 °F) and sometimes topping 38 °C (100.4 °F), while minimums hover between 23.4 and 24.6 °C (74.1 and 76.3 °F) and have never fallen below 17.8 °C (64.0 °F). Kuala Lumpur typically receives at least 2,600 mm (100 in) of rain annually; June to August are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds 131 millimetres (5.2 in) a month. Kuala Lumpur is highly prone to severe thunderstorms and lightning strikes. The Klang Valley, including Kuala Lumpur, is one of the places where thunderstorms are most frequently observed on Earth.
Floods are frequent in Kuala Lumpur after heavy downpours, especially in the city centre, because irrigation structure lags behind the intense development in the city. Smoke from forest fires in nearby Sumatra and Kalimantan sometimes casts a haze over the region, and is a major source of pollution, along with open burning, motor vehicle emissions, and construction.
Kuala Lumpur was administered by a corporation sole called the Federal Capital Commissioner from April 1, 1961, until it was awarded city status in 1972, after which executive power transferred to the Lord Mayor (Datuk Bandar). 14 mayors have been appointed since then. The current mayor is Kamarulzaman Mat Salleh, who has been in office since 17 April 2023.
The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. It is responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development, and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.
Kuala Lumpur's eleven parliamentary constituencies, with 2020 population, area, density and percentage of the total are congruent with administrative subdivisions under the authority of the Kuala Lumpur City Hall authority.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The federal Constitution stipulates the three branches of the Malaysian government: the Executive, Judiciary and Legislative branches. The Parliament consists of the Dewan Negara (Upper House / House of Senate) and Dewan Rakyat (Lower House / House of Representatives).
List of Kuala Lumpur representatives in the Federal Parliament (Dewan Rakyat)
Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialised and economically, the fastest-growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain government institutions such as Bank Negara Malaysia (National Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city. The city remains the economic and business hub of the country. Kuala Lumpur is a centre for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur is rated the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).
Bursa Malaysia, or the Malaysia Exchange, is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 5 July 2013, the market capitalisation stood at US$505.67 billion. The gross domestic product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM73,536 million in 2008 with an average annual growth rate of 5.9 percent. By 2015, the GDP had reached RM160,388 million, representing 15.1% of the total GDP of Malaysia. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in 2013 was RM79,752 with an average annual growth rate of 5.6 percent, and RM94,722 in 2015. Average monthly household income is RM9,073 (~$2,200) as of 2016, growing at a pace of approximately 6% a year. The service sector, comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment, representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.
The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic financing and the strong presence of Gulf financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, the Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companies' regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the country's largest companies have their headquarters here, and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur.
There has been growing emphasis on expanding the economic scope of the city in other service activities, such as research and development, which support the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centres such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research. A new financial district for Kuala Lumpur is currently under construction: the Tun Razak Exchange (TRX), formerly known as Kuala Lumpur International Financial District (KLIFD). The TRX's landmark and prominent building is The Exchange 106 tower. The 70-acre development will be situated in the heart of Kuala Lumpur and will serve international finance and business opportunities. The new financial hub is a strategic enabler of the Malaysian government's Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), an initiative by the Malaysian government to turn Malaysia into a high income economy nation.
Tourism plays an important role in the city's service-driven economy. Many large worldwide hotel chains have a presence in the city. One of the oldest hotels is the Hotel Majestic. Kuala Lumpur is the sixth most visited city in the world, with 8.9 million tourists per year. Tourism here is driven by the city's cultural diversity, relatively low costs, and wide gastronomic and shopping variety. MICE tourism, which mainly encompasses conventions— has expanded in recent years to become a vital component of the industry, and is expected to grow further once the Malaysian government's Economic Transformation Programme kicks in, and with the completion of a new 93,000 square meter-size MATRADE Centre in 2014. The MATRADE agency is also the owner of the Malaysia International Trade And Exhibition Centre (MITEC), the largest trade and exhibition centre of Malaysia, which is a component of the larger KL Metropolis development situated in the suburb of Segambut. Another notable trend is the increased presence of budget hotels in the city.
The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Petronas Twin Towers, the Bukit Bintang shopping district, the Kuala Lumpur Tower, Petaling Street (Chinatown), the Merdeka Square, the Kuala Lumpur railway station, the House of Parliament building, the National Palace (Istana Negara), the National Planetarium, the National Science Centre, the National Art Gallery (Balai Seni Negara), the National Theatre (Istana Budaya), the National Museum, the Royal Museum, the National Textile Museum, Islamic Arts Museum, Telekom Museum, Royal Malaysian Police Museum, the National Mosque of Malaysia (Masjid Negara), Federal Territory Mosque (Masjid Wilayah), Sultan Abdul Samad Building, DBKL City Theatre (Panggung Bandaraya), Medan Pasar, Central Market, KL Bird Park, KL Butterfly Park, Aquaria KLCC, Saloma Link (Pintasan Saloma), the National Monument, and religious sites such as the Sultan Abdul Samad Jamek Mosque, Thean Hou Temple and Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields.
Kuala Lumpur plays host to many cultural festivals such as the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. Every year during the Thaipusam celebration, a silver chariot carrying the statue of Lord Muruga together with his consort Valli and Teivayanni would be paraded through the city beginning at the temple all the way to Batu Caves in the neighboring Gombak, Selangor. The primary entertainment and shopping district of the city is mainly centred in the Golden Triangle encompassing Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail, Jalan Bukit Bintang, Ampang Road and Bintang Walk.
Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and is the retail and fashion hub of both Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (US$2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006.
Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier upscale shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers. Apart from Suria KLCC, the Bukit Bintang district has the highest concentration of shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur. It includes: Pavilion KL, Fahrenheit 88, Plaza Low Yat, Berjaya Times Square, Lot 10, Sungei Wang Plaza, Starhill Gallery, Lalaport BBCC, Quill City Mall and Avenue K. Changkat area of Bukit Bintang hosts various cafes, alfresco dining outlets, illegal activities such as prostitution and more. It is best known as one of the red-light districts in Kuala Lumpur. Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Bangsar Shopping Centre, KL Gateway Mall, Bangsar South, KL Eco City Mall, The Gardens and Mid Valley Megamall.
Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts especially at Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Traditional clothing of ethnic Malays such as baju Kurung and baju kebaya can be found here. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and colonial architectural influences.
Since 2000, the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism introduced a mega sale event for shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held three times a year – in March, May and December – in which all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination in Asia which has been maintained until present with new mega sales.
Kuala Lumpur is the most populous city in Malaysia, with a population of 1.98 million in the city proper as of 2020. It has a population density of 8,157 inhabitants per square kilometre (21,130/sq mi), and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. Residents of the city are colloquially known as KLites. Kuala Lumpur is also the centre of the wider Klang Valley metropolitan area covering Petaling Jaya, Klang, Subang Jaya, Puchong, Shah Alam, and Gombak, with an estimated metropolitan population of 7.25 million as of 2017.
Kuala Lumpur's heterogeneous populace includes the country's three major ethnic groups: the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians, although the city also has a mix of different cultures including Eurasians, Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from around Malaysia.
Historically Kuala Lumpur was a predominantly Chinese city, although more recently the Bumiputera component of the city has grown substantially and they are now the dominant group. The Kuala Lumpur of 1872 beside the Klang River was described by Frank Swettenham as a "purely Chinese village", although a Malay stockade already existed at Bukit Nanas at that time. By 1875, after participation in the Selangor Civil War by Pahang Malays had ended, Swettenham noted Malay quarters near the Chinese area in a sketch map he had drawn. There were said to be 1,000 Chinese and 700 Malays in the town in this period. Many of the Malays may have settled in Kuala Lumpur after the war. The population of Kuala Lumpur had increased to around three thousand in 1880 when it was made the capital of Selangor. A significant component of the Malay population in Kuala Lumpur of this period consisted of Malays recruited by the British in 1880, mostly from rural Malacca, to establish a police force of 2–300, many of whom brought their families. Many of the Malays were originally from the other islands of Malay Archipelago i.e. Sumatra and Java. The Mandailings, the Minangkabaus, Javanese, and Buginese began arriving in Kuala Lumpur in the 19th century, while the Acehnese arrived in the late 20th century. In the following decades that saw the rebuilding of the town, it grew considerably with a large influx of immigrants, due in large part to the construction of a railway line in 1886 connecting Kuala Lumpur and Klang.
A census in 1891 of uncertain accuracy gave a figure of 43,796 inhabitants, 79% of whom were Chinese (71% of the Chinese were Hakka, but possibly over-counted), 14% Malay, and 6% Indian. Another perhaps more accurate estimate put the population of Kuala Lumpur in 1890 at 20,000. The rubber boom in the early 20th century led to a further increase in population, from 30,000 in 1900 to 80,000 in 1920. In 1931, 61% of Kuala Lumpur's 111,418 inhabitants were Chinese, and in 1947 63.5%. The Malays however began to settle in Kuala Lumpur in significant numbers, in part due to government employment, as well as the expansion of the city that absorbed the surrounding rural areas where many Malays lived. Between 1947 and 1957 the population of Malays in Kuala Lumpur increased from 12.5 to 15%, while the proportion of Chinese dropped. The process continued after Malayan independence with the growth of a largely Malay civil service, and later the implementation of the New Economic Policy which encouraged Malay participation in urban industries and business. In 1980 the population of Kuala Lumpur had reached over a million, with 52% Chinese, 33% Malay, and 15% Indian. From 1980 to 2000 the number of Bumiputeras increased by 77%, but the Chinese still outnumbered the Bumiputeras in Kuala Lumpur in the 2000 census at 43% compared to 38%. By the 2010 census, according to the Department of Statistics and excluding non-citizens, the Malay population in Kuala Lumpur had increased to 44.7% (45.9% Bumiputera), exceeding the Chinese population of 43.2%. In the 2020 census, the percentage of the Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur had reached around 47.7%, with the Chinese population at 41.6% and Indians 10.0%.
A notable phenomenon in recent times has been the increased portion of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, which rose from 1% of the city's population in 1980 to about 8% in the 2000 census, 9.4% in 2010, and 10.5% in the 2020 census. These figures also do not include a significant number of illegal immigrants. Kuala Lumpur's rapid development has triggered a huge influx of low-skilled foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into Malaysia, many of whom enter the country illegally or without proper permits.
Birth rates in Kuala Lumpur have declined and resulted in a lower proportion of young people – the proportion of those below 15 years old fell from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15–59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur is pluralistic and religiously diverse. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population. Islam is practised primarily by the Malays, the Indian Muslim communities and a small number of Chinese Muslims. Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism are practised mainly among the Chinese. Indians traditionally adhere to Hinduism. Some Chinese and Indians also subscribe to Christianity. Kuala Lumpur is one of the three states where less than 50% of the population are self-identified Muslims, the other two being Penang and Sarawak. As of the 2020 Census, the population of Kuala Lumpur was 45.3% Muslim, 32.3% Buddhist, 8.2% Hindu, 6.4% Christian, 1.8% of other religions, and 6.0% non-religious.
Statistics from the 2010 Census indicate that 87.4% of the Chinese population identify as Buddhists, with significant minorities of adherents identifying as Christians (7.9%), Chinese folk religions (2.7%) and Muslims (0.6%). The majority of the Indian population identify as Hindus (81.1%), with a significant minorities of identifying as Christians (7.8%), Muslims (4.9%) and Buddhists (2.1%). The non-Malay bumiputera community are predominantly Christians (44.9%), with significant minorities identifying as Muslims (31.2%) and Buddhists (13.5%). All bumiputera Malays are Muslim due to the criterion in the definition of a Malay in the Malaysian constitution that they should adhere to Islam.
Bahasa Malaysia is the principal language in Kuala Lumpur. Majority of local Malays speak Selangor dialect but Malays from other parts of the state such as Kelantan, Kedah and Terengganu also use their own respective varieties of Malay. Kuala Lumpur residents are generally literate in English, with a large proportion adopting it as their first language. Malaysian English is widely used. It has a strong presence, especially in business, and is taught as a compulsory language in schools. Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin are prominent, as they are spoken by the local majority Chinese population. Another major Chinese dialect spoken is Hakka. While Tamil is dominant amongst the local Indian population, other Indian languages spoken by minorities include Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Hindi. Besides Malay, there are a variety of languages spoken by people of Indonesian descent, such as Minangkabau and Javanese. There are also speakers of Arabic, Iban, Kadazandusun, Bidayuh and other languages.
The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a mixture of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture. A relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's notable colonial-era buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings were designed in a number of styles – Mughal/Moorish Revival, Mock Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and adapted to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around. A significant architect of the early period is Arthur Benison Hubback who designed a number of the colonial-era buildings including the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station and Jamek Mosque.
Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two stories with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today in the Medan Pasar Besar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.
Independence coupled with rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated into the designs of the building, due to Islamic restrictions on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Telekom Tower, Maybank Tower, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Centre. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact they are places of science and knowledge. The 452-metre (1,483 ft) Petronas Towers are the tallest twin buildings in the world and were the tallest buildings in the country until being surpassed by The Exchange 106 by 1.7 meters in 2019. They were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.
Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all-glass shells exist throughout the city, with the most prominent examples being the Petronas Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted to the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline. According to the World Tallest 50 Urban Agglomeration 2010 Projection by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Kuala Lumpur ranks 10th among cities that have most buildings above 100 metres with a combined height of 34,035 metres from its 244 high rise buildings.
The Perdana Botanical Garden or Lake Gardens, a 92-hectare (230-acre) botanical garden, was the first recreational park created in Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian Parliament building is located close by, and Carcosa Seri Negara, which was once the official residence of British colonial administration, is also sited here. The park includes a butterfly park, deer park, orchid garden, a hibiscus garden, and the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, which is the world's largest aviary bird park. Other parks in the city include the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queen's Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, the equestrian park and West Valley Park near Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI), and Bukit Jalil International Park.
There are three forest reserves within the city, the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country 10.52 ha or 26.0 acres, Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve (7.41 ha or 18.3 acres) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve (42.11 ha or 104.1 acres). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species, particularly monkeys, treeshrews, pygmy goats, budgerigars, squirrels and birds.
According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia. In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject, but as of 2012, English was still the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences for certain schools. Some schools provide instruction in Mandarin and Tamil for certain subjects.
Kuala Lumpur contains 14 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya (UM). Established in 1949, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It was ranked the best university in Malaysia, the 22nd-best in Asia, and third in Southeast Asia in QS World University Rankings 2019. In recent years, the number of international students at the University of Malaya has risen, as a result of increasing efforts made to attract them.
Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College (TARUC), UCSI University (UCSI), Taylor's University (TULC), International Medical University (IMU), Open University Malaysia (OUM), Kuala Lumpur University (UniKL), Perdana University (PU), Wawasan Open University (WOU), HELP University and the branch campus of the National University of Malaysia (UKM) and University of Technology Malaysia (UTM). The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies for the army, navy, and air force.
Greater Kuala Lumpur covers an even more extensive selection of universities including several international branches such as Monash University Malaysia Campus, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and Xiamen University Malaysia.
Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum, which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artefacts and paintings collected throughout the country. The Islamic Arts Museum, which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits and a library of Islamic art books, is the largest Islamic arts collection in Southeast Asia. The museum's collection not only concentrates on works from the Middle East, but also includes work from elsewhere in Asia, such as China and Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur has a craft complex coupled with a museum that displays a variety of textile, ceramic, metal craft and weaved products. Information on the production process is portrayed in diorama format complete with historical facts, technique and traditionally engineered equipment. Among the processes shown are pottery making, intricate wood carving, silver-smithing, weaving songket cloth, stamping batik patterns on cloth, and boat-making.
The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall located underneath the Petronas Towers. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world, and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances. The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West and Damansara Performing Arts Centre (DPac) in Damansara Perdana are two of the most established centres in the country for the performing arts, notably theatre, plays, music, and film screening. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. The Future Music Festival Asia has been held in the city since 2012, featuring local and international artists.
The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a 5.67-hectare (14.0-acre) site neighbouring the National Theatre (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and is a trustee of the national art heritage. The Ilham Tower Gallery near Ampang Park houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.
Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands and local designers. Also, Kuala Lumpur was designated as the World Book Capital for 2020 by UNESCO.
Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from 5.86 square kilometres (1,450 acres) in 1984 to 15.8 square kilometres (3,900 acres) in 2000.
Kuala Lumpur was touted as one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship from 1999 to 2017. The open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix was held until the series folded in 2009. The Motorcycle Grand Prix races are held at the Sepang International Circuit in Sepang in the neighbouring state of Selangor. The Formula One event contributed significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian financial crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, in Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6%. In 2015, the Kuala Lumpur Street Circuit was constructed to host the Kuala Lumpur City Grand Prix motor racing event.
Football is one of the most popular sports in Kuala Lumpur. The Merdeka Tournament is mainly held at Stadium Merdeka. The Stadium Negara is also located right next to it which is also one of the oldest indoor stadiums in the country. The city is also the home of Kuala Lumpur City, which plays in the Malaysia Super League. Kuala Lumpur hosted the official Asian Basketball Championship in 1965, 1977 and 1985. The city's basketball supporters cheered Malaysia's national basketball team to a Final Four finish in 1985, the team's best performance to date. Further, the city is home to the Kuala Lumpur Dragons, 2016 Champions of the ASEAN Basketball League. The team plays its home games in the MABA Stadium.
KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event, is held annually in the city. Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race. The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.
Kuala Lumpur is also the birthplace of Hashing, which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates, some from the Selangor Club, began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or "Hare and Hounds".
Kuala Lumpur hosted the 128th IOC Session in 2015 where the IOC elected Beijing as the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics and Lausanne as the host city of the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics.
As in most other Asian cities, driving is the main commuting choice in Kuala Lumpur. Every part of the city is well connected with highways. Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network with more transportation development planned. Public transportation covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote public transport, utilisation rates are low, 16 percent of the population in 2006. However, public transport utilisation will increase with the expansion of the rail network, operated by Prasarana Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley via its subsidiaries Rapid Rail and Rapid Bus, using the Rapid KL brand name. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, Prasarana Malaysia has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley metropolitan area to increase passenger numbers and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transport system. Prasarana Malaysia has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and reduce the need for more buses. KL Sentral was added on 16 April 2001 and served as the new transport hub of the Klang Valley Integrated Transit System.
The KTM Komuter, a commuter rail service, was introduced in 1995 as the first rail transit system to provide local rail services in Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding Klang Valley suburban areas. Services were later expanded to other parts of Malaysia with the introduction of the Northern and Southern sectors. KTM Komuter's 175 km (109 mi) network in the Central Sector has 53 stations. It consists of two cross-city routes, namely the Port Klang Line (Tanjung Malim to Port Klang) and Seremban Line (Batu Caves to Pulau Sebang/Tampin). Transfers between the two main lines can be made at any of the four stations on the central core: KL Sentral, Kuala Lumpur, Bank Negara and Putra.
Light Rapid Transit (LRT) Malaysia is the medium-capacity rail lines in the Klang Valley, Malaysia. The first LRT line was opened in 1996 and the system has since expanded to three lines, which opened in 1998 and 1999. Along with the MRT, the LRT is constructed and owned by the Prasarana, with operating concessions currently run by Rapid KL and Rapid Rail. In 2006, the government announced the Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya line extension projects. Unlike the original line, which used the fixed-block signalling block system, the extension uses the communications-based train control (CBTC) signaling system.
Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Malaysia is a heavy rail rapid transit system that constitutes the bulk of the railway network in Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley. The first section of the MRT opened on 16 December 2016, and the network has since grown rapidly in accordance with Malaysia's aim of developing a comprehensive rail network as the backbone of the country's public transportation system. The network consists of three lines – the 13 MRT Circle Line, looping around Kuala Lumpur, the 9 MRT Kajang Line and the 12 MRT Putrajaya Line, covering a 20 km radius in the southeast–northwest direction from the city centre, will integrate the current rapid transit system and serve high-density areas which are currently not serviced by any rapid transit system. About 90 new stations are planned in this "wheel and spoke" concept, out of which 26 in the city centre will be underground. Ridership capacity will be 2 million passengers per day.
The KL Monorail opened on 31 August 2003 with 11 stations running 8.6 km (5 mi) on two parallel elevated tracks. The line is numbered 8 and coloured light green on official transit maps. It connects the KL Sentral transport hub in the south and Titiwangsa in the north with the "Golden Triangle", a commercial, shopping, and entertainment area comprising Bukit Bintang, Imbi, Sultan Ismail, and Raja Chulan.
Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) at Sepang, Selangor, which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, also known as Subang Skypark and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998.
KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations on four continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low-cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres, an airport rail link service from KL Sentral, which takes twenty-eight minutes and costs RM 55 (roughly US$13.50), while travelling by car or bus via highway will take about an hour but cost a lot less. Direct buses from KLIA to the city centre are plentiful (every 10 to 15 minutes during peak hours), air-conditioned and comfortable with fares ranging from RM 11 (roughly US$2.70) to RM 15 (roughly US$3.70). Air Asia and other low-cost carrier flights do not fly out of KLIA main terminal, but from KLIA2, which is two kilometres from KLIA. KLIA2 is served by an extension of the KLIA Ekspres and by a free shuttle bus service from KLIA. As of 2018, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprop flights by airlines such as Firefly and Malindo Air.
Bas Mini KL or Kuala Lumpur Mini-Bus Service was one of the oldest and popular Malaysia public bus service, having served Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley region. The buses were primarily painted pink with a white stripe on the sides, and had a capacity of only 20–30 passengers, due to their smaller size. The buses operated on a commission basis, with service operators paid according to the fares they collected. The mini-bus service was from 23 September 1975 and discontinued on 1 July 1998, to be replaced by the Intrakota bus service and later, Rapid Bus in 2005.
Rapid Bus began the first phase of the revamp of its bus network in January 2006, introducing 15 City Shuttle bus routes which serve major areas in the Central Business District (CBD) of Kuala Lumpur. In 2008, Rapid Bus operated 167 routes with 1,400 buses covering 980 residential areas with a ridership of about 400,000 per day. The buses run between four hubs at the edge of the central business district, namely KL Sentral, Titiwangsa, Kuala Lumpur City Centre, Maluri, and Medan Pasar in the city centre. These bus hubs also serve as rail interchanges, with the exception of Medan Pasar, although it is at a walking distance from Masjid Jamek LRT station. On June 18, 2020, Rapid Bus released a new feature: real-time location of bus in Google Maps, via collaboration with Google Transit.
Effective 10 April 2019, all RapidKL buses are implementing fully cashless journey for all routes by stages, in which the bus accepts Touch n Go cards only for user convenience. These systems were fully implemented by May 27, 2019. Almost 170 RapidKL bus routes are covered with the real time feature, which was expanded to the MRT feeder bus service. Rapid Bus is however not the only bus operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley. Other bus operators are Selangor Omnibus, Setara Jaya bus, and Causeway Link.
In Kuala Lumpur, most taxis have distinctive white and red liveries. Many companies operate and maintain pools of different model of cars in their own brands. Before local car production began, the Mercedes-Benz 200, Mazda 323/Ford Laser, Toyota Mark II X80 series and the Opel Kadett were used. Most were scrapped and replaced by Protons, but there are still a large number of these models running the roads. Kuala Lumpur is one of the major ASEAN cities with taxis extensively running on natural gas. Taxis can be hailed from taxi stands or from the streets. Taxis may be flagged down at any time of the day along any public road outside of the Central Business District (CBD). However, increased usage of ridesharing services like Grab, MyCar and JomRides has resulted in a decrease in taxi use.
Nevertheless, the London-based website, LondonCabs.co.uk has claimed that taxis in the city charge passengers high rates, refusing to turn on their meters and offering instead over-priced flat-rate fares, although other passengers contradict such claims. The heads of some taxi associations came out and distanced themselves from taxi drivers who had given the taxi industry a bad name, promising the public that not all taxi drivers were like that.
Kuala Lumpur is twinned with:
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur (Malaysian: [ˈkualə, -a ˈlumpo(r), -ʊ(r)]), officially the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur (Malay: Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur) (Tamil: கோலாலம்பூர் கூட்டரசு பிரதேசம்) and colloquially referred to as KL, is a federal territory and the capital city of Malaysia. It is one of the fastest-growing cities in Asia and the largest city in Malaysia, covering an area of 243 km (94 sq mi) with a census population of 1,982,112 as of 2020. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.564 million people as of 2018. It is among the fastest growing metropolitan regions in Southeast Asia, both in population and economic development.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The city serves as the cultural, financial, and economic centre of Malaysia. It is also home to the Parliament of Malaysia and the Istana Negara, the official residence of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (monarch of Malaysia). Kuala Lumpur first developed around 1857 as a town serving the tin mines of the region and served as the capital of Selangor from 1880 until 1978. Kuala Lumpur was the founding capital of the Federation of Malaya and its successor, Malaysia. The city remained the seat of the executive and judicial branches of the Malaysian federal government until these were relocated to Putrajaya in early 1999. However, some sections of the political bodies still remain in Kuala Lumpur. The city is one of the three federal territories of Malaysia, enclaved within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Since the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events, including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the 2017 Southeast Asian Games. Kuala Lumpur has undergone rapid development in recent decades and is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers, which have since become an iconic symbol of Malaysian development. Kuala Lumpur is well connected with neighboring urban regions such as Petaling Jaya via the rapidly expanding Klang Valley Integrated Transit System. Residents of the city can also travel to other parts of Malaysia through KL Sentral.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is one of the leading cities in the world for tourism and shopping and was the 6th most-visited city in the world in 2019. The city houses three of the world's ten largest shopping malls. Kuala Lumpur ranks 70th in the world and second in Southeast Asia for the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Ranking and ninth in ASPAC and second in Southeast Asia for KPMG's Leading Technology Innovation Hub 2021. Kuala Lumpur was named World Book Capital 2020 by UNESCO.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur means \"muddy confluence\" in Malay; Kuala is the point where two rivers join or an estuary, and lumpur means \"mud\". One suggestion is that it was named after Sungai Lumpur (\"muddy river\"); in the 1820s a place named Sungei Lumpoor was said to be the most important tin-producing settlement up the Klang River. However this derivation does not account for this: Kuala Lumpur lies at the confluence of Gombak River and Klang River, and therefore should be named Kuala Gombak, since the kuala is typically named after the river that joins a larger river or the sea. Some have argued that Sungai Lumpur in fact extended down to the confluence and therefore the point where it joined the Klang River would be Kuala Lumpur, although this Sungai Lumpur is said to be another river joining the Klang River 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) upstream from the Gombak confluence, or perhaps located to the north of the Batu Caves area.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "It has also been proposed that Kuala Lumpur was originally named Pengkalan Lumpur (\"muddy landing place\") in the same way that Klang was once called Pengkalan Batu (\"stone landing place\"), but became corrupted into Kuala Lumpur. Another theory says that it was initially a Cantonese word, lam-pa, meaning 'flooded jungle' or 'decayed jungle'. There is no firm contemporary evidence for these suggestions other than anecdotes. The name may also be a corrupted form of an earlier forgotten name.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Sultanate of Selangor 1857–1974 Federated Malay States 1895–1942; 1945–1946 Empire of Japan 1942–1945 Malayan Union 1946–1948 Federation of Malaya 1948–1963 Malaysia 1963–present",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society states that Raja Abdullah (who was involved in the Klang War) founded Kuala Lumpur, aside from also opening up tin-mines up river and had introduced the Chinese into the region. Chinese miners were involved in tin mining up the Selangor River in the 1840s about 16 kilometres (10 miles) north of present-day Kuala Lumpur, and Mandailing Sumatrans led by Raja Asal [ms] and Sutan Puasa were also involved in tin mining and trade in the Ulu Klang region before 1860, and Sumatrans may have settled in the upper reaches of Klang River in the first quarter of the 19th century, or possibly earlier. Kuala Lumpur was originally a small hamlet of just a few houses and shops at the confluence of the Sungai Gombak and Sungai Klang (Klang River). Kuala Lumpur became established as a town c. 1857, when the Malay Chief of Klang, Raja Abdullah bin Raja Jaafar, aided by his brother Raja Juma'at of Lukut, raised funds from Malaccan Chinese businessmen to hire Chinese miners from Lukut to open new tin mines there. The miners landed at Kuala Lumpur and continued on foot to Ampang, where they opened the first mine. Kuala Lumpur was the furthest point up the Klang River to which supplies could conveniently be brought by boat, and therefore became a collection and dispersal point serving the tin mines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Despite a high death toll from the malarial conditions of the jungle, the Ampang mines succeeded, and exported the first tin in 1859. At that time, Sutan Puasa was already trading near Ampang. Two traders from Lukut, Hiu Siew and Yap Ah Sze, arrived in Kuala Lumpur and set up shops to sell provisions to miners in exchange for tin. The town, spurred on by tin-mining, started to develop around Old Market Square (Medan Pasar), with roads radiating out towards Ampang as well as Pudu and Batu (the destinations became the names of these roads: Ampang Road, Pudu Road, and Batu Road), where miners had also begun to settle in, and Petaling and Damansara. The miners formed gangs and the gangs frequently fought in this period, particularly factions of Kuala Lumpur and Kanching, mainly over control of the best tin mines. Leaders of the Chinese community were conferred the title of Kapitan Cina (Chinese headman) by the Malay chief, and Hiu Siew, the early Chinese trader, became the first Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur. The third Chinese Kapitan of Kuala Lumpur, Yap Ah Loy, was appointed in 1868.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Important Malay figures of early Kuala Lumpur also included Haji Mohamed Tahir, who became the Dato Dagang (\"chief of traders\"). The Minangkabaus of Sumatra became another important group who traded and established tobacco plantations in the area. Notable Minangkabaus included their headman, Dato' Sati, Utsman Abdullah, and Haji Mohamed Taib, who was involved in the early development of Kampung Baru. The Minangkabaus were also significant socio-religious figures, for example Utsman bin Abdullah was the first kadi of Kuala Lumpur, as well as Muhammad Nur bin Ismail.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Early Kuala Lumpur was a small town that suffered from many social and political problems – the buildings were made of wood and 'atap' (palm frond thatching). The buildings were prone to catching fire, and due to a lack of proper sanitation the town was plagued with diseases. It also suffered from a constant threat of flooding due to its location. The town became embroiled in the Selangor Civil War in part over control of revenue from the tin mines. Yap Ah Loy allied himself with Tengku Kudin [ms] and the Hai San secret society, they fought against a rival secret society, Ghee Hin, whom allied themselves with Raja Mahdi. Raja Asal and Sutan Puasa switched sides to Raja Mahdi, and Kuala Lumpur was captured in 1872 and burnt to the ground. Yap escaped to Klang where he assembled another fighting force and recaptured Kuala Lumpur in March 1873, defeating Raja Mahdi's forces with the help of fighters from Pahang. The war and other setbacks, such as dropping tin prices, led to a slump. A major outbreak of cholera caused many to flee. The slump lasted until late 1879, when rising prices for tin allowed the town to recover. In late 1881, the town was severely flooded, after a fire that had destroyed the entire town in January. With the town being rebuilt a few times and having thrived, this was due in large to Yap Ah Loy. Yap, together with Frank Swettenham who was appointed the Resident in 1882, were the two most important figures of early Kuala Lumpur with Swettenham credited with its rapid growth and development and its transformation into a major urban centre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The early Chinese and Malay settled along the east bank of the Klang River. The Chinese mainly settled around the commercial centre of Market Square. The Malays, and later Indian Chettiars and Muslims, resided in the Java Street area, now Jalan Tun Perak. In 1880, the colonial administration moved the state capital of Selangor from Klang to the more strategically advantageous Kuala Lumpur, and British Resident William Bloomfield Douglas decided to locate the government buildings and living quarters to the west of the river. Government offices and a new police headquarters were built on Bukit Aman, and the Padang initially created for police training. The Padang, now known as Merdeka Square, would later become the centre of the British administrative offices when the colonial government offices moved to the Sultan Abdul Samad Building in 1897.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Frank Swettenham, on becoming the British Resident, began improving the town by cleaning up the streets. He also stipulated in 1884 that buildings should be constructed of brick and tile so that they would be less flammable, and that the town be rebuilt with wider streets to reduce fire risk. Kapitan Yap Ah Loy bought a sprawling piece of real estate to set up a brick factory for the rebuilding of Kuala Lumpur, the eponymous Brickfields. Demolished atap buildings were replaced with brick and tile buildings, and many of the new brick buildings had \"five-foot ways\" and Chinese carpentry work. This resulted in a distinct eclectic shop house architecture typical to this region. Kapitan Yap Ah Loy expanded road access, linking tin mines with the city with the main arterial routes of the present Ampang Road, Pudu Road and Petaling Street. As Chinese Kapitan, he held wide powers on a par with Malay community leaders. Law reforms were implemented and new legal measures introduced to the assembly. Yap also presided over a small claims court. With a police force of six, he was able to uphold the rule of law, constructing a prison that could accommodate sixty prisoners at a time. Yap Ah Loy also built Kuala Lumpur's first school and a major tapioca mill in Petaling Street, in which the Selangor's Sultan Abdul Samad held an interest.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A railway line between Kuala Lumpur and Klang, initiated by Swettenham and completed in 1886, increased access and resulted in rapid growth. The population grew from 4,500 in 1884 to 20,000 in 1890. As development intensified in the 1880s, putting pressure on sanitation, waste disposal and other health measures. A Sanitary Board created on 14 May 1890 was responsible for sanitation, road upkeep, street lighting, and other functions. This would eventually become the Kuala Lumpur Municipal Council. In 1896, Kuala Lumpur was chosen as the capital of the newly formed Federated Malay States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur expanded considerably in the 20th century. It was 0.65 km (0.25 sq mi) in 1895, but was extended to encompass 20 km (7.7 sq mi) in 1903. By the time it became a municipality in 1948 it had expanded to 93 km (36 sq mi), and then to 243 km (94 sq mi) in 1974 as a Federal Territory.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The development of a rubber industry in Selangor fueled by the demand for car tyres in the early 20th century led to a boom, and the population of Kuala Lumpur increased from 30,000 in 1900 to 80,000 in 1920. The commercial activities of Kuala Lumpur had been run to a large extent by Chinese businessmen such as Loke Yew, who was then the richest and most influential Chinese in Kuala Lumpur. The growth of the rubber industry led to an influx of foreign capital and planters, with new companies and industries becoming established in Kuala Lumpur, and other companies previously based elsewhere also found a presence here.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During World War II, Kuala Lumpur was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army on 11 January 1942. Despite suffering little damage during the course of the battle, the wartime occupation of the city resulted in significant loss of lives; at least 5,000 Chinese were killed in Kuala Lumpur in just a few weeks of occupation by Japanese forces, and thousands of Indians were sent as forced labour to work on the Burma Railway where many died. They occupied the city until 15 August 1945, when the commander in chief of the Japanese Seventh Area Army in Singapore and Malaysia, Seishirō Itagaki, surrendered to the British administration following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kuala Lumpur grew during the war, and continued after the war during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), during which Malaya was preoccupied with a communist insurgency and New Villages were established on the outskirts of the city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The first municipal election in Kuala Lumpur was held on 16 February 1952. An ad hoc alliance between the Malay UMNO and Chinese MCA party candidates won a majority of the seats, and this led to the formation of the Alliance Party (later the Barisan Nasional). On 31 August 1957, the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from British rule. The British flag was lowered and the Malayan flag raised for the first time at the Padang at midnight on 30 August 1957, and on the morning of 31 August, the ceremony for the Declaration of Independence was held at the Merdeka Stadium by the first Prime Minister of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman. Kuala Lumpur remained the capital after the formation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963. The Malaysian Houses of Parliament were completed at the edge of the Lake Gardens in 1963.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur had seen a number of civil disturbances over the years. A riot in 1897 was a relatively minor affair that began with the confiscation of faulty dacing (a scale used by traders), and in 1912, a more serious disturbance called the tauchang riot began during the Chinese New Year with the cutting of pigtails and ended with rioting and factional fighting lasting a number of days. The worst rioting on record in Malaysia, however, occurred on 13 May 1969, when race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur. The so-called 13 May Incident included violent conflicts between members of the Malay and the Chinese communities, the result of Malaysian dissatisfaction with their socio-political status. The riots caused the deaths of 196 people, according to official figures, and led to major changes in the country's economic policy to promote and prioritise Malay economic development over that of other ethnicities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur achieved city status on 1 February 1972, becoming the first settlement in Malaysia to be granted the status after independence. Later, on 1 February 1974, Kuala Lumpur became a federal territory. The territory of Kuala Lumpur expanded to 96 square miles by absorbing the surrounding areas. Kuala Lumpur was ceded by Selangor to be directly controlled by the central government, and it ceased to be capital of Selangor in 1978 after the city of Shah Alam was declared the new state capital.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "On 14 May 1990, Kuala Lumpur celebrated the centennial of the local council. The new federal territory Kuala Lumpur flag and anthem were introduced. Putrajaya was declared a Federal Territory on 1 February 2001, as well as the seat of the federal government. The administrative and judicial functions of the government were shifted from Kuala Lumpur to Putrajaya. Kuala Lumpur however still retained its legislative function, and remained the home of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (Constitutional King).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "From the 1990s onwards, major urban developments in the Klang Valley extended the Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area. This area, known as Greater Kuala Lumpur, extends from the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur westward to Port Klang, east to the edge of the Titiwangsa Mountains as well as to the north and south. The area covers other administratively separate towns and cities such as Klang, Shah Alam, Putrajaya and others, and is served by the Klang Valley Integrated Transit System. Notable projects undertaken within Kuala Lumpur itself include the development of a new Kuala Lumpur City Centre around Jalan Ampang and the Petronas Towers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The geography of Kuala Lumpur is characterised by the huge Klang Valley, bordered by the Titiwangsa Mountains in the east, several minor ranges in the north and the south, and the Strait of Malacca in the west. Kuala Lumpur is a Malay term that translates to \"muddy confluence\" and is located at the confluence of the Klang and Gombak rivers which flow into the Selangor River.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Located in the centre of Selangor state, Kuala Lumpur was a territory of Selangor State Government. In 1974, Kuala Lumpur was split off from Selangor to form the first Federal Territory governed directly by the Malaysian federal government. Its location in the most developed state on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia, which has a wider stretch of flat land than the east coast, has helped it develop faster than other cities in Malaysia. The municipality covers an area of 243 km (94 sq mi), with an average elevation of 81.95 m (268 ft 10 in) highest point being Bukit Nanas at 94 meters above sea level.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Protected by the Titiwangsa Range in the east and Indonesia's Sumatra Island in the west, Kuala Lumpur is sheltered from strong winds and has a tropical rainforest climate (Köppen climate classification Af), hot, humid and sunny, with abundant rainfall, especially during the northeast monsoon season from October to March. Temperatures tend to remain constant. Maximums hover between 32 and 35 °C (90 and 95 °F) and sometimes topping 38 °C (100.4 °F), while minimums hover between 23.4 and 24.6 °C (74.1 and 76.3 °F) and have never fallen below 17.8 °C (64.0 °F). Kuala Lumpur typically receives at least 2,600 mm (100 in) of rain annually; June to August are relatively dry, but even then rainfall typically exceeds 131 millimetres (5.2 in) a month. Kuala Lumpur is highly prone to severe thunderstorms and lightning strikes. The Klang Valley, including Kuala Lumpur, is one of the places where thunderstorms are most frequently observed on Earth.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Floods are frequent in Kuala Lumpur after heavy downpours, especially in the city centre, because irrigation structure lags behind the intense development in the city. Smoke from forest fires in nearby Sumatra and Kalimantan sometimes casts a haze over the region, and is a major source of pollution, along with open burning, motor vehicle emissions, and construction.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur was administered by a corporation sole called the Federal Capital Commissioner from April 1, 1961, until it was awarded city status in 1972, after which executive power transferred to the Lord Mayor (Datuk Bandar). 14 mayors have been appointed since then. The current mayor is Kamarulzaman Mat Salleh, who has been in office since 17 April 2023.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The local administration is carried out by the Kuala Lumpur City Hall, an agency under the Federal Territories Ministry of Malaysia. It is responsible for public health and sanitation, waste removal and management, town planning, environmental protection and building control, social and economic development, and general maintenance functions of urban infrastructure. Executive power lies with the mayor in the city hall, who is appointed for three years by the Federal Territories Minister. This system of appointing the mayor has been in place ever since the local government elections were suspended in 1970.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur's eleven parliamentary constituencies, with 2020 population, area, density and percentage of the total are congruent with administrative subdivisions under the authority of the Kuala Lumpur City Hall authority.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is home to the Parliament of Malaysia. The federal Constitution stipulates the three branches of the Malaysian government: the Executive, Judiciary and Legislative branches. The Parliament consists of the Dewan Negara (Upper House / House of Senate) and Dewan Rakyat (Lower House / House of Representatives).",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "List of Kuala Lumpur representatives in the Federal Parliament (Dewan Rakyat)",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur and its surrounding urban areas form the most industrialised and economically, the fastest-growing region in Malaysia. Despite the relocation of federal government administration to Putrajaya, certain government institutions such as Bank Negara Malaysia (National Bank of Malaysia), Companies Commission of Malaysia and Securities Commission as well as most embassies and diplomatic missions have remained in the city. The city remains the economic and business hub of the country. Kuala Lumpur is a centre for finance, insurance, real estate, media and the arts of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur is rated the only global city in Malaysia, according to the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network (GaWC).",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Bursa Malaysia, or the Malaysia Exchange, is based in the city and forms one of its core economic activities. As of 5 July 2013, the market capitalisation stood at US$505.67 billion. The gross domestic product (GDP) for Kuala Lumpur is estimated at RM73,536 million in 2008 with an average annual growth rate of 5.9 percent. By 2015, the GDP had reached RM160,388 million, representing 15.1% of the total GDP of Malaysia. The per capita GDP for Kuala Lumpur in 2013 was RM79,752 with an average annual growth rate of 5.6 percent, and RM94,722 in 2015. Average monthly household income is RM9,073 (~$2,200) as of 2016, growing at a pace of approximately 6% a year. The service sector, comprising finance, insurance, real estate, business services, wholesale and retail trade, restaurants and hotels, transport, storage and communication, utilities, personal services and government services form the largest component of employment, representing about 83.0 percent of the total. The remaining 17 percent comes from manufacturing and construction.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The large service sector is evident in the number of local and foreign banks and insurance companies operating in the city. Kuala Lumpur is poised to become the global Islamic financing hub with an increasing number of financial institutions providing Islamic financing and the strong presence of Gulf financial institutions such as the world's largest Islamic bank, the Al-Rajhi Bank and Kuwait Finance House. Apart from that, the Dow Jones & Company is keen to work with Bursa Malaysia to set up Islamic Exchange Trade Funds (ETFs), which would help raise Malaysia's profile in the Gulf. The city has a large number of foreign corporations and is also host to many multi national companies' regional offices or support centres, particularly for finance and accounting, and information technology functions. Most of the country's largest companies have their headquarters here, and as of December 2007 and excluding Petronas, there are 14 companies that are listed in Forbes 2000 based in Kuala Lumpur.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "There has been growing emphasis on expanding the economic scope of the city in other service activities, such as research and development, which support the rest of the economy of Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur has been home for years to important research centres such as the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, the Forest Research Institute Malaysia and the Institute of Medical Research. A new financial district for Kuala Lumpur is currently under construction: the Tun Razak Exchange (TRX), formerly known as Kuala Lumpur International Financial District (KLIFD). The TRX's landmark and prominent building is The Exchange 106 tower. The 70-acre development will be situated in the heart of Kuala Lumpur and will serve international finance and business opportunities. The new financial hub is a strategic enabler of the Malaysian government's Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), an initiative by the Malaysian government to turn Malaysia into a high income economy nation.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Tourism plays an important role in the city's service-driven economy. Many large worldwide hotel chains have a presence in the city. One of the oldest hotels is the Hotel Majestic. Kuala Lumpur is the sixth most visited city in the world, with 8.9 million tourists per year. Tourism here is driven by the city's cultural diversity, relatively low costs, and wide gastronomic and shopping variety. MICE tourism, which mainly encompasses conventions— has expanded in recent years to become a vital component of the industry, and is expected to grow further once the Malaysian government's Economic Transformation Programme kicks in, and with the completion of a new 93,000 square meter-size MATRADE Centre in 2014. The MATRADE agency is also the owner of the Malaysia International Trade And Exhibition Centre (MITEC), the largest trade and exhibition centre of Malaysia, which is a component of the larger KL Metropolis development situated in the suburb of Segambut. Another notable trend is the increased presence of budget hotels in the city.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The major tourist destinations in Kuala Lumpur include the Petronas Twin Towers, the Bukit Bintang shopping district, the Kuala Lumpur Tower, Petaling Street (Chinatown), the Merdeka Square, the Kuala Lumpur railway station, the House of Parliament building, the National Palace (Istana Negara), the National Planetarium, the National Science Centre, the National Art Gallery (Balai Seni Negara), the National Theatre (Istana Budaya), the National Museum, the Royal Museum, the National Textile Museum, Islamic Arts Museum, Telekom Museum, Royal Malaysian Police Museum, the National Mosque of Malaysia (Masjid Negara), Federal Territory Mosque (Masjid Wilayah), Sultan Abdul Samad Building, DBKL City Theatre (Panggung Bandaraya), Medan Pasar, Central Market, KL Bird Park, KL Butterfly Park, Aquaria KLCC, Saloma Link (Pintasan Saloma), the National Monument, and religious sites such as the Sultan Abdul Samad Jamek Mosque, Thean Hou Temple and Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur plays host to many cultural festivals such as the Thaipusam procession at the Sri Mahamariamman Temple. Every year during the Thaipusam celebration, a silver chariot carrying the statue of Lord Muruga together with his consort Valli and Teivayanni would be paraded through the city beginning at the temple all the way to Batu Caves in the neighboring Gombak, Selangor. The primary entertainment and shopping district of the city is mainly centred in the Golden Triangle encompassing Jalan P. Ramlee, Jalan Sultan Ismail, Jalan Bukit Bintang, Ampang Road and Bintang Walk.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur alone has 66 shopping malls and is the retail and fashion hub of both Malaysia and Southeast Asia. Shopping in Malaysia contributed RM7.7 billion (US$2.26 billion) or 20.8 percent of the RM31.9 billion tourism receipts in 2006.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Suria KLCC is one of Malaysia's premier upscale shopping destinations due to its location beneath the Petronas Twin Towers. Apart from Suria KLCC, the Bukit Bintang district has the highest concentration of shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur. It includes: Pavilion KL, Fahrenheit 88, Plaza Low Yat, Berjaya Times Square, Lot 10, Sungei Wang Plaza, Starhill Gallery, Lalaport BBCC, Quill City Mall and Avenue K. Changkat area of Bukit Bintang hosts various cafes, alfresco dining outlets, illegal activities such as prostitution and more. It is best known as one of the red-light districts in Kuala Lumpur. Bangsar district also has a few shopping complexes, including Bangsar Village, Bangsar Shopping Centre, KL Gateway Mall, Bangsar South, KL Eco City Mall, The Gardens and Mid Valley Megamall.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Apart from shopping complexes, Kuala Lumpur has designated numerous zones in the city to market locally manufactured products such as textiles, fabrics and handicrafts especially at Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman. Traditional clothing of ethnic Malays such as baju Kurung and baju kebaya can be found here. The Chinatown of Kuala Lumpur, commonly known as Petaling Street, is one of them. Chinatown features many pre-independence buildings with Straits Chinese and colonial architectural influences.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Since 2000, the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism introduced a mega sale event for shopping in Malaysia. The mega sale event is held three times a year – in March, May and December – in which all shopping malls are encouraged to participate to boost Kuala Lumpur as a leading shopping destination in Asia which has been maintained until present with new mega sales.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is the most populous city in Malaysia, with a population of 1.98 million in the city proper as of 2020. It has a population density of 8,157 inhabitants per square kilometre (21,130/sq mi), and is the most densely populated administrative district in Malaysia. Residents of the city are colloquially known as KLites. Kuala Lumpur is also the centre of the wider Klang Valley metropolitan area covering Petaling Jaya, Klang, Subang Jaya, Puchong, Shah Alam, and Gombak, with an estimated metropolitan population of 7.25 million as of 2017.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur's heterogeneous populace includes the country's three major ethnic groups: the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians, although the city also has a mix of different cultures including Eurasians, Kadazans, Ibans and other indigenous races from around Malaysia.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Historically Kuala Lumpur was a predominantly Chinese city, although more recently the Bumiputera component of the city has grown substantially and they are now the dominant group. The Kuala Lumpur of 1872 beside the Klang River was described by Frank Swettenham as a \"purely Chinese village\", although a Malay stockade already existed at Bukit Nanas at that time. By 1875, after participation in the Selangor Civil War by Pahang Malays had ended, Swettenham noted Malay quarters near the Chinese area in a sketch map he had drawn. There were said to be 1,000 Chinese and 700 Malays in the town in this period. Many of the Malays may have settled in Kuala Lumpur after the war. The population of Kuala Lumpur had increased to around three thousand in 1880 when it was made the capital of Selangor. A significant component of the Malay population in Kuala Lumpur of this period consisted of Malays recruited by the British in 1880, mostly from rural Malacca, to establish a police force of 2–300, many of whom brought their families. Many of the Malays were originally from the other islands of Malay Archipelago i.e. Sumatra and Java. The Mandailings, the Minangkabaus, Javanese, and Buginese began arriving in Kuala Lumpur in the 19th century, while the Acehnese arrived in the late 20th century. In the following decades that saw the rebuilding of the town, it grew considerably with a large influx of immigrants, due in large part to the construction of a railway line in 1886 connecting Kuala Lumpur and Klang.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "A census in 1891 of uncertain accuracy gave a figure of 43,796 inhabitants, 79% of whom were Chinese (71% of the Chinese were Hakka, but possibly over-counted), 14% Malay, and 6% Indian. Another perhaps more accurate estimate put the population of Kuala Lumpur in 1890 at 20,000. The rubber boom in the early 20th century led to a further increase in population, from 30,000 in 1900 to 80,000 in 1920. In 1931, 61% of Kuala Lumpur's 111,418 inhabitants were Chinese, and in 1947 63.5%. The Malays however began to settle in Kuala Lumpur in significant numbers, in part due to government employment, as well as the expansion of the city that absorbed the surrounding rural areas where many Malays lived. Between 1947 and 1957 the population of Malays in Kuala Lumpur increased from 12.5 to 15%, while the proportion of Chinese dropped. The process continued after Malayan independence with the growth of a largely Malay civil service, and later the implementation of the New Economic Policy which encouraged Malay participation in urban industries and business. In 1980 the population of Kuala Lumpur had reached over a million, with 52% Chinese, 33% Malay, and 15% Indian. From 1980 to 2000 the number of Bumiputeras increased by 77%, but the Chinese still outnumbered the Bumiputeras in Kuala Lumpur in the 2000 census at 43% compared to 38%. By the 2010 census, according to the Department of Statistics and excluding non-citizens, the Malay population in Kuala Lumpur had increased to 44.7% (45.9% Bumiputera), exceeding the Chinese population of 43.2%. In the 2020 census, the percentage of the Bumiputera population in Kuala Lumpur had reached around 47.7%, with the Chinese population at 41.6% and Indians 10.0%.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "A notable phenomenon in recent times has been the increased portion of foreign residents in Kuala Lumpur, which rose from 1% of the city's population in 1980 to about 8% in the 2000 census, 9.4% in 2010, and 10.5% in the 2020 census. These figures also do not include a significant number of illegal immigrants. Kuala Lumpur's rapid development has triggered a huge influx of low-skilled foreign workers from Indonesia, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into Malaysia, many of whom enter the country illegally or without proper permits.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Birth rates in Kuala Lumpur have declined and resulted in a lower proportion of young people – the proportion of those below 15 years old fell from 33% in 1980 to slightly less than 27% in 2000. On the other hand, the working age group of 15–59 increased from 63% in 1980 to 67% in 2000. The elderly age group, 60 years old and above has increased from 4% in 1980 and 1991 to 6% in 2000.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is pluralistic and religiously diverse. The city has many places of worship catering to the multi-religious population. Islam is practised primarily by the Malays, the Indian Muslim communities and a small number of Chinese Muslims. Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism are practised mainly among the Chinese. Indians traditionally adhere to Hinduism. Some Chinese and Indians also subscribe to Christianity. Kuala Lumpur is one of the three states where less than 50% of the population are self-identified Muslims, the other two being Penang and Sarawak. As of the 2020 Census, the population of Kuala Lumpur was 45.3% Muslim, 32.3% Buddhist, 8.2% Hindu, 6.4% Christian, 1.8% of other religions, and 6.0% non-religious.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Statistics from the 2010 Census indicate that 87.4% of the Chinese population identify as Buddhists, with significant minorities of adherents identifying as Christians (7.9%), Chinese folk religions (2.7%) and Muslims (0.6%). The majority of the Indian population identify as Hindus (81.1%), with a significant minorities of identifying as Christians (7.8%), Muslims (4.9%) and Buddhists (2.1%). The non-Malay bumiputera community are predominantly Christians (44.9%), with significant minorities identifying as Muslims (31.2%) and Buddhists (13.5%). All bumiputera Malays are Muslim due to the criterion in the definition of a Malay in the Malaysian constitution that they should adhere to Islam.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Bahasa Malaysia is the principal language in Kuala Lumpur. Majority of local Malays speak Selangor dialect but Malays from other parts of the state such as Kelantan, Kedah and Terengganu also use their own respective varieties of Malay. Kuala Lumpur residents are generally literate in English, with a large proportion adopting it as their first language. Malaysian English is widely used. It has a strong presence, especially in business, and is taught as a compulsory language in schools. Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin are prominent, as they are spoken by the local majority Chinese population. Another major Chinese dialect spoken is Hakka. While Tamil is dominant amongst the local Indian population, other Indian languages spoken by minorities include Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, and Hindi. Besides Malay, there are a variety of languages spoken by people of Indonesian descent, such as Minangkabau and Javanese. There are also speakers of Arabic, Iban, Kadazandusun, Bidayuh and other languages.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The architecture of Kuala Lumpur is a mixture of old colonial influences, Asian traditions, Malay Islamic inspirations, modern, and postmodern architecture. A relatively young city compared with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, most of Kuala Lumpur's notable colonial-era buildings were built toward the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. These buildings were designed in a number of styles – Mughal/Moorish Revival, Mock Tudor, Neo-Gothic or Grecian-Spanish style or architecture. Most of the styling has been modified to use local resources and adapted to the local climate, which is hot and humid all year around. A significant architect of the early period is Arthur Benison Hubback who designed a number of the colonial-era buildings including the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station and Jamek Mosque.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Prior to the Second World War, many shophouses, usually two stories with functional shops on the ground floor and separate residential spaces upstairs, were built around the old city centre. These shop-houses drew inspiration from Straits Chinese and European traditions. Some of these shophouses have made way for new developments but there are still many standing today in the Medan Pasar Besar (Old Market Square), Chinatown, Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, Jalan Doraisamy, Bukit Bintang and Tengkat Tong Shin areas.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Independence coupled with rapid economic growth from the 1970s to the 1990s and with Islam being the official religion in the country, has resulted in the construction of buildings with a more local and Islamic flavour arise around the city. Many of these buildings derive their design from traditional Malay items such as the songkok and the keris. Some of these buildings have Islamic geometric motifs integrated into the designs of the building, due to Islamic restrictions on imitating nature through drawings. Examples of these buildings are Telekom Tower, Maybank Tower, Dayabumi Complex, and the Islamic Centre. Some buildings such as the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia and National Planetarium have been built to masquerade as a place of worship, complete with dome and minaret, when in fact they are places of science and knowledge. The 452-metre (1,483 ft) Petronas Towers are the tallest twin buildings in the world and were the tallest buildings in the country until being surpassed by The Exchange 106 by 1.7 meters in 2019. They were designed to resemble motifs found in Islamic art.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Late modern and postmodern architecture began to appear in the late-1990s and early-2000s. With economic development, old buildings such as Bok House have been razed to make way for new ones. Buildings with all-glass shells exist throughout the city, with the most prominent examples being the Petronas Towers and Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. Kuala Lumpur's central business district today has shifted to the Kuala Lumpur city centre (KLCC) where many new and tall buildings with modern and postmodern architecture fill the skyline. According to the World Tallest 50 Urban Agglomeration 2010 Projection by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, Kuala Lumpur ranks 10th among cities that have most buildings above 100 metres with a combined height of 34,035 metres from its 244 high rise buildings.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The Perdana Botanical Garden or Lake Gardens, a 92-hectare (230-acre) botanical garden, was the first recreational park created in Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian Parliament building is located close by, and Carcosa Seri Negara, which was once the official residence of British colonial administration, is also sited here. The park includes a butterfly park, deer park, orchid garden, a hibiscus garden, and the Kuala Lumpur Bird Park, which is the world's largest aviary bird park. Other parks in the city include the ASEAN Sculpture Garden, KLCC Park, Titiwangsa Lake Gardens, Metropolitan Lake Gardens in Kepong, Taman Tasik Permaisuri (Queen's Lake Gardens), Bukit Kiara Botanical Gardens, the equestrian park and West Valley Park near Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI), and Bukit Jalil International Park.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "There are three forest reserves within the city, the Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the city centre, the oldest gazetted forest reserve in the country 10.52 ha or 26.0 acres, Bukit Sungai Putih Forest Reserve (7.41 ha or 18.3 acres) and Bukit Sungai Besi Forest Reserve (42.11 ha or 104.1 acres). Bukit Nanas, in the heart of the city centre, is one of the oldest virgin forests in the world within a city. These residual forest areas are home to a number of fauna species, particularly monkeys, treeshrews, pygmy goats, budgerigars, squirrels and birds.",
"title": "Cityscape"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "According to government statistics, Kuala Lumpur has a literacy rate of 97.5% in 2000, the highest rate in any state or territory in Malaysia. In Malaysia, Malay is the language of instruction for most subjects while English is a compulsory subject, but as of 2012, English was still the language of instruction for mathematics and the natural sciences for certain schools. Some schools provide instruction in Mandarin and Tamil for certain subjects.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur contains 14 tertiary education institutions, 79 high schools, 155 elementary schools and 136 kindergartens.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is home to the University of Malaya (UM). Established in 1949, it is the oldest university in Malaysia, and one of the oldest in the region. It was ranked the best university in Malaysia, the 22nd-best in Asia, and third in Southeast Asia in QS World University Rankings 2019. In recent years, the number of international students at the University of Malaya has risen, as a result of increasing efforts made to attract them.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Other universities located in Kuala Lumpur include Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College (TARUC), UCSI University (UCSI), Taylor's University (TULC), International Medical University (IMU), Open University Malaysia (OUM), Kuala Lumpur University (UniKL), Perdana University (PU), Wawasan Open University (WOU), HELP University and the branch campus of the National University of Malaysia (UKM) and University of Technology Malaysia (UTM). The National Defence University of Malaysia is located at Sungai Besi Army Base, at the southern part of central Kuala Lumpur. It was established to be a major centre for military and defence technology studies. This institution covers studies for the army, navy, and air force.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Greater Kuala Lumpur covers an even more extensive selection of universities including several international branches such as Monash University Malaysia Campus, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and Xiamen University Malaysia.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is a hub for cultural activities and events in Malaysia. Among the centres is the National Museum, which is situated along the Mahameru Highway. Its collection comprises artefacts and paintings collected throughout the country. The Islamic Arts Museum, which houses more than seven thousand Islamic artefacts including rare exhibits and a library of Islamic art books, is the largest Islamic arts collection in Southeast Asia. The museum's collection not only concentrates on works from the Middle East, but also includes work from elsewhere in Asia, such as China and Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur has a craft complex coupled with a museum that displays a variety of textile, ceramic, metal craft and weaved products. Information on the production process is portrayed in diorama format complete with historical facts, technique and traditionally engineered equipment. Among the processes shown are pottery making, intricate wood carving, silver-smithing, weaving songket cloth, stamping batik patterns on cloth, and boat-making.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The premier performing arts venue is the Petronas Philharmonic Hall located underneath the Petronas Towers. The resident orchestra is the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra (MPO), consisting of musicians from all over the world, and features regular concerts, chamber concerts and traditional cultural performances. The Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) in Sentul West and Damansara Performing Arts Centre (DPac) in Damansara Perdana are two of the most established centres in the country for the performing arts, notably theatre, plays, music, and film screening. It has housed many local productions and has been a supporter of local and regional independent performance artists. The Future Music Festival Asia has been held in the city since 2012, featuring local and international artists.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The National Art Gallery of Malaysia is located on Jalan Temerloh, off Jalan Tun Razak on a 5.67-hectare (14.0-acre) site neighbouring the National Theatre (Istana Budaya) and National Library. The architecture of the gallery incorporates elements of traditional Malay architecture, as well as contemporary modern architecture. The National Art Gallery serves as a centre of excellence and is a trustee of the national art heritage. The Ilham Tower Gallery near Ampang Park houses exhibitions of works by local and foreign artists.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur holds the Malaysia International Gourmet Festival annually. Another event hosted annually by the city is the Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, which includes international brands and local designers. Also, Kuala Lumpur was designated as the World Book Capital for 2020 by UNESCO.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur has numerous parks, gardens and open spaces for recreational purposes. Total open space for recreational and sport facilities land use in the city has increased significantly by 169.6 percent from 5.86 square kilometres (1,450 acres) in 1984 to 15.8 square kilometres (3,900 acres) in 2000.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur was touted as one of the host cities for the Formula One World Championship from 1999 to 2017. The open-wheel auto racing A1 Grand Prix was held until the series folded in 2009. The Motorcycle Grand Prix races are held at the Sepang International Circuit in Sepang in the neighbouring state of Selangor. The Formula One event contributed significantly to tourist arrivals and tourism income to Kuala Lumpur. This was evident during the Asian financial crisis in 1998. Despite cities around Asia suffering declining tourist arrivals, in Kuala Lumpur tourist arrivals increased from 6,210,900 in 1997 to 10,221,600 in 2000, or 64.6%. In 2015, the Kuala Lumpur Street Circuit was constructed to host the Kuala Lumpur City Grand Prix motor racing event.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Football is one of the most popular sports in Kuala Lumpur. The Merdeka Tournament is mainly held at Stadium Merdeka. The Stadium Negara is also located right next to it which is also one of the oldest indoor stadiums in the country. The city is also the home of Kuala Lumpur City, which plays in the Malaysia Super League. Kuala Lumpur hosted the official Asian Basketball Championship in 1965, 1977 and 1985. The city's basketball supporters cheered Malaysia's national basketball team to a Final Four finish in 1985, the team's best performance to date. Further, the city is home to the Kuala Lumpur Dragons, 2016 Champions of the ASEAN Basketball League. The team plays its home games in the MABA Stadium.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "KL Grand Prix CSI 5*, a five-star international showjumping equestrian event, is held annually in the city. Other annual sport events hosted by the city include the KL Tower Run, the KL Tower International BASE Jump Merdeka Circuit and the Kuala Lumpur International Marathon. Kuala Lumpur is also one of the stages of the Tour de Langkawi cycling race. The annual Malaysia Open Super Series badminton tournament is held in Kuala Lumpur.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is also the birthplace of Hashing, which began in December 1938 when a group of British colonial officers and expatriates, some from the Selangor Club, began meeting on Monday evenings to run, in a fashion patterned after the traditional British Paper Chase or \"Hare and Hounds\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur hosted the 128th IOC Session in 2015 where the IOC elected Beijing as the host city of the 2022 Winter Olympics and Lausanne as the host city of the 2020 Winter Youth Olympics.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "As in most other Asian cities, driving is the main commuting choice in Kuala Lumpur. Every part of the city is well connected with highways. Kuala Lumpur has a comprehensive road network with more transportation development planned. Public transportation covers a variety of transport modes such as bus, rail and taxi. Despite efforts to promote public transport, utilisation rates are low, 16 percent of the population in 2006. However, public transport utilisation will increase with the expansion of the rail network, operated by Prasarana Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley via its subsidiaries Rapid Rail and Rapid Bus, using the Rapid KL brand name. Since the take over from Intrakota Komposit Sdn Bhd, Prasarana Malaysia has redrawn the entire bus network of Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley metropolitan area to increase passenger numbers and improve Kuala Lumpur's public transport system. Prasarana Malaysia has adopted the hub and spoke system to provide greater connectivity, and reduce the need for more buses. KL Sentral was added on 16 April 2001 and served as the new transport hub of the Klang Valley Integrated Transit System.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The KTM Komuter, a commuter rail service, was introduced in 1995 as the first rail transit system to provide local rail services in Kuala Lumpur and the surrounding Klang Valley suburban areas. Services were later expanded to other parts of Malaysia with the introduction of the Northern and Southern sectors. KTM Komuter's 175 km (109 mi) network in the Central Sector has 53 stations. It consists of two cross-city routes, namely the Port Klang Line (Tanjung Malim to Port Klang) and Seremban Line (Batu Caves to Pulau Sebang/Tampin). Transfers between the two main lines can be made at any of the four stations on the central core: KL Sentral, Kuala Lumpur, Bank Negara and Putra.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Light Rapid Transit (LRT) Malaysia is the medium-capacity rail lines in the Klang Valley, Malaysia. The first LRT line was opened in 1996 and the system has since expanded to three lines, which opened in 1998 and 1999. Along with the MRT, the LRT is constructed and owned by the Prasarana, with operating concessions currently run by Rapid KL and Rapid Rail. In 2006, the government announced the Sri Petaling Line and Kelana Jaya line extension projects. Unlike the original line, which used the fixed-block signalling block system, the extension uses the communications-based train control (CBTC) signaling system.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Malaysia is a heavy rail rapid transit system that constitutes the bulk of the railway network in Kuala Lumpur and the rest of the Klang Valley. The first section of the MRT opened on 16 December 2016, and the network has since grown rapidly in accordance with Malaysia's aim of developing a comprehensive rail network as the backbone of the country's public transportation system. The network consists of three lines – the 13 MRT Circle Line, looping around Kuala Lumpur, the 9 MRT Kajang Line and the 12 MRT Putrajaya Line, covering a 20 km radius in the southeast–northwest direction from the city centre, will integrate the current rapid transit system and serve high-density areas which are currently not serviced by any rapid transit system. About 90 new stations are planned in this \"wheel and spoke\" concept, out of which 26 in the city centre will be underground. Ridership capacity will be 2 million passengers per day.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The KL Monorail opened on 31 August 2003 with 11 stations running 8.6 km (5 mi) on two parallel elevated tracks. The line is numbered 8 and coloured light green on official transit maps. It connects the KL Sentral transport hub in the south and Titiwangsa in the north with the \"Golden Triangle\", a commercial, shopping, and entertainment area comprising Bukit Bintang, Imbi, Sultan Ismail, and Raja Chulan.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is served by two airports. The main airport, Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) at Sepang, Selangor, which is also the aviation hub of Malaysia, is located about 50 kilometres (31 mi) south of city. The other airport is Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport, also known as Subang Skypark and served as the main international gateway to Kuala Lumpur from 1965 until KLIA opened in 1998.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "KLIA connects the city with direct flights to destinations on four continents around the world, and is the main hub for the national carrier, Malaysia Airlines and low-cost carrier, AirAsia. KLIA can be reached using the KLIA Ekspres, an airport rail link service from KL Sentral, which takes twenty-eight minutes and costs RM 55 (roughly US$13.50), while travelling by car or bus via highway will take about an hour but cost a lot less. Direct buses from KLIA to the city centre are plentiful (every 10 to 15 minutes during peak hours), air-conditioned and comfortable with fares ranging from RM 11 (roughly US$2.70) to RM 15 (roughly US$3.70). Air Asia and other low-cost carrier flights do not fly out of KLIA main terminal, but from KLIA2, which is two kilometres from KLIA. KLIA2 is served by an extension of the KLIA Ekspres and by a free shuttle bus service from KLIA. As of 2018, Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport is only used for chartered and turboprop flights by airlines such as Firefly and Malindo Air.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Bas Mini KL or Kuala Lumpur Mini-Bus Service was one of the oldest and popular Malaysia public bus service, having served Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley region. The buses were primarily painted pink with a white stripe on the sides, and had a capacity of only 20–30 passengers, due to their smaller size. The buses operated on a commission basis, with service operators paid according to the fares they collected. The mini-bus service was from 23 September 1975 and discontinued on 1 July 1998, to be replaced by the Intrakota bus service and later, Rapid Bus in 2005.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Rapid Bus began the first phase of the revamp of its bus network in January 2006, introducing 15 City Shuttle bus routes which serve major areas in the Central Business District (CBD) of Kuala Lumpur. In 2008, Rapid Bus operated 167 routes with 1,400 buses covering 980 residential areas with a ridership of about 400,000 per day. The buses run between four hubs at the edge of the central business district, namely KL Sentral, Titiwangsa, Kuala Lumpur City Centre, Maluri, and Medan Pasar in the city centre. These bus hubs also serve as rail interchanges, with the exception of Medan Pasar, although it is at a walking distance from Masjid Jamek LRT station. On June 18, 2020, Rapid Bus released a new feature: real-time location of bus in Google Maps, via collaboration with Google Transit.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Effective 10 April 2019, all RapidKL buses are implementing fully cashless journey for all routes by stages, in which the bus accepts Touch n Go cards only for user convenience. These systems were fully implemented by May 27, 2019. Almost 170 RapidKL bus routes are covered with the real time feature, which was expanded to the MRT feeder bus service. Rapid Bus is however not the only bus operator in Kuala Lumpur and the Klang Valley. Other bus operators are Selangor Omnibus, Setara Jaya bus, and Causeway Link.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In Kuala Lumpur, most taxis have distinctive white and red liveries. Many companies operate and maintain pools of different model of cars in their own brands. Before local car production began, the Mercedes-Benz 200, Mazda 323/Ford Laser, Toyota Mark II X80 series and the Opel Kadett were used. Most were scrapped and replaced by Protons, but there are still a large number of these models running the roads. Kuala Lumpur is one of the major ASEAN cities with taxis extensively running on natural gas. Taxis can be hailed from taxi stands or from the streets. Taxis may be flagged down at any time of the day along any public road outside of the Central Business District (CBD). However, increased usage of ridesharing services like Grab, MyCar and JomRides has resulted in a decrease in taxi use.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Nevertheless, the London-based website, LondonCabs.co.uk has claimed that taxis in the city charge passengers high rates, refusing to turn on their meters and offering instead over-priced flat-rate fares, although other passengers contradict such claims. The heads of some taxi associations came out and distanced themselves from taxi drivers who had given the taxi industry a bad name, promising the public that not all taxi drivers were like that.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Kuala Lumpur is twinned with:",
"title": "Twin towns – sister cities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kuala Lumpur, officially the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur and colloquially referred to as KL, is a federal territory and the capital city of Malaysia. It is one of the fastest-growing cities in Asia and the largest city in Malaysia, covering an area of 243 km2 (94 sq mi) with a census population of 1,982,112 as of 2020. Greater Kuala Lumpur, also known as the Klang Valley, is an urban agglomeration of 7.564 million people as of 2018. It is among the fastest growing metropolitan regions in Southeast Asia, both in population and economic development. The city serves as the cultural, financial, and economic centre of Malaysia. It is also home to the Parliament of Malaysia and the Istana Negara, the official residence of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong. Kuala Lumpur first developed around 1857 as a town serving the tin mines of the region and served as the capital of Selangor from 1880 until 1978. Kuala Lumpur was the founding capital of the Federation of Malaya and its successor, Malaysia. The city remained the seat of the executive and judicial branches of the Malaysian federal government until these were relocated to Putrajaya in early 1999. However, some sections of the political bodies still remain in Kuala Lumpur. The city is one of the three federal territories of Malaysia, enclaved within the state of Selangor, on the central west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. Since the 1990s, the city has played host to many international sporting, political and cultural events, including the 1998 Commonwealth Games and the 2017 Southeast Asian Games. Kuala Lumpur has undergone rapid development in recent decades and is home to the tallest twin buildings in the world, the Petronas Towers, which have since become an iconic symbol of Malaysian development. Kuala Lumpur is well connected with neighboring urban regions such as Petaling Jaya via the rapidly expanding Klang Valley Integrated Transit System. Residents of the city can also travel to other parts of Malaysia through KL Sentral. Kuala Lumpur is one of the leading cities in the world for tourism and shopping and was the 6th most-visited city in the world in 2019. The city houses three of the world's ten largest shopping malls. Kuala Lumpur ranks 70th in the world and second in Southeast Asia for the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Ranking and ninth in ASPAC and second in Southeast Asia for KPMG's Leading Technology Innovation Hub 2021. Kuala Lumpur was named World Book Capital 2020 by UNESCO.
|
2001-10-25T13:19:07Z
|
2023-12-27T23:26:08Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuala_Lumpur
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16,855 |
Kansas State University
|
Kansas State University (KSU, Kansas State, or K-State) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. It was opened as the state's land-grant college in 1863 and was the first public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas. It had a record high enrollment of 24,766 students for the Fall 2014 semester.
The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Kansas State's academic offerings are administered through nine colleges, including the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Technology and Aviation in Salina. Graduate degrees offered include 65 master's degree programs and 45 doctoral degrees.
Branch campuses are in Salina and Olathe. The Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus is home to the College of Technology and Aviation. The Olathe Innovation Campus has a focus on graduate work in research bioenergy, animal health, plant science and food safety and security.
Kansas State University, originally named Kansas State Agricultural College, was founded in Manhattan on February 16, 1863, during the American Civil War, as a land-grant institution under the Morrill Act. The school was the first land-grant college created under the Morrill Act. K-State is the third-oldest school in the Big 12 Conference and the oldest public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas.
The effort to establish the school began in 1861, the year that Kansas was admitted to the United States. One of the new state legislature's top priorities involved establishing a state university. That year, the delegation from Manhattan, led by New England abolitionist, Isaac Goodnow, introduced a bill to convert the private Blue Mont Central College in Manhattan, incorporated in 1858, into the state university. But the bill establishing the university in Manhattan was controversially vetoed by Governor Charles L. Robinson of Lawrence, and an attempt to override the veto in the Legislature failed by two votes. In 1862, another bill to make Manhattan the site of the state university failed by one vote. Finally, upon the third attempt on February 16, 1863, the state accepted Manhattan's offer to donate the Blue Mont College building and grounds and established the state's land-grant college at the site – the institution that would become Kansas State University.
When the college opened for its first session on September 2, 1863, it became only the second public institution of higher learning to admit women and men equally in the United States. Enrollment for the first session totaled 52 students: 26 men and 26 women. Twelve years after opening, the university moved its main campus from the location of Blue Mont Central College to its present site in 1875. The original site is now occupied by Central National Bank of Manhattan and Founders Hill Apartments.
The early years of the institution witnessed debate over whether the college should provide a focused agricultural education or a full liberal arts education. During this era, the tenor of the school shifted with the tenure of college presidents. For example, President John A. Anderson (1873–1879) favored a limited education and President George T. Fairchild (1879–1897) favored a classic liberal education. Fairchild was credited with saying, "Our college exists not so much to make men farmers as to make farmers men."
During this era, in 1873, Kansas State helped pioneer the academic teaching of home economics for women, becoming one of the first two colleges to offer the program of study.
In November 1928, the school was accredited by the Association of American Universities (AAU) as a school whose graduates were deemed capable of advanced graduate work. The name of the school was changed in 1931 to Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science. In 1959, the Kansas legislature changed the name again to Kansas State University of Agriculture and Applied Science to reflect a growing number of graduate programs. However, in modern practice, the "Agriculture and Applied Science" portion has usually been omitted even from official documents such as state statutes. Milton S. Eisenhower served as president from 1943 to 1950.
On June 15, 2009, Kirk Schulz became the 13th president of Kansas State University. In March 2010 he announced his K-State 2025 plan. The initiative is designed to elevate K-State to a top 50 nationally recognized research university by 2025. His last day was April 22, 2016, as he was selected as Washington State University's next president.
In late April 2016, Ret. General Richard Myers began serving as the interim president of Kansas State University and was announced as the permanent 14th president on November 15, 2016. He was succeeded by Richard Linton, a former dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Science at North Carolina State University (2012–2022).
The state legislature established the state's land-grant college in Manhattan on January 13, 1863. A commission to establish a state university in Lawrence was called for later in the same legislative session, provided that town could meet certain requirements, and finalized later that year. Kansas State was the first public institution of higher learning founded in the state and began teaching college-level classes in 1863. By comparison, the University of Kansas opened in 1866, and offered only preparatory-level classes until college-level classes began in 1869.
Kansas State was founded with an agricultural and scientific college consistent with the land-grant college mandate, as well as departments for military science and literature. It was formally renamed as Kansas State University in 1959.
The main campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan now covers 668 acres (2.70 km). The campus is historic, featuring more buildings built before 1910 than any other campus in Kansas. Holtz Hall, built in 1876, is the oldest free-standing building on campus. However, the oldest building on campus is the original section of Seaton Hall, which now forms Seaton Court, facing the courtyard of Hale Library and Eisenhower Hall. Originally named the Industrial Workshop, this section of Seaton Hall is the oldest remaining education building on the Manhattan campus.
The predominant architectural feature of the Manhattan campus is its use of native limestone. This includes the signature building at Kansas State University, Anderson Hall, developed in three stages between 1877 and 1885. Anderson Hall, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has housed the university's administrative offices for more than a century. Dickens Hall was constructed in 1908 and currently houses the statistics and philosophy departments. Although there are many historic building on the campus, since 1986 Kansas State has also added over two million square feet (186,000 m) of new buildings to the campus, including an expanded library, new art museum, and plant sciences building.
Several of the buildings on campus were heavily damaged by an EF4 tornado on June 11, 2008. Damage estimates totaled more than $20 million.
Since 2014, the Main campus has been under significant renovation to accommodate infrastructure changes. The campus is also adopting a more walking friendly atmosphere by closing off many small access roads to vehicles.
Since 1986, Kansas State ranks first nationally among public universities in its total of Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall scholars with 147 recipients. The school is a member of the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools, and is home to the Kansas Beta chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. The institution petitioned in 1925, and three years later received, a charter of Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society.
Kansas State University has 65 academic departments in nine colleges: Agriculture; Architecture, Planning and Design; Arts and Sciences; Business Administration; Education; Engineering; Health and Human Sciences; Technology and Aviation; and Veterinary Medicine. The graduate school offers 65 master's degree programs and nearly 50 doctoral programs.
In 1991, the former Kansas Technical Institute in Salina, Kansas was merged with Kansas State University by an act of the Kansas legislature. The College of Technology and Aviation is at the Salina campus. Initially, this campus was referred to as Kansas State University – Salina, but on October 14, 2014, the Kansas Board of Regents approved a name change to Kansas State University Polytechnic Campus. The campus was again renamed in 2021 to Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus.
In 2018, the Kansas Board of Regents approved that the name of the College of Engineering should be changed to the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering in Ice's honor.
The university has had a long-standing interest in agriculture, particularly native Great Plains plant and animal life. The Kansas State University Gardens is an on-campus horticulture display garden that serves as an educational resource and learning laboratory for K-State students and the public. The Konza Prairie is a native tallgrass prairie preserve south of Manhattan, which is co-owned by The Nature Conservancy and Kansas State University and operated as a field research station by the department of biology. The university also owns an additional 18,000 acres (73 km) in cities across the state that it operates as Agricultural Experiment Stations in research centers in Hays, Garden City, Colby, and Parsons.
In 2006, K-State dedicated the Biosecurity Research Institute. The BRI, in Pat Roberts Hall, is a safe and secure location in which scientists and their collaborators can study high-consequence pathogens. It was designed and constructed for biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) and biosafety level 3 agriculture (BSL-3Ag) research.
The university's research facilities include the James R. Macdonald Laboratory for research in atomic, molecular and optical physics and the NASA Center for Gravitational Studies in Cellular and Developmental Biology. The excimer laser, which made LASIK eye surgery possible, is a technology developed by Kansas State researchers.
Kansas State was involved in early experimentation with television and radio broadcasts. The first radio station licensed in Manhattan was Kansas State's experimental station 9YV. In 1912 the station began a daily broadcast (in morse code) of the weather forecast, becoming the first radio station in the U.S. to air a regularly-scheduled forecast. After a series of efforts to secure a more high-powered signal for the university – including a brief cooperation with John R. Brinkley's notorious KFKB – Kansas State was granted a license for KSAC, which began broadcasting with 500 watts of power on December 1, 1924. The station was reassigned to the frequency of AM 580 in 1928, and continued broadcasting on that frequency until November 27, 2002, when it made its last broadcast after the frequency was bought out by WIBW in Topeka, Kansas.
On March 9, 1932, the Federal Radio Commission granted Kansas State a license to operate the television station W9XAK. It was the first television station in Kansas. Activity on the station peaked in 1933 and 1934, with original programs being produced three nights a week. On October 28, 1939, the station broadcast the Homecoming football game in Manhattan between Kansas State and Nebraska, which was the second college football game ever televised. The station went off the air in 1939.
K-State Research Exchange, referred to as K-REx, is a local branding of Kansas State University's implementation of DSpace.
Kansas State University graduate students are required to submit an electronic version of their thesis, dissertation, or report, and then are made openly available through the K-State Research Exchange (K-REx), and become indexed by search engines.
The university is home to several museums, including the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, the KSU Historic Costume and Textiles Museum, the K-State Insect Zoo, and the Chang, Chapman, and Kemper galleries, which feature faculty and student artwork. The university also offers an annual cycle of performance art at McCain Auditorium, including concerts, plays and dance.
The former All-University Convocation lecture series – which began with a speech by Harry Golden on April 3, 1963, and ended in 1997 – brought to campus prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Supreme Court Justices Byron White and William O. Douglas, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, and thinkers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Benjamin Spock, Betty Friedan, Buckminster Fuller, and Saul Alinsky.
K-State has twelve residence halls on campus: Boyd Hall, Ford Hall, Goodnow Hall, Haymaker Hall, Marlatt Hall, Moore Hall, West Hall, Putnam Hall, Van Zile Hall, and the new Wefald hall, completed in 2016. The Living Community at Jardine, and Smurthwaite, as well as Jardine Apartments. Smurthwaite, Ford, and Boyd Halls are all female. Haymaker and Marlatt Halls were all-male residence halls until the fall semesters of 2002 and 2009 respectively, when they became co-educational. The residence halls are divided into three complexes: Derby, Kramer, and Strong.
K-State implemented an academic honor code in 1999. When students are admitted, it is implied that they will adhere to the Honor Pledge: "On my honor, as a student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this academic work."
Kansas State has more than 400 student organizations.
Student media include KSDB-FM "Wildcat 91.9", KKSU-LD "Channel 8", the Kansas State Collegian, and the Royal Purple Yearbook.
Alma Mater is the name of the official school song of Kansas State University. In 1888, when the university was still Kansas State Agricultural College, H.W. Jones submitted the song as part of a school-wide contest. It was originally a four-stanza song and, over the years, some lyrics have changed. The song is sung at most K-State sporting events by fans, students and alumni. Wildcat Victory and Wabash Cannonball are both commonly used as fight songs. Wildcat Victory is used by many high schools as their fight song. Since the early 2010s, K-State students have chanted obscenities at sporting events toward their rival, the University of Kansas, to Darude's Sandstorm and the Wabash Cannonball. This tradition has continued despite the efforts of Hall of Fame Football Coach Bill Snyder, Kansas State Basketball Coach, Jerome Tang, and Band Director, Frank Tracz.
There are dozens of national and international fraternities and sororities at Kansas State University.
Intercollegiate sports began at Kansas State in the 1890s. The school's sports teams are called the Wildcats, and they participate in the NCAA Division I and the Big 12 Conference. The official school color is Royal Purple, making Kansas State one of very few schools (alongside Syracuse and Harvard) that have only one official color. White and silver are commonly used as complementary colors; white is mentioned with purple in the university's fight song "Wildcat Victory." The athletics logo is a stylized Wildcat head in profile usually featured in the school color, called the "Powercat."
Sports sponsored by the school include football, basketball, cross country and track, baseball, golf, tennis, rowing, women's soccer, and volleyball. The head football coach is Chris Klieman, the head men's basketball coach is Jerome Tang, the head women's basketball coach is Jeff Mittie, and the head baseball coach is Pete Hughes. In 2012−2013, Kansas State became only the second Big 12 school to win conference titles in football, men's basketball, and baseball in the same school year.
Historically, African-American athletes at Kansas State were responsible for breaking the modern "color barrier" in Big Seven Conference athletics. Harold Robinson became the first African-American athlete in the conference in more than two decades and the first ever to receive a scholarship, playing football for Kansas State in 1949. In the spring of 1951 the conference's baseball color barrier was broken by Kansas State's Earl Woods, and in the winter of 1951–1952 Kansas State's Gene Wilson broke the conference color barrier in basketball (together with LaVannes Squires at the University of Kansas).
Beginning with the first graduating class in 1867, a number of Kansas State alumni have gone on to distinguished careers. The 46th Governor of Kansas, who served as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom under President Donald Trump, Sam Brownback, and one U.S. Senator from Kansas, Pat Roberts, are graduates of Kansas State University. Other graduates currently serve as the vice-president of Liberia, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the president of the University of the Virgin Islands. Kansas State alumni have been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame, served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and have earned Emmy Awards and Olympic gold medals. Geraldine L. Richmond, the National Medal of Science laureate (2013) and Priestley Medalist (2018), received a B.S. in chemistry in 1975.
In line with its roots as a land grant college, a number of Kansas State's most eminent faculty in its earliest years were in the areas of agriculture, science and military. For example, famed geologist Benjamin Franklin Mudge was chair of the geology department, while famed Army officer Andrew Summers Rowan, the subject of the essay A Message to Garcia, served as professor of military tactics.
Kansas State faculty have received a number of awards. Fred Albert Shannon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1929, while teaching history at Kansas State. In 2008, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching honored Michael Wesch as national Professor of the Year. At least eight Kansas State faculty members have gone on to serve as university presidents, including Naomi B. Lynn, the first Hispanic female president of an American public university.
Media related to Kansas State University at Wikimedia Commons
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kansas State University (KSU, Kansas State, or K-State) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. It was opened as the state's land-grant college in 1863 and was the first public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas. It had a record high enrollment of 24,766 students for the Fall 2014 semester.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The university is classified among \"R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity\". Kansas State's academic offerings are administered through nine colleges, including the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Technology and Aviation in Salina. Graduate degrees offered include 65 master's degree programs and 45 doctoral degrees.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Branch campuses are in Salina and Olathe. The Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus is home to the College of Technology and Aviation. The Olathe Innovation Campus has a focus on graduate work in research bioenergy, animal health, plant science and food safety and security.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kansas State University, originally named Kansas State Agricultural College, was founded in Manhattan on February 16, 1863, during the American Civil War, as a land-grant institution under the Morrill Act. The school was the first land-grant college created under the Morrill Act. K-State is the third-oldest school in the Big 12 Conference and the oldest public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The effort to establish the school began in 1861, the year that Kansas was admitted to the United States. One of the new state legislature's top priorities involved establishing a state university. That year, the delegation from Manhattan, led by New England abolitionist, Isaac Goodnow, introduced a bill to convert the private Blue Mont Central College in Manhattan, incorporated in 1858, into the state university. But the bill establishing the university in Manhattan was controversially vetoed by Governor Charles L. Robinson of Lawrence, and an attempt to override the veto in the Legislature failed by two votes. In 1862, another bill to make Manhattan the site of the state university failed by one vote. Finally, upon the third attempt on February 16, 1863, the state accepted Manhattan's offer to donate the Blue Mont College building and grounds and established the state's land-grant college at the site – the institution that would become Kansas State University.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "When the college opened for its first session on September 2, 1863, it became only the second public institution of higher learning to admit women and men equally in the United States. Enrollment for the first session totaled 52 students: 26 men and 26 women. Twelve years after opening, the university moved its main campus from the location of Blue Mont Central College to its present site in 1875. The original site is now occupied by Central National Bank of Manhattan and Founders Hill Apartments.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The early years of the institution witnessed debate over whether the college should provide a focused agricultural education or a full liberal arts education. During this era, the tenor of the school shifted with the tenure of college presidents. For example, President John A. Anderson (1873–1879) favored a limited education and President George T. Fairchild (1879–1897) favored a classic liberal education. Fairchild was credited with saying, \"Our college exists not so much to make men farmers as to make farmers men.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During this era, in 1873, Kansas State helped pioneer the academic teaching of home economics for women, becoming one of the first two colleges to offer the program of study.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In November 1928, the school was accredited by the Association of American Universities (AAU) as a school whose graduates were deemed capable of advanced graduate work. The name of the school was changed in 1931 to Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science. In 1959, the Kansas legislature changed the name again to Kansas State University of Agriculture and Applied Science to reflect a growing number of graduate programs. However, in modern practice, the \"Agriculture and Applied Science\" portion has usually been omitted even from official documents such as state statutes. Milton S. Eisenhower served as president from 1943 to 1950.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On June 15, 2009, Kirk Schulz became the 13th president of Kansas State University. In March 2010 he announced his K-State 2025 plan. The initiative is designed to elevate K-State to a top 50 nationally recognized research university by 2025. His last day was April 22, 2016, as he was selected as Washington State University's next president.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In late April 2016, Ret. General Richard Myers began serving as the interim president of Kansas State University and was announced as the permanent 14th president on November 15, 2016. He was succeeded by Richard Linton, a former dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Science at North Carolina State University (2012–2022).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The state legislature established the state's land-grant college in Manhattan on January 13, 1863. A commission to establish a state university in Lawrence was called for later in the same legislative session, provided that town could meet certain requirements, and finalized later that year. Kansas State was the first public institution of higher learning founded in the state and began teaching college-level classes in 1863. By comparison, the University of Kansas opened in 1866, and offered only preparatory-level classes until college-level classes began in 1869.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kansas State was founded with an agricultural and scientific college consistent with the land-grant college mandate, as well as departments for military science and literature. It was formally renamed as Kansas State University in 1959.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The main campus of Kansas State University in Manhattan now covers 668 acres (2.70 km). The campus is historic, featuring more buildings built before 1910 than any other campus in Kansas. Holtz Hall, built in 1876, is the oldest free-standing building on campus. However, the oldest building on campus is the original section of Seaton Hall, which now forms Seaton Court, facing the courtyard of Hale Library and Eisenhower Hall. Originally named the Industrial Workshop, this section of Seaton Hall is the oldest remaining education building on the Manhattan campus.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The predominant architectural feature of the Manhattan campus is its use of native limestone. This includes the signature building at Kansas State University, Anderson Hall, developed in three stages between 1877 and 1885. Anderson Hall, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has housed the university's administrative offices for more than a century. Dickens Hall was constructed in 1908 and currently houses the statistics and philosophy departments. Although there are many historic building on the campus, since 1986 Kansas State has also added over two million square feet (186,000 m) of new buildings to the campus, including an expanded library, new art museum, and plant sciences building.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Several of the buildings on campus were heavily damaged by an EF4 tornado on June 11, 2008. Damage estimates totaled more than $20 million.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Since 2014, the Main campus has been under significant renovation to accommodate infrastructure changes. The campus is also adopting a more walking friendly atmosphere by closing off many small access roads to vehicles.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Since 1986, Kansas State ranks first nationally among public universities in its total of Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Goldwater, and Udall scholars with 147 recipients. The school is a member of the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools, and is home to the Kansas Beta chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. The institution petitioned in 1925, and three years later received, a charter of Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Kansas State University has 65 academic departments in nine colleges: Agriculture; Architecture, Planning and Design; Arts and Sciences; Business Administration; Education; Engineering; Health and Human Sciences; Technology and Aviation; and Veterinary Medicine. The graduate school offers 65 master's degree programs and nearly 50 doctoral programs.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1991, the former Kansas Technical Institute in Salina, Kansas was merged with Kansas State University by an act of the Kansas legislature. The College of Technology and Aviation is at the Salina campus. Initially, this campus was referred to as Kansas State University – Salina, but on October 14, 2014, the Kansas Board of Regents approved a name change to Kansas State University Polytechnic Campus. The campus was again renamed in 2021 to Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2018, the Kansas Board of Regents approved that the name of the College of Engineering should be changed to the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering in Ice's honor.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The university has had a long-standing interest in agriculture, particularly native Great Plains plant and animal life. The Kansas State University Gardens is an on-campus horticulture display garden that serves as an educational resource and learning laboratory for K-State students and the public. The Konza Prairie is a native tallgrass prairie preserve south of Manhattan, which is co-owned by The Nature Conservancy and Kansas State University and operated as a field research station by the department of biology. The university also owns an additional 18,000 acres (73 km) in cities across the state that it operates as Agricultural Experiment Stations in research centers in Hays, Garden City, Colby, and Parsons.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 2006, K-State dedicated the Biosecurity Research Institute. The BRI, in Pat Roberts Hall, is a safe and secure location in which scientists and their collaborators can study high-consequence pathogens. It was designed and constructed for biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) and biosafety level 3 agriculture (BSL-3Ag) research.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The university's research facilities include the James R. Macdonald Laboratory for research in atomic, molecular and optical physics and the NASA Center for Gravitational Studies in Cellular and Developmental Biology. The excimer laser, which made LASIK eye surgery possible, is a technology developed by Kansas State researchers.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Kansas State was involved in early experimentation with television and radio broadcasts. The first radio station licensed in Manhattan was Kansas State's experimental station 9YV. In 1912 the station began a daily broadcast (in morse code) of the weather forecast, becoming the first radio station in the U.S. to air a regularly-scheduled forecast. After a series of efforts to secure a more high-powered signal for the university – including a brief cooperation with John R. Brinkley's notorious KFKB – Kansas State was granted a license for KSAC, which began broadcasting with 500 watts of power on December 1, 1924. The station was reassigned to the frequency of AM 580 in 1928, and continued broadcasting on that frequency until November 27, 2002, when it made its last broadcast after the frequency was bought out by WIBW in Topeka, Kansas.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "On March 9, 1932, the Federal Radio Commission granted Kansas State a license to operate the television station W9XAK. It was the first television station in Kansas. Activity on the station peaked in 1933 and 1934, with original programs being produced three nights a week. On October 28, 1939, the station broadcast the Homecoming football game in Manhattan between Kansas State and Nebraska, which was the second college football game ever televised. The station went off the air in 1939.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "K-State Research Exchange, referred to as K-REx, is a local branding of Kansas State University's implementation of DSpace.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kansas State University graduate students are required to submit an electronic version of their thesis, dissertation, or report, and then are made openly available through the K-State Research Exchange (K-REx), and become indexed by search engines.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The university is home to several museums, including the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, the KSU Historic Costume and Textiles Museum, the K-State Insect Zoo, and the Chang, Chapman, and Kemper galleries, which feature faculty and student artwork. The university also offers an annual cycle of performance art at McCain Auditorium, including concerts, plays and dance.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The former All-University Convocation lecture series – which began with a speech by Harry Golden on April 3, 1963, and ended in 1997 – brought to campus prominent leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Supreme Court Justices Byron White and William O. Douglas, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, Rep. Shirley Chisholm, and thinkers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Benjamin Spock, Betty Friedan, Buckminster Fuller, and Saul Alinsky.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "K-State has twelve residence halls on campus: Boyd Hall, Ford Hall, Goodnow Hall, Haymaker Hall, Marlatt Hall, Moore Hall, West Hall, Putnam Hall, Van Zile Hall, and the new Wefald hall, completed in 2016. The Living Community at Jardine, and Smurthwaite, as well as Jardine Apartments. Smurthwaite, Ford, and Boyd Halls are all female. Haymaker and Marlatt Halls were all-male residence halls until the fall semesters of 2002 and 2009 respectively, when they became co-educational. The residence halls are divided into three complexes: Derby, Kramer, and Strong.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "K-State implemented an academic honor code in 1999. When students are admitted, it is implied that they will adhere to the Honor Pledge: \"On my honor, as a student, I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this academic work.\"",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kansas State has more than 400 student organizations.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Student media include KSDB-FM \"Wildcat 91.9\", KKSU-LD \"Channel 8\", the Kansas State Collegian, and the Royal Purple Yearbook.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Alma Mater is the name of the official school song of Kansas State University. In 1888, when the university was still Kansas State Agricultural College, H.W. Jones submitted the song as part of a school-wide contest. It was originally a four-stanza song and, over the years, some lyrics have changed. The song is sung at most K-State sporting events by fans, students and alumni. Wildcat Victory and Wabash Cannonball are both commonly used as fight songs. Wildcat Victory is used by many high schools as their fight song. Since the early 2010s, K-State students have chanted obscenities at sporting events toward their rival, the University of Kansas, to Darude's Sandstorm and the Wabash Cannonball. This tradition has continued despite the efforts of Hall of Fame Football Coach Bill Snyder, Kansas State Basketball Coach, Jerome Tang, and Band Director, Frank Tracz.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "There are dozens of national and international fraternities and sororities at Kansas State University.",
"title": "Campus life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Intercollegiate sports began at Kansas State in the 1890s. The school's sports teams are called the Wildcats, and they participate in the NCAA Division I and the Big 12 Conference. The official school color is Royal Purple, making Kansas State one of very few schools (alongside Syracuse and Harvard) that have only one official color. White and silver are commonly used as complementary colors; white is mentioned with purple in the university's fight song \"Wildcat Victory.\" The athletics logo is a stylized Wildcat head in profile usually featured in the school color, called the \"Powercat.\"",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Sports sponsored by the school include football, basketball, cross country and track, baseball, golf, tennis, rowing, women's soccer, and volleyball. The head football coach is Chris Klieman, the head men's basketball coach is Jerome Tang, the head women's basketball coach is Jeff Mittie, and the head baseball coach is Pete Hughes. In 2012−2013, Kansas State became only the second Big 12 school to win conference titles in football, men's basketball, and baseball in the same school year.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Historically, African-American athletes at Kansas State were responsible for breaking the modern \"color barrier\" in Big Seven Conference athletics. Harold Robinson became the first African-American athlete in the conference in more than two decades and the first ever to receive a scholarship, playing football for Kansas State in 1949. In the spring of 1951 the conference's baseball color barrier was broken by Kansas State's Earl Woods, and in the winter of 1951–1952 Kansas State's Gene Wilson broke the conference color barrier in basketball (together with LaVannes Squires at the University of Kansas).",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Beginning with the first graduating class in 1867, a number of Kansas State alumni have gone on to distinguished careers. The 46th Governor of Kansas, who served as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom under President Donald Trump, Sam Brownback, and one U.S. Senator from Kansas, Pat Roberts, are graduates of Kansas State University. Other graduates currently serve as the vice-president of Liberia, the president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the president of the University of the Virgin Islands. Kansas State alumni have been enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame, served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and have earned Emmy Awards and Olympic gold medals. Geraldine L. Richmond, the National Medal of Science laureate (2013) and Priestley Medalist (2018), received a B.S. in chemistry in 1975.",
"title": "Notable people"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In line with its roots as a land grant college, a number of Kansas State's most eminent faculty in its earliest years were in the areas of agriculture, science and military. For example, famed geologist Benjamin Franklin Mudge was chair of the geology department, while famed Army officer Andrew Summers Rowan, the subject of the essay A Message to Garcia, served as professor of military tactics.",
"title": "Notable people"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Kansas State faculty have received a number of awards. Fred Albert Shannon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1929, while teaching history at Kansas State. In 2008, CASE and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching honored Michael Wesch as national Professor of the Year. At least eight Kansas State faculty members have gone on to serve as university presidents, including Naomi B. Lynn, the first Hispanic female president of an American public university.",
"title": "Notable people"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Media related to Kansas State University at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kansas State University is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. It was opened as the state's land-grant college in 1863 and was the first public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas. It had a record high enrollment of 24,766 students for the Fall 2014 semester. The university is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". Kansas State's academic offerings are administered through nine colleges, including the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Technology and Aviation in Salina. Graduate degrees offered include 65 master's degree programs and 45 doctoral degrees. Branch campuses are in Salina and Olathe. The Kansas State University Salina Aerospace and Technology Campus is home to the College of Technology and Aviation. The Olathe Innovation Campus has a focus on graduate work in research bioenergy, animal health, plant science and food safety and security.
|
2001-09-25T21:20:02Z
|
2023-12-29T07:03:14Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_State_University
|
16,857 |
Sporting Kansas City
|
Sporting Kansas City is an American men's professional soccer club that plays in Major League Soccer (MLS) and is based in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The administrative offices are located in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and the team clubhouse and practice facilities are located in Kansas City, Kansas, near Children's Mercy Park. The club competes as a part of the league's Western Conference.
Sporting Kansas City began play in 1996 as a charter team in the league, then known as the Kansas City Wiz. The team was founded by Lamar Hunt in 1995. Since moving across the state line, they have been the only major professional sports league franchise to play their home games in Kansas.
Starting in 1997, the franchise was known as the Kansas City Wizards. The team rebranded in November 2010, coinciding with its move to its new home stadium, Children's Mercy Park. The franchise has won the MLS Cup twice (2000, 2013), the Supporters' Shield in 2000, and the U.S. Open Cup in 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2017.
The club also has a reserve team, Sporting Kansas City II, that began play in the second-tier USL Championship in 2016 and switched to MLS Next Pro in 2022.
The Kansas City MLS franchise was founded by Lamar Hunt, who was also the founder of the American Football League, the Kansas City Chiefs, the United Soccer Association (which merged with the NPSL to form the North American Soccer League or NASL), and Major League Soccer. The Kansas City Wiz played their first game on April 13, 1996, defeating the Colorado Rapids at Arrowhead Stadium, 3–0. The Wiz players included Preki, Mo Johnston and Digital Takawira, and were coached by Ron Newman. The team finished third in the Western Conference (fifth overall) in 1996 regular season with a 17–15 record, qualifying for the first ever MLS Playoffs. In the 1996 conference semi-finals, the Wiz beat the Dallas Burn in three games, winning the final game in a shootout, before losing the conference final to the LA Galaxy.
Following the 1996 season, the Wiz changed names, becoming the "Wizards", following legal action from electronics retailer The Wiz. For the 1997 MLS season, their record was 21–11, sufficient for the Western Conference regular season championship. Preki was named 1997 MLS MVP. In the first round of the playoffs, the Wizards lost to the last-seeded Colorado Rapids. The Wizards had losing records for the 1998 and 1999 seasons, finishing last in the Western Conference both years. The Wizards fired Ron Newman early during the 1999 season, and replaced him with Bob Gansler. The Wizards finished the 1999 season with a record of 8–24, which put them in last place in the Western Conference once again.
In 2000, their first full season under Bob Gansler, the Wizards opened the season on a 12-game unbeaten streak. Goalkeeper Tony Meola recorded an MLS record shutout streak at 681 minutes and 16 shutouts, and won MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and MLS MVP. Peter Vermes was named 2000 MLS Defender of the Year. The Wizards finished the 2000 regular season 16–7–9, the best record in the league, winning the MLS Supporters' Shield.
In the 2000 playoffs, fell behind 4 to 1 to the LA Galaxy, but Miklos Molnar scored a penalty kick in game three to send the series into a tiebreaker, where he scored again to send the Wizards to their first MLS Cup. At RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., the Wizards, with the league's best defense, faced the team with the league's best offense, the Chicago Fire. The Wizards took the lead on an 11th-minute goal by Miklos Molnar. The Fire put ten shots on goal, but Tony Meola and the defense held, and the Wizards claimed their first MLS Cup Championship. Tony Meola was named 2000 MLS Cup MVP.
After the loss of Preki to the Miami Fusion, the team struggled to defend their championship in 2001, making the playoffs as the 8th seed with a record of 11–13–3. In the first round, the Wizards reign as champion ended with a 6 points to 3 loss to Preki and the Miami Fusion. Despite getting back Preki, the Wizards sat in last place in the Western Conference in 2002. They made the playoffs with a record of 9–10–9. The last two teams in the East, the MetroStars and D.C. United missed the playoffs, which propelled the Wizards into the playoffs. In the first round, the team would fall, 6 points to 3 to eventual champions, Los Angeles Galaxy.
The Wizards returned to the top half of the West in 2003 with a record of 11–10–9. In the first round of the playoffs, the Wizards defeated the Colorado Rapids in the aggregate goal series, 3–1. That set up a one-game showdown with the San Jose Earthquakes the winner would advance to the 2003 MLS Cup. The Wizards took the lead, but the Earthquakes battled back and forced golden goal in overtime by Landon Donovan in the 117th minute, which sent his team to the 2003 MLS Cup and the Wizards home.
The Wizards started out 2004 mediocre, before turning around in the summer. The Wizards finished the season on a six-game unbeaten streak to finish 14–9–9 for the Western Conference regular season championship. Goalkeeper Tony Meola went down with injury and backup Bo Oshoniyi filled as a replacement.
In the first round of the 2004 playoffs, the Wizards lost the first game to San Jose Earthquakes, 2–0. In the second game, however, the Wizards scored 2 goals before Jack Jewsbury scored in stoppage time to move KC onto the conference final. In the conference final, the Wizards held off the Los Angeles Galaxy to reach their second MLS Cup. In the 2004 MLS Cup final, the Wizards went up against D.C. United at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California. The Wizards Jose Burciaga scored in the sixth minute, but D.C. United replied with three goals in the first half. KC was given a lifeline in the 58th minute as Josh Wolff scored the first penalty kick in MLS Cup history, but KC lost the 2004 MLS Cup final 3–2.
Following MLS expansion, the Wizards moved to the Eastern Conference in 2005. By the end of the 2005 season, despite the solid play of 2005 MLS Defender of the Year Jimmy Conrad, the Wizards found themselves outside the playoffs with a record of 11–9–12. After the season, the team's veteran leader, Preki announced his retirement.
In the 2006 season, the Wizards just missed out on a playoff berth with a loss to the New York Red Bulls on the final day of the regular season, finishing with a 10–14–8 record. Lamar Hunt sold the club in August 2006 to OnGoal, LLC, a six-man ownership group led by Cerner Corporation co-founders Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig, a local group committed to keeping the Wizards in Kansas City.
The club dedicated its 2007 season to Lamar Hunt, who had died in December 2006. A good start earned them four wins in the first seven weeks of the season. The club picked up goalkeeper Kevin Hartman from the LA Galaxy to help with that position. Despite winning just four games after the All-Star break, Kansas City managed to finish fifth in the East at 11–12–7 and qualify for the playoffs. The club shifted over to the West as a result of a playoff format change, the Wizards played against Chivas USA. With the Wizards Davy Arnaud's goal in the first game to win the series, the defense and Kevin Hartman did the rest and kept Chivas USA off the scoreboard. In the conference final, the Wizards came up short to the Houston Dynamo, 2–0.
In 2008, the Wizards played their home games at CommunityAmerica Ballpark in Kansas, and ended a four-year playoff drought by posting an 11–10–9 record, good enough for fourth place in the Eastern Conference. Facing the Columbus Crew, the Wizards earned a 1–1 tie in Game 1 of the first round series, but with a 2–0 loss in Game 2 the Wizards lost the aggregate series 3–1.
In the 2009 season, the Wizards remained at CommunityAmerica Ballpark, but struggled to score. They went 426 minutes without scoring a goal, the longest streak of the season. In August 2009, with the team holding a 5–7–6 record, KC fired Head Coach Curt Onalfo, and named general manager Peter Vermes the head coach. The Wizards finished with the worst home record in the league, and at 8–13–9 were third to last in the league standings. Top players were Claudio López (8 goals & 7 assists) and Josh Wolff (11 goals), who sparked the Wizards offense.
The Wizards hosted Manchester United F.C. in a friendly on July 25, 2010, and won the match by a score of 2–1. The announced attendance of 52,342 is a record for a professional soccer match in the Kansas City area It would be the franchise's final overall game played at Arrowhead Stadium. In the 2010 regular season, the Wizards finished third in the Eastern Conference and narrowly missed qualifying for the playoffs.
With the rebranding (of Wizards to Sporting) the team followed a recent trend in MLS of adopting European-style names, such as Toronto FC, D.C. United, and Real Salt Lake. The title "Sporting" has its origins in Iberia where it is used only by multi-sports clubs with a history of having multiple departments fielding teams across different sports, the most notable being Portugal's Sporting CP. Kansas City's use of the term has been criticized for inaccuracy and cultural appropriation. At the rebrand announcement, the Kansas City's president announced they had planned to add a rugby club and lacrosse club. Since then, a partnership with the Kansas City Blues Rugby Club has been announced, but the two sides are not part of one "Sporting Club" and no lacrosse team has been established. The rebranding was met with a mixture of both excitement and disdain by fans when originally announced. With the opening of the new Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas, Sporting became the first major-league team to have played in stadiums on both sides of the state line in Kansas City, while Kansas City became the only U.S. metropolitan area other than New York City to have major professional sports teams playing in different states.
Because Children's Mercy Park was not ready for the beginning of the 2011 season, Sporting Kansas City played its first ten games on the road, only winning one game. Once the road trip was over, the team found more success and ended the regular season with the most points of any Eastern Conference team. After defeating the Colorado Rapids on a 4–0 aggregate in the Eastern Conference semifinals, Sporting lost to the Houston Dynamo 2–0 in the Eastern Conference finals.
KC began the 2012 season with seven consecutive wins, in the process setting an MLS record for 335 minutes without allowing a shot on goal. The team finished the regular season first in the East with an 18–7–9 record. KC was led by Graham Zusi, who delivered a league-leading 15 assists and was named finalist for 2012 MLS MVP, Jimmy Nielsen, who notched a league leading 15 shutouts and was named 2012 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year, and Matt Besler, who was named MLS Defender of the Year. KC lost to the Houston Dynamo in the conference semifinals. KC won the 2012 U.S. Open Cup, defeating Seattle Sounders FC in the finals, to qualify for the 2013–14 CONCACAF Champions League.
In 2013, Kansas City took advantage of MLS's newly created retention funds to renew contracts with U.S. national team players Graham Zusi and Matt Besler. Sporting had finished second in the Eastern Conference and overall with 17 wins, 10 losses, and tied 7 times in the regular season. In the 2013 MLS Playoffs, Sporting KC defeated NE Revolution in the conference semifinals and Houston Dynamo in the conference finals, advancing to MLS Cup 2013. SKC defeated Real Salt Lake on penalties (7–6) after the match was tied 1–1 in regulation and overtime. It was the coldest MLS Cup game on record.
In the 2014 MLS Cup Playoffs, Sporting were eliminated in the East Knockout Round by the New York Red Bulls.
On October 27, 2014, the league announced that Sporting, along with the Houston Dynamo, would move from the Eastern Conference to the Western Conference when two teams from East Coast states, New York City FC and Orlando City SC, joined the league in 2015. Sporting finished sixth in the Western Conference that year, again qualifying for postseason play due to the expanded twelve-club field in the 2015 MLS Cup Playoffs. They were eliminated in the Western Knockout Round by the Portland Timbers, 6–7 in a Penalty Shootout.
Sporting's co-owner Neal Patterson died due to soft tissue cancer in July 2017. Kansas City unveiled wordmarks that was worn on the team's jerseys and on Children's Mercy Park to commemorate their late owner. Later that month, the club traded Dom Dwyer to Orlando City in exchange for $1.6 million (in general and targeted allocation money with additional incentives), setting the record for the most expensive internal trade in league history.
The team won the 2017 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, defeating the New York Red Bulls 2–1 in the final. The win gave Sporting their fourth Open Cup title, and their third in the last six years. The victory extended head coach Peter Vermes's record to 4–0 in cup finals and championship games with the club. In Open Cup history, Kansas City became just the second franchise in the single elimination tournament to have won four Open Cup finals in the same number of appearances.
Sporting Kansas City's official colors are "sporting blue" and "dark indigo" with "lead" as a tertiary color. The primary logo is composed of a teardrop-shaped shield containing a stylized representation of the Kansas-Missouri state line with "sporting blue" stripes on the "Kansas" side and an interlocking "SC" on the "Missouri" side. The shield's contour alludes to the team's former logo while under the "Kansas City Wizards" appellation. The stateline represents Sporting's fanbase in both of the Kansas and Missouri portions of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The eleven alternating horizontal stripes of "sporting blue" and "dark indigo" forming the state line are a nod to the number of players a team fields. The "SC" (for Sporting Club) is inspired by Asclepius' rod representing health and fitness, a Greek statue called the Winged Victory of Samothrace – alluding to strength and movement, and to the Spanish architecture of Kansas City's Country Club Plaza. Beginning in 2013, Ivy Funds became the club's first uniform sponsor, and a new home and away jersey design was unveiled, as well as an alternate argyle design.
Home: 1996–2010
Home: 2011–present
Third
From 1996 through 2007, the Wizards played home games in Arrowhead Stadium, the American football stadium mainly used by the Kansas City Chiefs. Wizards management kept the west end of Arrowhead tarped off for the first 10 years of play, limiting seating near the field. In 2006, fans could sit all the way around the field, but, in 2007, seating was [again] only available along the sidelines. After the 2007 final season at Arrowhead, the Wizards continued to use the stadium for select large events. In 2008, the club played a regular season home game against the Los Angeles Galaxy at the stadium to accommodate the large crowd expected for David Beckham's Galaxy debut. Again in 2010, the Wizards played a friendly here against English club Manchester United, winning 2–1.
The Wizards entered an agreement with the Kansas City T-Bones to use their home stadium, CommunityAmerica Ballpark, during the 2008 and 2009 seasons. The deal was later extended to include 2010. The stadium, located across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas, built a new bleacher section financed by the Wizards to increase its capacity to 10,385. This move made the Wizards the third MLS team to share their home ground with a baseball team. D.C. United had been sharing RFK Stadium with Major League Baseball's Washington Nationals in Washington, D.C., before the latter's move into Nationals Park. The San Jose Earthquakes used Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, home of the Oakland A's (and Oakland Raiders), for certain games during the 2008 and 2009 seasons.
The Wizards originally planned to return to Kansas City, Missouri, and build a new stadium there – tentatively called Trails Stadium – as part of a major mixed-use development. The team had received all required approvals and was awaiting site demolition; however, the 2008–09 financial crisis ultimately led to the scrapping of the Trails Stadium project.
The team sought a new site for its stadium, quickly settling on a development in Kansas City, Kansas, known as Village West, near CommunityAmerica Ballpark and the Kansas Speedway. In September 2009, the developer asked Wyandotte County (in Kansas) and Kansas state officials for permission to use revenues from existing tax increment financing in the Village West area to help finance the soccer complex. On December 17, Wizards president Robb Heineman provided an update on the stadium situation, identifying the Kansas City, Kansas, location as near final, pending the signature of the final agreements. On January 19, 2010, Wyandotte County approved the bonds to help finance the stadium, and on January 20 the groundbreaking ceremony was made, with Wizards CEO Robb Heineman using heavy machinery to move dirt on the construction site.
When the Kansas City Wizards first rebranded as Sporting Kansas City, they built Livestrong Sporting Park. Spending $200 million on the complex, it was the first "European style" soccer complex in the United States. Name rights were held by the Livestrong Foundation until the downfall of Lance Armstrong from his doping scandal; Sporting Kansas City subsequently changed the name of their stadium to Sporting Park.
On November 19, 2015, the stadium was renamed to Children's Mercy Park in a ten-year deal with Children's Mercy Hospital.
Home venue(s):
Other stadiums used:
Sporting regularly sells out its matches, with over 100 straight sellouts as of August 2017. Sporting has 14,000 season-ticket holders, with a wait list for season tickets of 3,000 people. Sporting KC has a relatively young fan base, with season-ticket holders having an average age of 29.7 years. Sporting KC works with Sporting Innovations, a consulting firm spun off from the team that focuses on fan engagement. Administrators from several college football teams, such as the Florida Gators, have visited Sporting KC to learn from the team's success at fan engagement.
The main supporters group of Sporting Kansas City cheers in the Members' Stand on the North side of Children's Mercy Park and is known as "The Cauldron". The name is derived from the large metal pots used for boiling potions, due to the team's former name Wizards. Since the rebranding in 2010, Sporting have seen dramatic growth in their fan section, with several fan groups adding their voice to The Cauldron culture and atmosphere.
Current groups in the north stands along with The Cauldron include: The Emeritus, Drainage Pond SC, Monster Squad, La Barra KC, Mass Street Mob, King City Yardbirds, Fountain City Ultras, Trenches, and Ladies of SKC.
The South Stand SC cheers from the south end of Children's Mercy Park and is the umbrella group for The Wedge and Ad Astra SKC (a reference to the motto of the state of Kansas), while American Outlaws – Kansas City Chapter are also present in the stands.
"Blue the Dog" is the franchise's official mascot.
The two teams had faced each other regularly over the years, while both having been members of the Eastern conference. During that time, Sporting KC had frequently faced Houston in the playoffs, beginning their rivalry. As of 2022, SKC is 18–18–16 (W–L–T) against the Dynamo.
In their total meetings, Sporting KC is 17–19–12 (W–L–T), (as of October 2023). The two teams faced each other in MLS Cup 2013, in what was the coldest MLS Cup final at that time.
In recent years, the metro areas of Portland and Kansas City have both become major soccer markets due to the performance of their respective soccer teams. Additionally their NWSL teams, the Portland Thorns and the Kansas City Current, have become major rivals, especially since the Thorns' 2–0 win over the Current in the 2022 NWSL Championship.
Sporting KC began a rivalry with St. Louis City SC starting with the team's entrance into the league in the 2023 season. St. Louis City won the first meeting at CityPark in May of 2023, but Sporting KC won the second meeting at Children’s Mercy Park in September of that year. The two teams played in their first postseason matchup in the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs, with Sporting Kansas City (the #8 seed) upsetting the #1 seeded St. Louis in a best-of-three series.
From 2023, every Sporting Kansas City match is available via MLS Season Pass on the Apple TV app.
Prior to 2017 matches were broadcast in high definition on KMCI-TV (except for nationally broadcast matches). The play-by-play announcer was WHB 810AM 'Border Patrol' host Nate Bukaty, who began broadcasting for the team in the 2015 season. Former Sporting Kansas City goalkeeper Andy Gruenebaum provided color commentary following his retirement after the 2014 season. Color commentary was covered by Jake Yadrich through the 2013 season, after which he transitioned to be the lead analyst on the sidelines during games. Morning reporter Kacie McDonnell of KSHB-TV, an NBC affiliate and KMCI-TV's sister station, served as the network host of the pregame and postgame shows.
In addition, the Sporting Kansas City Television Network provided coverage across markets in six states:
Matches that are not broadcast nationally were broadcast on Fox Sports Kansas City (it was also carried on Fox Sports Midwest in the St. Louis market until 2023, where it will be removed due to the new St Louis City FC MLS team). In 2017, Fox Sports Midwest only carried select matches, while in 2018, the club announced the St. Louis market would receive all matches while the Mid-Missouri and Iowa markets would receive most matches. Nate Bukaty continues to provide the play-by-play commentary, while Jacob Peterson joined as the color commentator ahead of the 2020 season with Carter Augustine returning as the sideline reporter.
In 2022, prior to an upcoming leaguewide TV deal, KMCI returned as broadcast partner for those in the Kansas City market, with other areas being able to stream all matches on the club's website.
Regular local radio coverage in English is provided through an official partnership with Sports Radio 810 WHB and its affiliate ESPN Kansas City 99.3FM. Spanish broadcasting was previously found on KDTD 1340AM, but is on KCZZ (ESPN Deportes Kansas City 1480AM) for the 2018 season. The broadcasts are produced by Jorge Moreno and feature the voice of 13-year MLS veteran Diego Gutierrez along with Ale Cabero, Raul Villegas and Alonso Cadena.
Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.
This is a partial list of the most recent seasons completed by SKC. For the full season-by-season history, see List of Sporting Kansas City seasons.
^ 1. Avg. attendance include statistics from league matches only. ^ 2. Top goalscorer(s) includes all goals scored in League, MLS Cup Playoffs, U.S. Open Cup, MLS is Back Tournament, CONCACAF Champions League, FIFA Club World Cup, and other competitive continental matches.
The following records are for MLS regular season only:
Source: Updated: March 8, 2020
Sporting Legends is an initiative launched in 2013 that pays tribute to the individuals who played an instrumental role for Sporting Kansas City and in the growth of soccer in the region.
The individuals named as Sporting Legends, their year of induction, and a brief description are listed below:
^ + Dom Dwyer scored four goals in this game
^ @ DNQ = Did not qualify; NHG = No home game was played during the playoffs ^ # The 73% jump in attendance between 2010 and 2011 coincides with the team's move from CommunityAmerica Ballpark (capacity 10,400) to their new soccer-specific stadium Livestrong Sporting Park (now known as Children's Mercy Park) (capacity 18,500).
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sporting Kansas City is an American men's professional soccer club that plays in Major League Soccer (MLS) and is based in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The administrative offices are located in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and the team clubhouse and practice facilities are located in Kansas City, Kansas, near Children's Mercy Park. The club competes as a part of the league's Western Conference.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Sporting Kansas City began play in 1996 as a charter team in the league, then known as the Kansas City Wiz. The team was founded by Lamar Hunt in 1995. Since moving across the state line, they have been the only major professional sports league franchise to play their home games in Kansas.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Starting in 1997, the franchise was known as the Kansas City Wizards. The team rebranded in November 2010, coinciding with its move to its new home stadium, Children's Mercy Park. The franchise has won the MLS Cup twice (2000, 2013), the Supporters' Shield in 2000, and the U.S. Open Cup in 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2017.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The club also has a reserve team, Sporting Kansas City II, that began play in the second-tier USL Championship in 2016 and switched to MLS Next Pro in 2022.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Kansas City MLS franchise was founded by Lamar Hunt, who was also the founder of the American Football League, the Kansas City Chiefs, the United Soccer Association (which merged with the NPSL to form the North American Soccer League or NASL), and Major League Soccer. The Kansas City Wiz played their first game on April 13, 1996, defeating the Colorado Rapids at Arrowhead Stadium, 3–0. The Wiz players included Preki, Mo Johnston and Digital Takawira, and were coached by Ron Newman. The team finished third in the Western Conference (fifth overall) in 1996 regular season with a 17–15 record, qualifying for the first ever MLS Playoffs. In the 1996 conference semi-finals, the Wiz beat the Dallas Burn in three games, winning the final game in a shootout, before losing the conference final to the LA Galaxy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Following the 1996 season, the Wiz changed names, becoming the \"Wizards\", following legal action from electronics retailer The Wiz. For the 1997 MLS season, their record was 21–11, sufficient for the Western Conference regular season championship. Preki was named 1997 MLS MVP. In the first round of the playoffs, the Wizards lost to the last-seeded Colorado Rapids. The Wizards had losing records for the 1998 and 1999 seasons, finishing last in the Western Conference both years. The Wizards fired Ron Newman early during the 1999 season, and replaced him with Bob Gansler. The Wizards finished the 1999 season with a record of 8–24, which put them in last place in the Western Conference once again.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2000, their first full season under Bob Gansler, the Wizards opened the season on a 12-game unbeaten streak. Goalkeeper Tony Meola recorded an MLS record shutout streak at 681 minutes and 16 shutouts, and won MLS Goalkeeper of the Year and MLS MVP. Peter Vermes was named 2000 MLS Defender of the Year. The Wizards finished the 2000 regular season 16–7–9, the best record in the league, winning the MLS Supporters' Shield.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 2000 playoffs, fell behind 4 to 1 to the LA Galaxy, but Miklos Molnar scored a penalty kick in game three to send the series into a tiebreaker, where he scored again to send the Wizards to their first MLS Cup. At RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., the Wizards, with the league's best defense, faced the team with the league's best offense, the Chicago Fire. The Wizards took the lead on an 11th-minute goal by Miklos Molnar. The Fire put ten shots on goal, but Tony Meola and the defense held, and the Wizards claimed their first MLS Cup Championship. Tony Meola was named 2000 MLS Cup MVP.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After the loss of Preki to the Miami Fusion, the team struggled to defend their championship in 2001, making the playoffs as the 8th seed with a record of 11–13–3. In the first round, the Wizards reign as champion ended with a 6 points to 3 loss to Preki and the Miami Fusion. Despite getting back Preki, the Wizards sat in last place in the Western Conference in 2002. They made the playoffs with a record of 9–10–9. The last two teams in the East, the MetroStars and D.C. United missed the playoffs, which propelled the Wizards into the playoffs. In the first round, the team would fall, 6 points to 3 to eventual champions, Los Angeles Galaxy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The Wizards returned to the top half of the West in 2003 with a record of 11–10–9. In the first round of the playoffs, the Wizards defeated the Colorado Rapids in the aggregate goal series, 3–1. That set up a one-game showdown with the San Jose Earthquakes the winner would advance to the 2003 MLS Cup. The Wizards took the lead, but the Earthquakes battled back and forced golden goal in overtime by Landon Donovan in the 117th minute, which sent his team to the 2003 MLS Cup and the Wizards home.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Wizards started out 2004 mediocre, before turning around in the summer. The Wizards finished the season on a six-game unbeaten streak to finish 14–9–9 for the Western Conference regular season championship. Goalkeeper Tony Meola went down with injury and backup Bo Oshoniyi filled as a replacement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the first round of the 2004 playoffs, the Wizards lost the first game to San Jose Earthquakes, 2–0. In the second game, however, the Wizards scored 2 goals before Jack Jewsbury scored in stoppage time to move KC onto the conference final. In the conference final, the Wizards held off the Los Angeles Galaxy to reach their second MLS Cup. In the 2004 MLS Cup final, the Wizards went up against D.C. United at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California. The Wizards Jose Burciaga scored in the sixth minute, but D.C. United replied with three goals in the first half. KC was given a lifeline in the 58th minute as Josh Wolff scored the first penalty kick in MLS Cup history, but KC lost the 2004 MLS Cup final 3–2.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Following MLS expansion, the Wizards moved to the Eastern Conference in 2005. By the end of the 2005 season, despite the solid play of 2005 MLS Defender of the Year Jimmy Conrad, the Wizards found themselves outside the playoffs with a record of 11–9–12. After the season, the team's veteran leader, Preki announced his retirement.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the 2006 season, the Wizards just missed out on a playoff berth with a loss to the New York Red Bulls on the final day of the regular season, finishing with a 10–14–8 record. Lamar Hunt sold the club in August 2006 to OnGoal, LLC, a six-man ownership group led by Cerner Corporation co-founders Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig, a local group committed to keeping the Wizards in Kansas City.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The club dedicated its 2007 season to Lamar Hunt, who had died in December 2006. A good start earned them four wins in the first seven weeks of the season. The club picked up goalkeeper Kevin Hartman from the LA Galaxy to help with that position. Despite winning just four games after the All-Star break, Kansas City managed to finish fifth in the East at 11–12–7 and qualify for the playoffs. The club shifted over to the West as a result of a playoff format change, the Wizards played against Chivas USA. With the Wizards Davy Arnaud's goal in the first game to win the series, the defense and Kevin Hartman did the rest and kept Chivas USA off the scoreboard. In the conference final, the Wizards came up short to the Houston Dynamo, 2–0.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In 2008, the Wizards played their home games at CommunityAmerica Ballpark in Kansas, and ended a four-year playoff drought by posting an 11–10–9 record, good enough for fourth place in the Eastern Conference. Facing the Columbus Crew, the Wizards earned a 1–1 tie in Game 1 of the first round series, but with a 2–0 loss in Game 2 the Wizards lost the aggregate series 3–1.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In the 2009 season, the Wizards remained at CommunityAmerica Ballpark, but struggled to score. They went 426 minutes without scoring a goal, the longest streak of the season. In August 2009, with the team holding a 5–7–6 record, KC fired Head Coach Curt Onalfo, and named general manager Peter Vermes the head coach. The Wizards finished with the worst home record in the league, and at 8–13–9 were third to last in the league standings. Top players were Claudio López (8 goals & 7 assists) and Josh Wolff (11 goals), who sparked the Wizards offense.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Wizards hosted Manchester United F.C. in a friendly on July 25, 2010, and won the match by a score of 2–1. The announced attendance of 52,342 is a record for a professional soccer match in the Kansas City area It would be the franchise's final overall game played at Arrowhead Stadium. In the 2010 regular season, the Wizards finished third in the Eastern Conference and narrowly missed qualifying for the playoffs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "With the rebranding (of Wizards to Sporting) the team followed a recent trend in MLS of adopting European-style names, such as Toronto FC, D.C. United, and Real Salt Lake. The title \"Sporting\" has its origins in Iberia where it is used only by multi-sports clubs with a history of having multiple departments fielding teams across different sports, the most notable being Portugal's Sporting CP. Kansas City's use of the term has been criticized for inaccuracy and cultural appropriation. At the rebrand announcement, the Kansas City's president announced they had planned to add a rugby club and lacrosse club. Since then, a partnership with the Kansas City Blues Rugby Club has been announced, but the two sides are not part of one \"Sporting Club\" and no lacrosse team has been established. The rebranding was met with a mixture of both excitement and disdain by fans when originally announced. With the opening of the new Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City, Kansas, Sporting became the first major-league team to have played in stadiums on both sides of the state line in Kansas City, while Kansas City became the only U.S. metropolitan area other than New York City to have major professional sports teams playing in different states.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Because Children's Mercy Park was not ready for the beginning of the 2011 season, Sporting Kansas City played its first ten games on the road, only winning one game. Once the road trip was over, the team found more success and ended the regular season with the most points of any Eastern Conference team. After defeating the Colorado Rapids on a 4–0 aggregate in the Eastern Conference semifinals, Sporting lost to the Houston Dynamo 2–0 in the Eastern Conference finals.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "KC began the 2012 season with seven consecutive wins, in the process setting an MLS record for 335 minutes without allowing a shot on goal. The team finished the regular season first in the East with an 18–7–9 record. KC was led by Graham Zusi, who delivered a league-leading 15 assists and was named finalist for 2012 MLS MVP, Jimmy Nielsen, who notched a league leading 15 shutouts and was named 2012 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year, and Matt Besler, who was named MLS Defender of the Year. KC lost to the Houston Dynamo in the conference semifinals. KC won the 2012 U.S. Open Cup, defeating Seattle Sounders FC in the finals, to qualify for the 2013–14 CONCACAF Champions League.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2013, Kansas City took advantage of MLS's newly created retention funds to renew contracts with U.S. national team players Graham Zusi and Matt Besler. Sporting had finished second in the Eastern Conference and overall with 17 wins, 10 losses, and tied 7 times in the regular season. In the 2013 MLS Playoffs, Sporting KC defeated NE Revolution in the conference semifinals and Houston Dynamo in the conference finals, advancing to MLS Cup 2013. SKC defeated Real Salt Lake on penalties (7–6) after the match was tied 1–1 in regulation and overtime. It was the coldest MLS Cup game on record.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the 2014 MLS Cup Playoffs, Sporting were eliminated in the East Knockout Round by the New York Red Bulls.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "On October 27, 2014, the league announced that Sporting, along with the Houston Dynamo, would move from the Eastern Conference to the Western Conference when two teams from East Coast states, New York City FC and Orlando City SC, joined the league in 2015. Sporting finished sixth in the Western Conference that year, again qualifying for postseason play due to the expanded twelve-club field in the 2015 MLS Cup Playoffs. They were eliminated in the Western Knockout Round by the Portland Timbers, 6–7 in a Penalty Shootout.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Sporting's co-owner Neal Patterson died due to soft tissue cancer in July 2017. Kansas City unveiled wordmarks that was worn on the team's jerseys and on Children's Mercy Park to commemorate their late owner. Later that month, the club traded Dom Dwyer to Orlando City in exchange for $1.6 million (in general and targeted allocation money with additional incentives), setting the record for the most expensive internal trade in league history.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The team won the 2017 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, defeating the New York Red Bulls 2–1 in the final. The win gave Sporting their fourth Open Cup title, and their third in the last six years. The victory extended head coach Peter Vermes's record to 4–0 in cup finals and championship games with the club. In Open Cup history, Kansas City became just the second franchise in the single elimination tournament to have won four Open Cup finals in the same number of appearances.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Sporting Kansas City's official colors are \"sporting blue\" and \"dark indigo\" with \"lead\" as a tertiary color. The primary logo is composed of a teardrop-shaped shield containing a stylized representation of the Kansas-Missouri state line with \"sporting blue\" stripes on the \"Kansas\" side and an interlocking \"SC\" on the \"Missouri\" side. The shield's contour alludes to the team's former logo while under the \"Kansas City Wizards\" appellation. The stateline represents Sporting's fanbase in both of the Kansas and Missouri portions of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The eleven alternating horizontal stripes of \"sporting blue\" and \"dark indigo\" forming the state line are a nod to the number of players a team fields. The \"SC\" (for Sporting Club) is inspired by Asclepius' rod representing health and fitness, a Greek statue called the Winged Victory of Samothrace – alluding to strength and movement, and to the Spanish architecture of Kansas City's Country Club Plaza. Beginning in 2013, Ivy Funds became the club's first uniform sponsor, and a new home and away jersey design was unveiled, as well as an alternate argyle design.",
"title": "Colors and badge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Home: 1996–2010",
"title": "Colors and badge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Home: 2011–present",
"title": "Colors and badge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Third",
"title": "Colors and badge"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "From 1996 through 2007, the Wizards played home games in Arrowhead Stadium, the American football stadium mainly used by the Kansas City Chiefs. Wizards management kept the west end of Arrowhead tarped off for the first 10 years of play, limiting seating near the field. In 2006, fans could sit all the way around the field, but, in 2007, seating was [again] only available along the sidelines. After the 2007 final season at Arrowhead, the Wizards continued to use the stadium for select large events. In 2008, the club played a regular season home game against the Los Angeles Galaxy at the stadium to accommodate the large crowd expected for David Beckham's Galaxy debut. Again in 2010, the Wizards played a friendly here against English club Manchester United, winning 2–1.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Wizards entered an agreement with the Kansas City T-Bones to use their home stadium, CommunityAmerica Ballpark, during the 2008 and 2009 seasons. The deal was later extended to include 2010. The stadium, located across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas, built a new bleacher section financed by the Wizards to increase its capacity to 10,385. This move made the Wizards the third MLS team to share their home ground with a baseball team. D.C. United had been sharing RFK Stadium with Major League Baseball's Washington Nationals in Washington, D.C., before the latter's move into Nationals Park. The San Jose Earthquakes used Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, home of the Oakland A's (and Oakland Raiders), for certain games during the 2008 and 2009 seasons.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Wizards originally planned to return to Kansas City, Missouri, and build a new stadium there – tentatively called Trails Stadium – as part of a major mixed-use development. The team had received all required approvals and was awaiting site demolition; however, the 2008–09 financial crisis ultimately led to the scrapping of the Trails Stadium project.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The team sought a new site for its stadium, quickly settling on a development in Kansas City, Kansas, known as Village West, near CommunityAmerica Ballpark and the Kansas Speedway. In September 2009, the developer asked Wyandotte County (in Kansas) and Kansas state officials for permission to use revenues from existing tax increment financing in the Village West area to help finance the soccer complex. On December 17, Wizards president Robb Heineman provided an update on the stadium situation, identifying the Kansas City, Kansas, location as near final, pending the signature of the final agreements. On January 19, 2010, Wyandotte County approved the bonds to help finance the stadium, and on January 20 the groundbreaking ceremony was made, with Wizards CEO Robb Heineman using heavy machinery to move dirt on the construction site.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "When the Kansas City Wizards first rebranded as Sporting Kansas City, they built Livestrong Sporting Park. Spending $200 million on the complex, it was the first \"European style\" soccer complex in the United States. Name rights were held by the Livestrong Foundation until the downfall of Lance Armstrong from his doping scandal; Sporting Kansas City subsequently changed the name of their stadium to Sporting Park.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "On November 19, 2015, the stadium was renamed to Children's Mercy Park in a ten-year deal with Children's Mercy Hospital.",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Home venue(s):",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Other stadiums used:",
"title": "Stadiums"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Sporting regularly sells out its matches, with over 100 straight sellouts as of August 2017. Sporting has 14,000 season-ticket holders, with a wait list for season tickets of 3,000 people. Sporting KC has a relatively young fan base, with season-ticket holders having an average age of 29.7 years. Sporting KC works with Sporting Innovations, a consulting firm spun off from the team that focuses on fan engagement. Administrators from several college football teams, such as the Florida Gators, have visited Sporting KC to learn from the team's success at fan engagement.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The main supporters group of Sporting Kansas City cheers in the Members' Stand on the North side of Children's Mercy Park and is known as \"The Cauldron\". The name is derived from the large metal pots used for boiling potions, due to the team's former name Wizards. Since the rebranding in 2010, Sporting have seen dramatic growth in their fan section, with several fan groups adding their voice to The Cauldron culture and atmosphere.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Current groups in the north stands along with The Cauldron include: The Emeritus, Drainage Pond SC, Monster Squad, La Barra KC, Mass Street Mob, King City Yardbirds, Fountain City Ultras, Trenches, and Ladies of SKC.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The South Stand SC cheers from the south end of Children's Mercy Park and is the umbrella group for The Wedge and Ad Astra SKC (a reference to the motto of the state of Kansas), while American Outlaws – Kansas City Chapter are also present in the stands.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "\"Blue the Dog\" is the franchise's official mascot.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The two teams had faced each other regularly over the years, while both having been members of the Eastern conference. During that time, Sporting KC had frequently faced Houston in the playoffs, beginning their rivalry. As of 2022, SKC is 18–18–16 (W–L–T) against the Dynamo.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In their total meetings, Sporting KC is 17–19–12 (W–L–T), (as of October 2023). The two teams faced each other in MLS Cup 2013, in what was the coldest MLS Cup final at that time.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In recent years, the metro areas of Portland and Kansas City have both become major soccer markets due to the performance of their respective soccer teams. Additionally their NWSL teams, the Portland Thorns and the Kansas City Current, have become major rivals, especially since the Thorns' 2–0 win over the Current in the 2022 NWSL Championship.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Sporting KC began a rivalry with St. Louis City SC starting with the team's entrance into the league in the 2023 season. St. Louis City won the first meeting at CityPark in May of 2023, but Sporting KC won the second meeting at Children’s Mercy Park in September of that year. The two teams played in their first postseason matchup in the 2023 MLS Cup Playoffs, with Sporting Kansas City (the #8 seed) upsetting the #1 seeded St. Louis in a best-of-three series.",
"title": "Club culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "From 2023, every Sporting Kansas City match is available via MLS Season Pass on the Apple TV app.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Prior to 2017 matches were broadcast in high definition on KMCI-TV (except for nationally broadcast matches). The play-by-play announcer was WHB 810AM 'Border Patrol' host Nate Bukaty, who began broadcasting for the team in the 2015 season. Former Sporting Kansas City goalkeeper Andy Gruenebaum provided color commentary following his retirement after the 2014 season. Color commentary was covered by Jake Yadrich through the 2013 season, after which he transitioned to be the lead analyst on the sidelines during games. Morning reporter Kacie McDonnell of KSHB-TV, an NBC affiliate and KMCI-TV's sister station, served as the network host of the pregame and postgame shows.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In addition, the Sporting Kansas City Television Network provided coverage across markets in six states:",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Matches that are not broadcast nationally were broadcast on Fox Sports Kansas City (it was also carried on Fox Sports Midwest in the St. Louis market until 2023, where it will be removed due to the new St Louis City FC MLS team). In 2017, Fox Sports Midwest only carried select matches, while in 2018, the club announced the St. Louis market would receive all matches while the Mid-Missouri and Iowa markets would receive most matches. Nate Bukaty continues to provide the play-by-play commentary, while Jacob Peterson joined as the color commentator ahead of the 2020 season with Carter Augustine returning as the sideline reporter.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 2022, prior to an upcoming leaguewide TV deal, KMCI returned as broadcast partner for those in the Kansas City market, with other areas being able to stream all matches on the club's website.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Regular local radio coverage in English is provided through an official partnership with Sports Radio 810 WHB and its affiliate ESPN Kansas City 99.3FM. Spanish broadcasting was previously found on KDTD 1340AM, but is on KCZZ (ESPN Deportes Kansas City 1480AM) for the 2018 season. The broadcasts are produced by Jorge Moreno and feature the voice of 13-year MLS veteran Diego Gutierrez along with Ale Cabero, Raul Villegas and Alonso Cadena.",
"title": "Broadcasting"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules. Players may hold more than one non-FIFA nationality.",
"title": "Players and staff"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "",
"title": "Honors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "This is a partial list of the most recent seasons completed by SKC. For the full season-by-season history, see List of Sporting Kansas City seasons.",
"title": "Team record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "^ 1. Avg. attendance include statistics from league matches only. ^ 2. Top goalscorer(s) includes all goals scored in League, MLS Cup Playoffs, U.S. Open Cup, MLS is Back Tournament, CONCACAF Champions League, FIFA Club World Cup, and other competitive continental matches.",
"title": "Team record"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The following records are for MLS regular season only:",
"title": "Player records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Source: Updated: March 8, 2020",
"title": "Player records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Sporting Legends is an initiative launched in 2013 that pays tribute to the individuals who played an instrumental role for Sporting Kansas City and in the growth of soccer in the region.",
"title": "Player records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The individuals named as Sporting Legends, their year of induction, and a brief description are listed below:",
"title": "Player records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "^ + Dom Dwyer scored four goals in this game",
"title": "Player records"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "^ @ DNQ = Did not qualify; NHG = No home game was played during the playoffs ^ # The 73% jump in attendance between 2010 and 2011 coincides with the team's move from CommunityAmerica Ballpark (capacity 10,400) to their new soccer-specific stadium Livestrong Sporting Park (now known as Children's Mercy Park) (capacity 18,500).",
"title": "Home attendance"
}
] |
Sporting Kansas City is an American men's professional soccer club that plays in Major League Soccer (MLS) and is based in the Kansas City metropolitan area. The administrative offices are located in Downtown Kansas City, Missouri, and the team clubhouse and practice facilities are located in Kansas City, Kansas, near Children's Mercy Park. The club competes as a part of the league's Western Conference. Sporting Kansas City began play in 1996 as a charter team in the league, then known as the Kansas City Wiz. The team was founded by Lamar Hunt in 1995. Since moving across the state line, they have been the only major professional sports league franchise to play their home games in Kansas. Starting in 1997, the franchise was known as the Kansas City Wizards. The team rebranded in November 2010, coinciding with its move to its new home stadium, Children's Mercy Park. The franchise has won the MLS Cup twice, the Supporters' Shield in 2000, and the U.S. Open Cup in 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2017. The club also has a reserve team, Sporting Kansas City II, that began play in the second-tier USL Championship in 2016 and switched to MLS Next Pro in 2022.
|
2001-09-26T03:25:35Z
|
2023-12-29T23:08:00Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporting_Kansas_City
|
16,858 |
Knights of Columbus
|
The Knights of Columbus (K of C) is a global Catholic fraternal service order founded by Fr. Michael J. McGivney on March 29, 1882. Membership is limited to practicing Catholic men. It is led by Patrick E. Kelly, the order's 14th Supreme Knight. The organization is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus.
The organization was founded in March 1882 as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States. In addition to providing an insurance system for its members, its charter states that it endeavors "to promote such social and intellectual intercourse among its members as shall be desirable and proper." It has grown to support refugee relief, Catholic education, local parishes and dioceses, and global Catholic social and political causes. The Knights promote the Catholic view on public policy issues, including opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.
The organization also provides certain financial services to the individual and institutional Catholic market. Its wholly owned insurance company, one of the largest in the world, underwrites more than two million insurance contracts, totaling more than $121 billion of life insurance in force as of 2023. It is a Fortune 1000 company based on its annual revenues. The order also owns the Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a money management firm which invests in accordance with Catholic social teachings.
As of 2023, the Knights reported having over two million members around the world. Women may participate in K of C through the Columbiettes and other female auxiliaries, and boys may join the Columbian Squires. The Order comprises four different "degrees", each one of which exemplifies one of the core principles of the order. There are more than 16,000 local Knights of Columbus councils around the world, including over 300 on college campuses.
American Catholic priest Michael J. McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus at St. Mary's Church in 1882 as a mutual benefit society for Catholic immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut. As a parish priest in an immigrant community, McGivney saw what could happen to a family when the main income earner died. This was before most government support programs were established. Because of religious and ethnic discrimination, Catholics in the late 19th century were regularly excluded from labor unions, popular fraternal organizations, and other organized groups that provided such social services.
Although its first councils were all in Connecticut, the Order spread throughout New England and the United States in subsequent years. As the order expanded outside of Connecticut, structural changes in the late 1880s and 1890s were instituted to give the Knights a federalist system with local, state, and national levels of government. This allowed them to coordinate activities across states and localities.
During World War I, the Knights established soldiers' welfare centers in the U.S. and abroad. After the war, the Knights participated in education, occupational training, and employment programs for veterans.
The Oregon Compulsory Education Act of 1922 would have disallowed parochial schools, including Catholic schools, in that state. The Knights of Columbus challenged the law in court, and, in a landmark 1925 ruling (Pierce v. Society of Sisters), the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down.
To combat the animus targeted at racial and religious minorities, including Catholics, the Order formed a historical commission which published a series of books on their contributions, among other activities. The "Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions Series" of books included three titles: The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Jews in the Making of America by George Cohen, and The Germans in the Making of America by Frederick Schrader.
Meanwhile, though the membership system at the time did not explicitly exclude African Americans, as few as one negative vote (and later, four or five) against a prospective candidate (no matter the size of the council) was enough to deny someone entry. This occurred in a racist manner often enough, especially in the Deep South, that the Josephites helped found the Knights of Peter Claver in 1909 for African Americans. The KoC national leadership later amended their policies so that rejections required a majority of council members.
Around 1915, during the nadir of American race relations, the Ku Klux Klan began promoting a conspiracy theory claiming that Fourth Degree Knights swore an oath to exterminate Freemasons and Protestants. The Knights of Columbus vehemently denied the existence of any such oath, calling the rumors libel. In 1923, the Knights of Columbus offered $25,000 to any person with proof that the fake oath attributed to the fourth degree membership was part of any authentic ceremony. The Knights began suing distributors for libel in an effort to stop this, and the KKK ended its publication of the false oath.
According to church historian Massimo Faggioli, the Knights of Columbus are today "'an extreme version' of a post-Vatican II phenomenon, the rise of discrete lay groups that have become centers of power themselves."
As the Order and its charitable works grew, so did its prominence within the Church. Pope John Paul I's first audience with a layman was with Supreme Knight Dechant, and Pope John Paul II met with Supreme Knight Virgil Dechant three days after his installation. During the pope's 1979 visit to the United States, the Supreme Officers and Board were the only lay organization to receive an audience.
President Richard Nixon addressed the Supreme Convention in 1971. President Ronald Reagan spoke in 1982 and 1986 and George W. Bush spoke in 2004. George H. W. Bush spoke as vice president in 1984 and then again as president in 1992. President Bill Clinton sent a videotaped message to the 111th Supreme Convention saying the Order's "contributions to the Catholic Church and to your communities merit our applause."
Faggioli believes the scope of the Knights' philanthropy can "create influence through money, especially in important places like Rome or Washington, D.C."
The order is dedicated to the principles of charity, unity, fraternity, and patriotism. Membership is restricted to adult male Catholics. As of 2020, there were 2 million knights.
Each member belongs to one of more than 16,000 local "councils" around the world. The college councils program started at The Catholic University of America in 1898. The oldest continuously running college council is the University of Notre Dame Council #1477, chartered in 1910. As of 2018, there are more than 300 college councils. Separate organizations, known as Fourth Degree assemblies, may form color guards to attend important civic and church events; they are often the most visible arm of the Knights.
The Supreme Council is the governing body of the order. It elects insurance members to serve three-year terms on a 24-member Board of Directors. Leaders' salaries are set by the board of directors and ratified by the delegates to the Supreme Convention. The seven-figure salaries of senior K of C officers have been criticized as excessive.
In 1969, the Knights opened a 23-story headquarters building in New Haven.
(*Appointed annually by each council's Grand Knight or assembly's Navigator) (**Appointed for a three-year term by the Supreme Knight)
Charity is the foremost important principle of the Knights of Columbus. At their 2019 convention, then-Supreme Knight Carl Anderson said that the organization had donated $185 million and 76 million volunteer-hours toward charity projects in 2018. Charitable activities include support for refugees, aid for victims of natural disasters, and advocating Catholic ethics, such as opposition to same-sex marriage and opposition to abortion.
Beginning in 1897, the National Council encouraged local councils to establish funds to support members affected by the 1890s depression. Councils also offered employment agency services and provided aid to the poor and sick. Aid has also been dispensed to assist victims of natural and man-made disasters, starting with a flood in Kansas in 1903. In 2015 alone, the order donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to victims of typhoons and other natural disasters.
During times of war, the Order supports aid to refugees. Between 2014 and 2018, the Knights gave more than $2 million to provide food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to persecuted Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East. The Knights donated $250,000 in 2018 to help refugees crossing over the Mexico–United States border who were seeking asylum in the United States and later expanded the program. Within days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2,000 Knights of Columbus in the country worked to help those impacted. They began by providing food and clothing to those at train and bus stations in Lviv who were fleeing into Poland. They then began organizing busses to take people the Polish border. In the first three months of the war, the Knights in Poland helped more than 300,000 people, or 10% of those who fled to that country.
The Knights of Columbus has donated more than $600 million to those with intellectual and physical disabilities. One of the largest recipients of aid in this area has been the Special Olympics, where the Knights have been involved since the very first games in 1968.
After the Knights had donated more than 1,000 ultrasound machines to crisis pregnancy centers from 2009 to 2019, Anderson said, "Our ultrasound initiative is now the greatest humanitarian achievement in the history of the Knights of Columbus. ... We can, and I am confident that we will, save millions of unborn lives." Following the United States Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Supreme Knight Patrick E. Kelly called on the order to increase their support for women facing unplanned and crisis pregnancies with the Aid and Support After Pregnancy (ASAP) initiative.
The Knights also donate to the institutional church, including being a major donor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. As of 2017, the Knights' Vicarius Christi fund has contributed more than $57 million to the charitable efforts of the pope. The Knights have supported the Vatican's news operation for decades.
In the field of education, the Knights of Columbus have a number of scholarships and other programs for seminarians, veterans, students at The Catholic University of America, and at other Catholic colleges. Especially during World War I and World War II, the Order operated a number of "huts" to support troops serving in combat, regardless of race or religion.
The original insurance system devised by McGivney gave a deceased Knight's widow a $1,000 death benefit. Each member was assessed $1 upon a death, and when the number of Knights grew beyond 1,000, the assessment decreased according to the rate of increase. Each member, regardless of age, was assessed equally. As a result, younger, healthier members could expect to pay more over the course of their lifetimes than those men who joined when they were older. There was also a Sick Benefit Deposit for members who fell ill and could not work. Each sick Knight was entitled to draw up to $5 a week for 13 weeks (roughly equivalent to $155 in 2022 dollars). If he remained sick after that, the council to which he belonged determined the sum of money given to him.
The need for a reserve fund for times of epidemic was seen from the earliest days, but it was rejected several times before finally being established in 1892. It had $12,000 in assets in 1896. By 1897, the method of funding the program changed. Each member was assessed five cents a month for 100 months, so that he would contribute $5.
Since its first loan to St. Rose Church in Meriden, Connecticut, in the late 1890s, the Knights of Columbus have made loans to parishes, dioceses, and other Catholic institutions. By 1954, over $300 million had been loaned and the program "never lost one cent of principal or interest."
In the post–World War II era, the interest rates on long-term bonds dipped below levels at which the order's insurance program could sustain itself, and Supreme Knight Hart moved the order into a more aggressive program of investing in real estate. Under his leadership, the order established a lease-back investment program in which the order would buy a piece of property and then lease it back to the original owner "upon terms generally that would bring to our Order a net rental equal to the normal mortgage interest rate." Between 1952 and 1962, 18 pieces of land were purchased for a total of $29 million. Late in 1953 the order purchased the land beneath Yankee Stadium for $2.5 million. In 1971, the City of New York took the land by eminent domain.
Between 1952 and 1962, 18 pieces of land were purchased as part of the lease-back program for a total of $29 million. During this time, the amount of money invested in common stock also increased.
The order offers a modern, professional insurance operation with more than $121 billion of life insurance policies in force and $26 billion in assets as of June 2023, This places the Order on the Fortune 1000 list and it is large enough to rank 49th on the A. M. Best list of all life insurance companies in North America.
Products include permanent and term life insurance, as well as annuities, long term care insurance, and disability insurance. The insurance program is not a separate business offered by the order to others, but is exclusively for the benefit of members and their families. All agents are members of the order.
The order's insurance program is the most highly rated program in North America. For more than 40 consecutive years, the order has received A. M. Best's highest rating, A++.
The order maintains a two-prong investment strategy: a company must first be a sound investment before stock in it is purchased, and secondly the company's activities must not conflict with Catholic social teaching. The guidelines include protecting human life, promoting human dignity, reducing arms production, pursuing economic justice, protecting the environment, and encouraging corporate responsibility. As of 2017, it had been named a "World's Most Ethical Company" by Ethisphere Institute for five consecutive years. Citing the awards they have won, the order calls themselves "champions of ethical investing."
In 2017, over $965 million was awarded in benefits. Since the founding of the order, $3.5 billion in death benefits have been paid. Additionally, the insurance program has a low 3.5 percent lapse rate of the 1.9 million members and their families who are insured.
Its insurance operation invests in loans to various churches, schools, and other Catholic institutions. As of 2008, over $500 million had been loaned through the ChurchLoan program. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Order established a $100 million fund to provide short-term loans to help dioceses weather the economic storm. Each diocese was eligible to obtain a $1 million secured line of credit.
Since its earliest days, the Knights of Columbus has been a "Catholic anti-defamation society." In 1914, it established a Commission on Religious Prejudices. As part of the effort, the order distributed pamphlets, and lecturers toured the country speaking on how Catholics could love and be loyal to America.
The creation of the 4th Degree, with its emphasis on patriotism, performed an anti-defamation function as well as asserting claims to Americanism. In response to a defamatory "bogus oath" circulated by the KKK, in 1914 the Knights set up a framework for a lecture series and educational programs to combat anti-Catholic sentiment.
The Knights have been urged to take a prominent role in the new evangelization. The CIS published a series on the new evangelization in 2011, and donations to other Catholic mass communication services represent one of the Knights' major expenditures. The Knights have also established councils in both secular and Catholic universities.
The order sponsors a number of international awards. The first, the Gaudium et Spes Award, is named after the document from the Second Vatican Council, and is the highest honor bestowed by the order. It "is awarded only in special circumstances and only to individuals of exceptional merit" and comes an honorarium of $100,000. In the first 25 years after its institution in 1992, it was only awarded twelve times. The award "recognizes individuals for their exemplary contributions to the realization of the message of faith and service in the spirit of Christ as articulated in the document for which it is named."
The second international award, also only given when merited, is the Caritas Award. Named for the theological virtue alternatively translated as either charity or love, it recognizes "extraordinary works of charity and service" and was established in 2013. It was first awarded to Monsignor Robert Weiss, pastor of St Rose of Lima in Newtown, Connecticut. The second was awarded to St. Virgilius Knights of Columbus Council 185. Both received the honor, and the $100,000 honorarium, for their actions following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The Saint Michael Award was established in conjunction with the Caritas Award to recognize members of the order who have exemplified a lifetime of service on behalf of the Knights of Columbus. Additionally, at its annual convention each year, the order recognizes other individuals and councils with awards. These include the Family of the Year award, and prizes for the best activities in the categories of church, community, council, culture of life, family, and youth. Additionally, top selling general and field insurance agents are recognized, as are top recruiting individuals and councils.
The order established the Grand Cross of the Knights of Columbus, but awarded it only to Cristobal Colón y de La Cerda, Duke of Veragua and descendant of Columbus, when he visited the US in 1893.
While the Knights were politically active from an early date, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, as the "Catholic anti-defamation character" of the order began to diminish as Catholics gained more acceptance, the leadership began to use its financial resources to directly influence the direction of the church. That led to the creation of a "variety of new programs reflecting the proliferation of the new social ministries of the church."
At times, the leadership of the order has been both liberal and conservative. Martin H. Carmody and Luke E. Hart were both political conservatives, but John J. Phelan was a Democratic politician prior to becoming Supreme Knight, John Swift's "strong support for economic democracy and social-welfare legislation marks him as a fairly representative New Deal anti-communist," and Francis P. Matthews was a civil rights official and member of Harry Truman's cabinet. Anderson previously served in the Office of Public Liaison under Ronald Reagan.
The Knights of Columbus is classified as a 501(c)(8) fraternal benefit society by the IRS. Unlike the more common 501(c)(3) nonprofits, 501(c)(8)s are allowed to engage in limited direct political activity without jeopardizing their tax exemptions. However, Anderson has said "One of our most important traditions throughout our 125-year history is that we do not, as an organization, become involved in partisan politics."
The Knights of Columbus supports political awareness and activity among its members and local councils. Public policy activity is limited to issue-specific campaigns, typically dealing with Catholic family and sanctity of life issues. They state that
In addition to performing charitable works, the Knights of Columbus encourages its members to meet their responsibilities as Catholic citizens and to become active in the political life of their local communities, to vote and to speak out on the public issues of the day. ... In the political realm, this means opening our public policy efforts and deliberations to the life of Christ and the teachings of the Church. In accord with our Bishops, the Knights of Columbus has consistently maintained positions that take these concerns into account. The order supports and promotes the social doctrine of the Church, including a robust vision of religious liberty that embraces religion's proper role in the private and public spheres.
The order opposed the persecution of Catholics in Mexico during the Cristero War, and opposed communism. During the 20th century, the order also established the Commission on Religious Prejudices and the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission, organizations which fought against racism. It was also supportive of trade unionism, and published the works "of the broad array of intellectuals", including George Schuster, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Allan Nevins, and W. E. B. DuBois.
During the Cold War, the order had a history of waging anti-socialist, anti-communist and anti-anarchist crusades. They lobbied for the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance, as a religious response to Soviet atheism. The Knights have actively opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage and in terms of funding, they have also been a key contributor to local measures against same-sex marriage. The Knights have donated over US$1 million to the Susan B. Anthony Foundation and other anti-abortion and anti-contraception organizations.
On March 10, 2001, the order opened a museum in New Haven dedicated to their history. The 77,000 square foot building cost US$10 million to renovate. It holds mosaics on loan from the Vatican and gifts from Popes, the membership application from John F. Kennedy, and a number of other items related to the history of the Knights. Near the entrance is the cross held by Jesus Christ on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica before undergoing a Knights-financed renovation.
In 2015, the order launched Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a money management firm which invests money in accordance with Catholic social teaching. The firm uses the Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to guide their investment decisions. The guidelines include protecting human life, promoting human dignity, reducing arms production, pursuing economic justice, protecting the environment, and encouraging corporate responsibility.
In addition to the wholly owned subsidiary, it also purchased 20% of Boston Advisors, a boutique investment management firm, managing assets for institutional and high-net-worth investors. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors manages the fixed-income strategies for their funds while Boston Advisors sub-advises on the equity strategies. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors also offers model portfolio, outsourced CIO services, a bank loan strategy, and other alternative investment strategies. In 2019, the Knights purchased the institutional management business of Boston Advisors.
The order owns and operates the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington D.C. In 2011, the Order purchased the 130,000-square-foot John Paul II Cultural Center. The mission as a cultural center ended in 2009 and the Knights rebranded it as a shrine to Pope John Paul II. Soon after the pope was canonized, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops named the building a national shrine.
Each year 64,000 pilgrims visit the shrine, which features video content, interactive displays, and personal effects from John Paul. There is also a first class relic of the pope's blood on display for veneration. It also serves as a base for the Order in Washington, D.C.
Some of the most notable American members include John F. Kennedy; Ted Kennedy; Al Smith; Sargent Shriver; Samuel Alito; Conrad Hilton; John Boehner; Ray Flynn; Jeb Bush; film maker John Ford; and Sergeant Major Daniel Daly, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient.
In the world of sports, Vince Lombardi, the famed former coach of the Green Bay Packers; James Connolly, the first Olympic gold medal champion in modern times; Floyd Patterson, former heavyweight boxing champion; and baseball legend Babe Ruth were all knights.
On October 15, 2006, Bishop Rafael Guízar y Valencia (1878–1938) was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. In 2000, six other Knights, who were killed in the violence following the Mexican Revolution, were declared saints by Pope John Paul II.
The emblem of the order was designed by Past Supreme Knight James T. Mullen and adopted at the second Supreme Council meeting on May 12, 1883. Shields used by medieval knights served as the inspiration. The emblem consists of a shield mounted on a Formée cross, which is an artistic representation of the cross of Christ. This represents the Catholic identity of the order.
Mounted on the shield are three objects: the fasces, an anchor, and a sword. In ancient Rome, the fasces was carried before magistrates as an emblem of authority. The order uses it as "symbolic of authority which must exist in any tightly-bonded and efficiently operating organization." The anchor represents Christopher Columbus, admiral under the orders of the kings of Spain and patron of this partnership, here a symbol of the Catholic contribution to America. The short sword, or dagger, was a weapon used by medieval knights. The shield as a whole, with the letters "K of C", represents "Catholic Knighthood in organized merciful action."
Many councils also have women's auxiliaries. At the turn of the 20th century, two were formed by local councils, each taking the name Daughters of Isabella. They expanded and issued charters to other circles but never merged. The newer organization renamed itself the Catholic Daughters of the Americas in 1921, and both have structures independent of the Knights of Columbus. Other groups are known as the Columbiettes. In the Philippines, the ladies' auxiliary is known as the Daughters of Mary Immaculate.
A proposal in 1896 to establish councils for women did not pass and was never proposed again.
The Knights' official junior organization is the Columbian Squires. According to its founder Barnabas McDonald, "The supreme purpose of the Columbian Squires is character building."
It was founded in 1925 in Duluth, Minnesota, by Barnabas McDonald. The formation of new Squire Circles in the United States and Canada is discouraged, as the Order desires to move youth activities from exclusive clubs into the local parish youth groups.
The Knights of Columbus is a member of the International Alliance of Catholic Knights (IACK), which includes fifteen fraternal orders such as the Knights of Saint Columbanus in Ireland, the Knights of St Columba in Great Britain, the Knights of Peter Claver in the United States, the Knights of the Southern Cross in Australia and New Zealand, the Knights of Marshall in Ghana, the Knights of Da Gama in South Africa, and the Knights of Saint Mulumba in Nigeria.
The Loyal Orange Institution, also known as the Orange Order, is a similar organization for Protestant Christians.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Knights of Columbus (K of C) is a global Catholic fraternal service order founded by Fr. Michael J. McGivney on March 29, 1882. Membership is limited to practicing Catholic men. It is led by Patrick E. Kelly, the order's 14th Supreme Knight. The organization is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The organization was founded in March 1882 as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States. In addition to providing an insurance system for its members, its charter states that it endeavors \"to promote such social and intellectual intercourse among its members as shall be desirable and proper.\" It has grown to support refugee relief, Catholic education, local parishes and dioceses, and global Catholic social and political causes. The Knights promote the Catholic view on public policy issues, including opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The organization also provides certain financial services to the individual and institutional Catholic market. Its wholly owned insurance company, one of the largest in the world, underwrites more than two million insurance contracts, totaling more than $121 billion of life insurance in force as of 2023. It is a Fortune 1000 company based on its annual revenues. The order also owns the Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a money management firm which invests in accordance with Catholic social teachings.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As of 2023, the Knights reported having over two million members around the world. Women may participate in K of C through the Columbiettes and other female auxiliaries, and boys may join the Columbian Squires. The Order comprises four different \"degrees\", each one of which exemplifies one of the core principles of the order. There are more than 16,000 local Knights of Columbus councils around the world, including over 300 on college campuses.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "American Catholic priest Michael J. McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus at St. Mary's Church in 1882 as a mutual benefit society for Catholic immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut. As a parish priest in an immigrant community, McGivney saw what could happen to a family when the main income earner died. This was before most government support programs were established. Because of religious and ethnic discrimination, Catholics in the late 19th century were regularly excluded from labor unions, popular fraternal organizations, and other organized groups that provided such social services.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although its first councils were all in Connecticut, the Order spread throughout New England and the United States in subsequent years. As the order expanded outside of Connecticut, structural changes in the late 1880s and 1890s were instituted to give the Knights a federalist system with local, state, and national levels of government. This allowed them to coordinate activities across states and localities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "During World War I, the Knights established soldiers' welfare centers in the U.S. and abroad. After the war, the Knights participated in education, occupational training, and employment programs for veterans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The Oregon Compulsory Education Act of 1922 would have disallowed parochial schools, including Catholic schools, in that state. The Knights of Columbus challenged the law in court, and, in a landmark 1925 ruling (Pierce v. Society of Sisters), the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "To combat the animus targeted at racial and religious minorities, including Catholics, the Order formed a historical commission which published a series of books on their contributions, among other activities. The \"Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions Series\" of books included three titles: The Gift of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois, The Jews in the Making of America by George Cohen, and The Germans in the Making of America by Frederick Schrader.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Meanwhile, though the membership system at the time did not explicitly exclude African Americans, as few as one negative vote (and later, four or five) against a prospective candidate (no matter the size of the council) was enough to deny someone entry. This occurred in a racist manner often enough, especially in the Deep South, that the Josephites helped found the Knights of Peter Claver in 1909 for African Americans. The KoC national leadership later amended their policies so that rejections required a majority of council members.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Around 1915, during the nadir of American race relations, the Ku Klux Klan began promoting a conspiracy theory claiming that Fourth Degree Knights swore an oath to exterminate Freemasons and Protestants. The Knights of Columbus vehemently denied the existence of any such oath, calling the rumors libel. In 1923, the Knights of Columbus offered $25,000 to any person with proof that the fake oath attributed to the fourth degree membership was part of any authentic ceremony. The Knights began suing distributors for libel in an effort to stop this, and the KKK ended its publication of the false oath.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "According to church historian Massimo Faggioli, the Knights of Columbus are today \"'an extreme version' of a post-Vatican II phenomenon, the rise of discrete lay groups that have become centers of power themselves.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As the Order and its charitable works grew, so did its prominence within the Church. Pope John Paul I's first audience with a layman was with Supreme Knight Dechant, and Pope John Paul II met with Supreme Knight Virgil Dechant three days after his installation. During the pope's 1979 visit to the United States, the Supreme Officers and Board were the only lay organization to receive an audience.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "President Richard Nixon addressed the Supreme Convention in 1971. President Ronald Reagan spoke in 1982 and 1986 and George W. Bush spoke in 2004. George H. W. Bush spoke as vice president in 1984 and then again as president in 1992. President Bill Clinton sent a videotaped message to the 111th Supreme Convention saying the Order's \"contributions to the Catholic Church and to your communities merit our applause.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Faggioli believes the scope of the Knights' philanthropy can \"create influence through money, especially in important places like Rome or Washington, D.C.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The order is dedicated to the principles of charity, unity, fraternity, and patriotism. Membership is restricted to adult male Catholics. As of 2020, there were 2 million knights.",
"title": "Organization and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Each member belongs to one of more than 16,000 local \"councils\" around the world. The college councils program started at The Catholic University of America in 1898. The oldest continuously running college council is the University of Notre Dame Council #1477, chartered in 1910. As of 2018, there are more than 300 college councils. Separate organizations, known as Fourth Degree assemblies, may form color guards to attend important civic and church events; they are often the most visible arm of the Knights.",
"title": "Organization and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Supreme Council is the governing body of the order. It elects insurance members to serve three-year terms on a 24-member Board of Directors. Leaders' salaries are set by the board of directors and ratified by the delegates to the Supreme Convention. The seven-figure salaries of senior K of C officers have been criticized as excessive.",
"title": "Organization and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1969, the Knights opened a 23-story headquarters building in New Haven.",
"title": "Organization and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "(*Appointed annually by each council's Grand Knight or assembly's Navigator) (**Appointed for a three-year term by the Supreme Knight)",
"title": "Organization and principles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Charity is the foremost important principle of the Knights of Columbus. At their 2019 convention, then-Supreme Knight Carl Anderson said that the organization had donated $185 million and 76 million volunteer-hours toward charity projects in 2018. Charitable activities include support for refugees, aid for victims of natural disasters, and advocating Catholic ethics, such as opposition to same-sex marriage and opposition to abortion.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Beginning in 1897, the National Council encouraged local councils to establish funds to support members affected by the 1890s depression. Councils also offered employment agency services and provided aid to the poor and sick. Aid has also been dispensed to assist victims of natural and man-made disasters, starting with a flood in Kansas in 1903. In 2015 alone, the order donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to victims of typhoons and other natural disasters.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "During times of war, the Order supports aid to refugees. Between 2014 and 2018, the Knights gave more than $2 million to provide food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to persecuted Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East. The Knights donated $250,000 in 2018 to help refugees crossing over the Mexico–United States border who were seeking asylum in the United States and later expanded the program. Within days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2,000 Knights of Columbus in the country worked to help those impacted. They began by providing food and clothing to those at train and bus stations in Lviv who were fleeing into Poland. They then began organizing busses to take people the Polish border. In the first three months of the war, the Knights in Poland helped more than 300,000 people, or 10% of those who fled to that country.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Knights of Columbus has donated more than $600 million to those with intellectual and physical disabilities. One of the largest recipients of aid in this area has been the Special Olympics, where the Knights have been involved since the very first games in 1968.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "After the Knights had donated more than 1,000 ultrasound machines to crisis pregnancy centers from 2009 to 2019, Anderson said, \"Our ultrasound initiative is now the greatest humanitarian achievement in the history of the Knights of Columbus. ... We can, and I am confident that we will, save millions of unborn lives.\" Following the United States Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Supreme Knight Patrick E. Kelly called on the order to increase their support for women facing unplanned and crisis pregnancies with the Aid and Support After Pregnancy (ASAP) initiative.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Knights also donate to the institutional church, including being a major donor to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. As of 2017, the Knights' Vicarius Christi fund has contributed more than $57 million to the charitable efforts of the pope. The Knights have supported the Vatican's news operation for decades.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the field of education, the Knights of Columbus have a number of scholarships and other programs for seminarians, veterans, students at The Catholic University of America, and at other Catholic colleges. Especially during World War I and World War II, the Order operated a number of \"huts\" to support troops serving in combat, regardless of race or religion.",
"title": "Charitable giving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The original insurance system devised by McGivney gave a deceased Knight's widow a $1,000 death benefit. Each member was assessed $1 upon a death, and when the number of Knights grew beyond 1,000, the assessment decreased according to the rate of increase. Each member, regardless of age, was assessed equally. As a result, younger, healthier members could expect to pay more over the course of their lifetimes than those men who joined when they were older. There was also a Sick Benefit Deposit for members who fell ill and could not work. Each sick Knight was entitled to draw up to $5 a week for 13 weeks (roughly equivalent to $155 in 2022 dollars). If he remained sick after that, the council to which he belonged determined the sum of money given to him.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The need for a reserve fund for times of epidemic was seen from the earliest days, but it was rejected several times before finally being established in 1892. It had $12,000 in assets in 1896. By 1897, the method of funding the program changed. Each member was assessed five cents a month for 100 months, so that he would contribute $5.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Since its first loan to St. Rose Church in Meriden, Connecticut, in the late 1890s, the Knights of Columbus have made loans to parishes, dioceses, and other Catholic institutions. By 1954, over $300 million had been loaned and the program \"never lost one cent of principal or interest.\"",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In the post–World War II era, the interest rates on long-term bonds dipped below levels at which the order's insurance program could sustain itself, and Supreme Knight Hart moved the order into a more aggressive program of investing in real estate. Under his leadership, the order established a lease-back investment program in which the order would buy a piece of property and then lease it back to the original owner \"upon terms generally that would bring to our Order a net rental equal to the normal mortgage interest rate.\" Between 1952 and 1962, 18 pieces of land were purchased for a total of $29 million. Late in 1953 the order purchased the land beneath Yankee Stadium for $2.5 million. In 1971, the City of New York took the land by eminent domain.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Between 1952 and 1962, 18 pieces of land were purchased as part of the lease-back program for a total of $29 million. During this time, the amount of money invested in common stock also increased.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The order offers a modern, professional insurance operation with more than $121 billion of life insurance policies in force and $26 billion in assets as of June 2023, This places the Order on the Fortune 1000 list and it is large enough to rank 49th on the A. M. Best list of all life insurance companies in North America.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Products include permanent and term life insurance, as well as annuities, long term care insurance, and disability insurance. The insurance program is not a separate business offered by the order to others, but is exclusively for the benefit of members and their families. All agents are members of the order.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The order's insurance program is the most highly rated program in North America. For more than 40 consecutive years, the order has received A. M. Best's highest rating, A++.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The order maintains a two-prong investment strategy: a company must first be a sound investment before stock in it is purchased, and secondly the company's activities must not conflict with Catholic social teaching. The guidelines include protecting human life, promoting human dignity, reducing arms production, pursuing economic justice, protecting the environment, and encouraging corporate responsibility. As of 2017, it had been named a \"World's Most Ethical Company\" by Ethisphere Institute for five consecutive years. Citing the awards they have won, the order calls themselves \"champions of ethical investing.\"",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 2017, over $965 million was awarded in benefits. Since the founding of the order, $3.5 billion in death benefits have been paid. Additionally, the insurance program has a low 3.5 percent lapse rate of the 1.9 million members and their families who are insured.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Its insurance operation invests in loans to various churches, schools, and other Catholic institutions. As of 2008, over $500 million had been loaned through the ChurchLoan program. At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Order established a $100 million fund to provide short-term loans to help dioceses weather the economic storm. Each diocese was eligible to obtain a $1 million secured line of credit.",
"title": "Insurance program"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Since its earliest days, the Knights of Columbus has been a \"Catholic anti-defamation society.\" In 1914, it established a Commission on Religious Prejudices. As part of the effort, the order distributed pamphlets, and lecturers toured the country speaking on how Catholics could love and be loyal to America.",
"title": "Promotion of the Catholic faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The creation of the 4th Degree, with its emphasis on patriotism, performed an anti-defamation function as well as asserting claims to Americanism. In response to a defamatory \"bogus oath\" circulated by the KKK, in 1914 the Knights set up a framework for a lecture series and educational programs to combat anti-Catholic sentiment.",
"title": "Promotion of the Catholic faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Knights have been urged to take a prominent role in the new evangelization. The CIS published a series on the new evangelization in 2011, and donations to other Catholic mass communication services represent one of the Knights' major expenditures. The Knights have also established councils in both secular and Catholic universities.",
"title": "Promotion of the Catholic faith"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The order sponsors a number of international awards. The first, the Gaudium et Spes Award, is named after the document from the Second Vatican Council, and is the highest honor bestowed by the order. It \"is awarded only in special circumstances and only to individuals of exceptional merit\" and comes an honorarium of $100,000. In the first 25 years after its institution in 1992, it was only awarded twelve times. The award \"recognizes individuals for their exemplary contributions to the realization of the message of faith and service in the spirit of Christ as articulated in the document for which it is named.\"",
"title": "Awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The second international award, also only given when merited, is the Caritas Award. Named for the theological virtue alternatively translated as either charity or love, it recognizes \"extraordinary works of charity and service\" and was established in 2013. It was first awarded to Monsignor Robert Weiss, pastor of St Rose of Lima in Newtown, Connecticut. The second was awarded to St. Virgilius Knights of Columbus Council 185. Both received the honor, and the $100,000 honorarium, for their actions following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.",
"title": "Awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Saint Michael Award was established in conjunction with the Caritas Award to recognize members of the order who have exemplified a lifetime of service on behalf of the Knights of Columbus. Additionally, at its annual convention each year, the order recognizes other individuals and councils with awards. These include the Family of the Year award, and prizes for the best activities in the categories of church, community, council, culture of life, family, and youth. Additionally, top selling general and field insurance agents are recognized, as are top recruiting individuals and councils.",
"title": "Awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The order established the Grand Cross of the Knights of Columbus, but awarded it only to Cristobal Colón y de La Cerda, Duke of Veragua and descendant of Columbus, when he visited the US in 1893.",
"title": "Awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "While the Knights were politically active from an early date, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, as the \"Catholic anti-defamation character\" of the order began to diminish as Catholics gained more acceptance, the leadership began to use its financial resources to directly influence the direction of the church. That led to the creation of a \"variety of new programs reflecting the proliferation of the new social ministries of the church.\"",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "At times, the leadership of the order has been both liberal and conservative. Martin H. Carmody and Luke E. Hart were both political conservatives, but John J. Phelan was a Democratic politician prior to becoming Supreme Knight, John Swift's \"strong support for economic democracy and social-welfare legislation marks him as a fairly representative New Deal anti-communist,\" and Francis P. Matthews was a civil rights official and member of Harry Truman's cabinet. Anderson previously served in the Office of Public Liaison under Ronald Reagan.",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Knights of Columbus is classified as a 501(c)(8) fraternal benefit society by the IRS. Unlike the more common 501(c)(3) nonprofits, 501(c)(8)s are allowed to engage in limited direct political activity without jeopardizing their tax exemptions. However, Anderson has said \"One of our most important traditions throughout our 125-year history is that we do not, as an organization, become involved in partisan politics.\"",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Knights of Columbus supports political awareness and activity among its members and local councils. Public policy activity is limited to issue-specific campaigns, typically dealing with Catholic family and sanctity of life issues. They state that",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In addition to performing charitable works, the Knights of Columbus encourages its members to meet their responsibilities as Catholic citizens and to become active in the political life of their local communities, to vote and to speak out on the public issues of the day. ... In the political realm, this means opening our public policy efforts and deliberations to the life of Christ and the teachings of the Church. In accord with our Bishops, the Knights of Columbus has consistently maintained positions that take these concerns into account. The order supports and promotes the social doctrine of the Church, including a robust vision of religious liberty that embraces religion's proper role in the private and public spheres.",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The order opposed the persecution of Catholics in Mexico during the Cristero War, and opposed communism. During the 20th century, the order also established the Commission on Religious Prejudices and the Knights of Columbus Historical Commission, organizations which fought against racism. It was also supportive of trade unionism, and published the works \"of the broad array of intellectuals\", including George Schuster, Samuel Flagg Bemis, Allan Nevins, and W. E. B. DuBois.",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "During the Cold War, the order had a history of waging anti-socialist, anti-communist and anti-anarchist crusades. They lobbied for the addition of the words \"under God\" to the Pledge of Allegiance, as a religious response to Soviet atheism. The Knights have actively opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage and in terms of funding, they have also been a key contributor to local measures against same-sex marriage. The Knights have donated over US$1 million to the Susan B. Anthony Foundation and other anti-abortion and anti-contraception organizations.",
"title": "Political activity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On March 10, 2001, the order opened a museum in New Haven dedicated to their history. The 77,000 square foot building cost US$10 million to renovate. It holds mosaics on loan from the Vatican and gifts from Popes, the membership application from John F. Kennedy, and a number of other items related to the history of the Knights. Near the entrance is the cross held by Jesus Christ on the facade of St. Peter's Basilica before undergoing a Knights-financed renovation.",
"title": "Subsidiaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In 2015, the order launched Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a money management firm which invests money in accordance with Catholic social teaching. The firm uses the Socially Responsible Investment Guidelines published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to guide their investment decisions. The guidelines include protecting human life, promoting human dignity, reducing arms production, pursuing economic justice, protecting the environment, and encouraging corporate responsibility.",
"title": "Subsidiaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In addition to the wholly owned subsidiary, it also purchased 20% of Boston Advisors, a boutique investment management firm, managing assets for institutional and high-net-worth investors. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors manages the fixed-income strategies for their funds while Boston Advisors sub-advises on the equity strategies. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors also offers model portfolio, outsourced CIO services, a bank loan strategy, and other alternative investment strategies. In 2019, the Knights purchased the institutional management business of Boston Advisors.",
"title": "Subsidiaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The order owns and operates the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington D.C. In 2011, the Order purchased the 130,000-square-foot John Paul II Cultural Center. The mission as a cultural center ended in 2009 and the Knights rebranded it as a shrine to Pope John Paul II. Soon after the pope was canonized, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops named the building a national shrine.",
"title": "Subsidiaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Each year 64,000 pilgrims visit the shrine, which features video content, interactive displays, and personal effects from John Paul. There is also a first class relic of the pope's blood on display for veneration. It also serves as a base for the Order in Washington, D.C.",
"title": "Subsidiaries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Some of the most notable American members include John F. Kennedy; Ted Kennedy; Al Smith; Sargent Shriver; Samuel Alito; Conrad Hilton; John Boehner; Ray Flynn; Jeb Bush; film maker John Ford; and Sergeant Major Daniel Daly, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient.",
"title": "Notable Knights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In the world of sports, Vince Lombardi, the famed former coach of the Green Bay Packers; James Connolly, the first Olympic gold medal champion in modern times; Floyd Patterson, former heavyweight boxing champion; and baseball legend Babe Ruth were all knights.",
"title": "Notable Knights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On October 15, 2006, Bishop Rafael Guízar y Valencia (1878–1938) was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in Rome. In 2000, six other Knights, who were killed in the violence following the Mexican Revolution, were declared saints by Pope John Paul II.",
"title": "Notable Knights"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The emblem of the order was designed by Past Supreme Knight James T. Mullen and adopted at the second Supreme Council meeting on May 12, 1883. Shields used by medieval knights served as the inspiration. The emblem consists of a shield mounted on a Formée cross, which is an artistic representation of the cross of Christ. This represents the Catholic identity of the order.",
"title": "Emblem of the order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Mounted on the shield are three objects: the fasces, an anchor, and a sword. In ancient Rome, the fasces was carried before magistrates as an emblem of authority. The order uses it as \"symbolic of authority which must exist in any tightly-bonded and efficiently operating organization.\" The anchor represents Christopher Columbus, admiral under the orders of the kings of Spain and patron of this partnership, here a symbol of the Catholic contribution to America. The short sword, or dagger, was a weapon used by medieval knights. The shield as a whole, with the letters \"K of C\", represents \"Catholic Knighthood in organized merciful action.\"",
"title": "Emblem of the order"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Many councils also have women's auxiliaries. At the turn of the 20th century, two were formed by local councils, each taking the name Daughters of Isabella. They expanded and issued charters to other circles but never merged. The newer organization renamed itself the Catholic Daughters of the Americas in 1921, and both have structures independent of the Knights of Columbus. Other groups are known as the Columbiettes. In the Philippines, the ladies' auxiliary is known as the Daughters of Mary Immaculate.",
"title": "Auxiliary groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "A proposal in 1896 to establish councils for women did not pass and was never proposed again.",
"title": "Auxiliary groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Knights' official junior organization is the Columbian Squires. According to its founder Barnabas McDonald, \"The supreme purpose of the Columbian Squires is character building.\"",
"title": "Auxiliary groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "It was founded in 1925 in Duluth, Minnesota, by Barnabas McDonald. The formation of new Squire Circles in the United States and Canada is discouraged, as the Order desires to move youth activities from exclusive clubs into the local parish youth groups.",
"title": "Auxiliary groups"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Knights of Columbus is a member of the International Alliance of Catholic Knights (IACK), which includes fifteen fraternal orders such as the Knights of Saint Columbanus in Ireland, the Knights of St Columba in Great Britain, the Knights of Peter Claver in the United States, the Knights of the Southern Cross in Australia and New Zealand, the Knights of Marshall in Ghana, the Knights of Da Gama in South Africa, and the Knights of Saint Mulumba in Nigeria.",
"title": "Similar Christian organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The Loyal Orange Institution, also known as the Orange Order, is a similar organization for Protestant Christians.",
"title": "Similar Christian organizations"
}
] |
The Knights of Columbus is a global Catholic fraternal service order founded by Fr. Michael J. McGivney on March 29, 1882. Membership is limited to practicing Catholic men. It is led by Patrick E. Kelly, the order's 14th Supreme Knight. The organization is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. The organization was founded in March 1882 as a mutual benefit society for working-class and immigrant Catholics in the United States. In addition to providing an insurance system for its members, its charter states that it endeavors "to promote such social and intellectual intercourse among its members as shall be desirable and proper." It has grown to support refugee relief, Catholic education, local parishes and dioceses, and global Catholic social and political causes. The Knights promote the Catholic view on public policy issues, including opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. The organization also provides certain financial services to the individual and institutional Catholic market. Its wholly owned insurance company, one of the largest in the world, underwrites more than two million insurance contracts, totaling more than $121 billion of life insurance in force as of 2023. It is a Fortune 1000 company based on its annual revenues. The order also owns the Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors, a money management firm which invests in accordance with Catholic social teachings. As of 2023, the Knights reported having over two million members around the world. Women may participate in K of C through the Columbiettes and other female auxiliaries, and boys may join the Columbian Squires. The Order comprises four different "degrees", each one of which exemplifies one of the core principles of the order. There are more than 16,000 local Knights of Columbus councils around the world, including over 300 on college campuses.
|
2001-09-26T12:15:34Z
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2023-12-18T18:12:56Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_of_Columbus
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Japanese sword
|
A Japanese sword (Japanese: 日本刀, Hepburn: nihontō) is one of several types of traditionally made swords from Japan. Bronze swords were made as early as the Yayoi period (1,000 BC–300 AD), though most people generally refer to the curved blades made from the Heian period (794–1185) to the present day when speaking of "Japanese swords". There are many types of Japanese swords that differ by size, shape, field of application and method of manufacture. Some of the more commonly known types of Japanese swords are the uchigatana, tachi, ōdachi, wakizashi, and tantō.
In modern times the most commonly known type of Japanese sword is the Shinogi-Zukuri katana, which is a single-edged and usually curved longsword traditionally worn by samurai from the 15th century onwards. Western historians have said that Japanese katana were among the finest cutting weapons in world military history, for their intended use.
Other types of Japanese swords include: tsurugi or ken, which is a straight double-edged sword; ōdachi, tachi, which are older styles of a very long curved single-edged sword; uchigatana, a slightly shorter curved single-edged long sword; wakizashi, a medium-sized sword; and tantō, which is an even smaller knife-sized sword. naginata, nagamaki, and yari, despite being polearms, are still considered to be swords, which is a common misconception; naginata, nagamaki, yari and even ōdachi are in reality not swords.
The type classifications for Japanese swords indicate the combination of a blade and its mounts as this, then, determines the style of use of the blade. An unsigned and shortened blade that was once made and intended for use as a tachi may be alternately mounted in tachi koshirae and katana koshirae. It is properly distinguished, then, by the style of mount it currently inhabits. A long tanto may be classified as a wakizashi due to its length being over 30 cm (12 in), however it may have originally been mounted and used as a tanto making the length distinction somewhat arbitrary but necessary when referring to unmounted short blades. When the mounts are taken out of the equation, a tanto and wakizashi will be determined by length under or over 30 cm (12 in), unless their intended use can be absolutely determined or the speaker is rendering an opinion on the intended use of the blade. In this way, a blade formally attributed as a wakizashi due to length may be informally discussed between individuals as a tanto because the blade was made during an age where tanto were popular and the wakizashi as a companion sword to katana did not yet exist.
The following are types of Japanese swords:
There are other bladed weapons made in the same traditional manner as Japanese swords, which are not swords, but are still classified as Japanese swords (nihontō) (as "tō" means "blade", rather than specifically "sword") because of the way they are made in a similar manner to Japanese swords:
Other edged weapons or tools that are made using the same methods as Japanese swords:
Each Japanese sword is classified according to when the blade was made.:
Historically in Japan, the ideal blade of a Japanese sword has been considered to be the kotō in the Kamakura period, and the swordsmiths from the Edo period to the present day from the Shinto period focused on reproducing the blade of a Japanese sword in the Kamakura period. There are more than 100 Japanese swords designated as National Treasures in Japan, of which the Kotō of the Kamakura period account for 80% and the tachi account for 70%.
Japanese swords since shintō are different from kotō in forging method and steel. This was due to the destruction of the Bizen school due to a great flood, the spread of the Mino school, and the virtual unification of Japan by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, which made almost no difference in the steel used by each school. Japanese swords since the Shintō period often have gorgeous decorations carved on the blade and lacquered maki-e decorations on the scabbard. This was due to the economic development and the increased value of swords as arts and crafts as the Sengoku Period ended and the peaceful Edo Period began.
Japanese swords are still commonly seen today; antique and modern forged swords can be found and purchased. Modern, authentic Japanese swords (nihontō) are made by a few hundred swordsmiths. Many examples can be seen at an annual competition hosted by the All Japan Swordsmith Association, under the auspices of the Nihontō Bunka Shinkō Kyōkai (Society for the Promotion of Japanese Sword Culture). However, in order to maintain the quality of Japanese swords, the Japanese government limits the number of Japanese swords a swordsmith can make in a year to 24 (up to 2 swords per month). Therefore, many of the swords called "Japanese sword" distributed around the world today are made in China, and the manufacturing process and quality are not authorized.
Many old Japanese swords can be traced back to one of five provinces, each of which had its own school, traditions, and "trademarks" (e.g., the swords from Mino province were "from the start famous for their sharpness"). These schools are known as Gokaden (The Five Traditions). In the Kotō era there were several other schools that did not fit within the Five Traditions or were known to mix elements of each Gokaden, and they were called wakimono (small school). There were 19 commonly referenced wakimono. The number of swordsmiths of Gokaden, as confirmed by signatures and documents, were 4005 in Bizen, 1269 in Mino, 1025 in Yamato, 847 in Yamashiro and 438 in Sōshū. These traditions and provinces are as follows:
The Yamato school is a school that originated in Yamato Province corresponding to present-day Nara Prefecture. Nara was the capital of ancient Japan. Since there is a legend that it was a swordsmith named Amakuni who first signed the tang of a sword, he is sometimes regarded as the founder and the oldest school. However, the founder identified in the material is Yukinobu in the Heian period. They forged the swords that were often worn by monk warriors called sōhei in Nara's large temples. The Yamato school consists of five schools: Senjuin, Shikkake, Taima, Tegai, and Hōshō. Each school forged swords under the supervision of a different temple. In the middle of the Muromachi period, swordsmiths moved to various places such as Mino, and the school disappeared. Their swords are often characterized by a deep curve, a narrow width from blade to back, a high central ridge, and a small tip. There are direct lines on the surface of the blade, the hamon is linear, and the grain at the boundary of the hamon is medium in size. It is often evaluated as a sword with a simple and strong impression.
The Yamashiro school is a school that originated in Yamashiro Province, corresponding to present-day Kyoto Prefecture. When Emperor Kanmu relocated the capital to Kyoto in 794, swordsmiths began to gather. The founder of the school was Sanjō Munechika in the late 10th century in the Heian period. The Yamashiro school consisted of schools such as Sanjō, Ayanokōji, Awataguchi, and Rai. At first, they often forged swords in response to aristocrats' demands, so importance was placed on aesthetics and practicality was not emphasized. However, when a domestic conflict occurred at the end of the Heian period, practicality was emphasized and a swordsmith was invited from the Bizen school. In the Kamakura period, tachi from a magnificent rai school became popular among samurai. After that, they also adopted the forging method of Sōshū school. Their swords are often characterized as long and narrow, curved from the base or center, and have a sparkle on the surface of the blade, with the hamon being straight and the grains on the boundary of the hamon being small. It is often evaluated as a sword with an elegant impression.
The Bizen school is a school that originated in Bizen Province, corresponding to present-day Okayama Prefecture. Bizen has been a major production area of high quality iron sand since ancient times. The Ko-bizen school in the mid Heian period was the originator. The Bizen school consisted of schools such as Ko-bizen, Fukuoka-ichimonji, Osafune, and Hatakeda. According to a sword book written in the Kamakura period, out of the 12 best swordsmiths in Japan who were convened by the Retired Emperor Go-Toba, 10 were from the Bizen school. Great swordsmiths were born one after another in the Osafune school which started in the Kamakura period, and it developed to the largest school in the history of Japanese swords. Kanemitsu and Nagayoshi of the Osafune school were apprentices to Masamune of the Sōshū school, the greatest swordsmith in Japan. While they forged high-quality swords by order, at the same time, from the Muromachi period, when wars became large-scale, they mass-produced low-quality swords for drafted farmers and for export. The Bizen school had enjoyed the highest prosperity for a long time, but declined rapidly due to a great flood which occurred in the late 16th century during the Sengoku period. Their swords are often characterized as curved from the base, with irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, while the hamon has a flashy pattern like a series of cloves, and there is little grain but a color gradient at the boundary of the hamon. It is often evaluated as a sword with a showy and gorgeous impression.
The Sōshū school is a school that originated in Sagami Province, corresponding to present-day Kanagawa Prefecture. Sagami Province was the political center of Japan where the Kamakura shogunate was established in the Kamakura period. At the end of the 13th century, the Kamakura shogunate invited swordsmiths from Yamashiro school and Bizen school, and swordsmiths began to gather. Shintōgo Kunimitsu forged experimental swords by combining the forging technology of Yamashiro school and Bizen school. Masamune, who learned from Shintōgo Kunimitsu, became the greatest swordsmith in Japan. From the lessons of the Mongol invasion of Japan, they revolutionized the forging process to make stronger swords. Although this forging method is not fully understood to date, one of the elements is heating at higher temperatures and rapid cooling. Their revolution influenced other schools to make the highest quality swords, but this technique was lost before the Azuchi–Momoyama period (Shintō period). The Sōshū school declined after the fall of the Kamakura shogunate. Their swords are often characterized by a shallow curve, a wide blade to the back, and a thin cross-section. There are irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, the hamon has a pattern of undulations with continuous roundness, and the grains at the boundary of the hamon are large.
The Mino school is a school that originated in Mino Province, corresponding to present-day Gifu Prefecture. Mino Province was a strategic traffic point connecting the Kanto and Kansai regions, and was surrounded by powerful daimyo (feudal lords). The Mino school started in the middle of the Kamakura period, when swordsmiths of the Yamato school who learned from the Sōshū school gathered in Mino. The Mino school became the largest production area of Japanese swords after the Bizen school declined due to a great flood. The production rate of katana was high, because it was the newest school among 5 big schools. Their swords are often characterized by a slightly higher central ridge and a thinner back. There are irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, the hamon are various, and the grain on the border of the hamon are hardly visible.
The word katana was used in ancient Japan and is still used today, whereas the old usage of the word nihontō is found in the poem the Song of Nihontō, by the Song dynasty poet Ouyang Xiu. The word nihontō became more common in Japan in the late Tokugawa shogunate. Due to importation of Western swords, the word nihontō was adopted in order to distinguish it from the Western sword (洋刀, yōtō).
Meibutsu (noted swords) is a special designation given to sword masterpieces which are listed in a compilation from the 18th century called the "Kyoho Meibutsucho". The swords listed are Koto blades from several different provinces; 100 of the 166 swords listed are known to exist today, with Sōshū blades being very well represented. The "Kyoho Meibutsucho" also listed the nicknames, prices, history and length of the Meibutsu, with swords by Yoshimitsu, Masamune, Yoshihiro, and Sadamune being very highly priced.
Each blade has a unique profile, mostly dependent on the swordsmith and the construction method. The most prominent part is the middle ridge, or shinogi. In the earlier picture, the examples were flat to the shinogi, then tapering to the blade edge. However, swords could narrow down to the shinogi, then narrow further to the blade edge, or even expand outward towards the shinogi then shrink to the blade edge (producing a trapezoidal shape). A flat or narrowing shinogi is called shinogi-hikushi, whereas a flat blade is called a shinogi-takushi.
The shinogi can be placed near the back of the blade for a longer, sharper, more fragile tip or a more moderate shinogi near the center of the blade.
The sword also has an exact tip shape, which is considered an extremely important characteristic: the tip can be long (ōkissaki), medium (chūkissaki), short (kokissaki), or even hooked backwards (ikuri-ōkissaki). In addition, whether the front edge of the tip is more curved (fukura-tsuku) or (relatively) straight (fukura-kareru) is also important.
The kissaki (point) is not usually a "chisel-like" point, and the Western knife interpretation of a "tantō point" is rarely found on true Japanese swords; a straight, linearly sloped point has the advantage of being easy to grind, but less stabbing/piercing capabilities compared to traditional Japanese kissaki Fukura (curvature of the cutting edge of tip) types. Kissaki usually have a curved profile, and smooth three-dimensional curvature across their surface towards the edge—though they are bounded by a straight line called the yokote and have crisp definition at all their edges. While the straight tip on the "American tanto" is identical to traditional Japanese fukura, two characteristics set it apart from Japanese sword makes: The absolute lack of curve only possible with modern tools, and the use of the word "tanto" in the nomenclature of the western tribute is merely a nod to the Japanese word for knife or short sword, rather than a tip style.
Although it is not commonly known, the "chisel point" kissaki originated in Japan. Examples of such are shown in the book "The Japanese Sword" by Kanzan Sato. Because American bladesmiths use this design extensively it is a common misconception that the design originated in America.
A hole is punched through the tang nakago, called a mekugi-ana. It is used to anchor the blade using a mekugi, a small bamboo pin that is inserted into another cavity in the handle tsuka and through the mekugi-ana, thus restricting the blade from slipping out. To remove the handle one removes the mekugi. The swordsmith's signature mei is carved on the tang.
In Japanese, the scabbard is referred to as a saya, and the handguard piece, often intricately designed as an individual work of art—especially in later years of the Edo period—was called the tsuba. Other aspects of the mountings (koshirae), such as the menuki (decorative grip swells), habaki (blade collar and scabbard wedge), fuchi and kashira (handle collar and cap), kozuka (small utility knife handle), kogai (decorative skewer-like implement), saya lacquer, and tsuka-ito (professional handle wrap, also named tsukamaki), received similar levels of artistry.
The mei is the signature inscribed on to the tang of the Japanese sword. Fake signatures ("gimei") are common not only due to centuries of forgeries but potentially misleading ones that acknowledge prominent smiths and guilds, and those commissioned to a separate signer.
Sword scholars collect and study oshigata, or paper tang-rubbings, taken from a blade: to identify the mei, the hilt is removed and the sword is held point side up. The mei is chiseled onto the tang on the side which traditionally faces away from the wearer's body while being worn; since the katana and wakizashi are always worn with the cutting edge up, the edge should be held to the viewer's left. The inscription will be viewed as kanji on the surface of the tang: the first two kanji represent the province; the next pair is the smith; and the last, when present, is sometimes a variation of 'made by', or, 'respectfully'. The date will be inscribed near the mei, either with the reign name; the Zodiacal Method; or those calculated from the reign of the legendary Emperor Jimmu, dependent upon the period.
What generally differentiates the different swords is their length. Japanese swords are measured in units of shaku. Since 1891, the modern Japanese shaku is approximately equal to a foot (11.93 inches), calibrated with the meter to equal exactly 10 meters per 33 shaku (30.30 cm).
However, the historical shaku was slightly longer (13.96 inches or 35.45 cm). Thus, there may sometimes be confusion about the blade lengths, depending on which shaku value is being assumed when converting to metric or U.S. customary measurements.
The three main divisions of Japanese blade length are:
A blade shorter than one shaku is considered a tantō (knife). A blade longer than one shaku but less than two is considered a shōtō (short sword). The wakizashi and kodachi are in this category. The length is measured in a straight line across the back of the blade from tip to munemachi (where blade meets tang). Most blades that fall into the "shōtō" size range are wakizashi. However, some daitō were designed with blades slightly shorter than 2 shaku. These were called kodachi and are somewhere in between a true daitō and a wakizashi. A shōtō and a daitō together are called a daishō (literally, "big-little"). The daishō was the symbolic armament of the Edo period samurai.
A blade longer than two shaku is considered a daitō, or long sword. To qualify as a daitō the sword must have a blade longer than 2 shaku (approximately 24 inches or 60 centimeters) in a straight line. While there is a well defined lower limit to the length of a daitō, the upper limit is not well enforced; a number of modern historians, swordsmiths, etc. say that swords that are over 3 shaku in blade length are "longer than normal daitō" and are usually referred to as ōdachi. The word "daitō" is often used when explaining the related terms shōtō (short sword) and daishō (the set of both large and small sword). Miyamoto Musashi refers to the long sword in The Book of Five Rings. He is referring to the katana in this, and refers to the nodachi and the odachi as "extra-long swords".
Before about 1500 most swords were usually worn suspended from cords on a belt, edge-down. This style is called jindachi-zukuri, and daitō worn in this fashion are called tachi (average blade length of 75–80 cm). From 1600 to 1867, more swords were worn through an obi (sash), paired with a smaller blade; both worn edge-up. This style is called buke-zukuri, and all daitō worn in this fashion are katana, averaging 70–74 cm (2 shaku 3 sun to 2 shaku 4 sun 5 bu) in blade length. However, Japanese swords of longer lengths also existed, including lengths up to 78 cm (2 shaku 5 sun 5 bu).
It was not simply that the swords were worn by cords on a belt, as a 'style' of sorts. Such a statement trivializes an important function of such a manner of bearing the sword. It was a very direct example of 'form following function.' At this point in Japanese history, much of the warfare was fought on horseback. Being so, if the sword or blade were in a more vertical position, it would be cumbersome, and awkward to draw. Suspending the sword by 'cords' allowed the sheath to be more horizontal, and far less likely to bind while drawing it in that position.
Abnormally long blades (longer than 3 shaku), usually carried across the back, are called ōdachi or nodachi. The word ōdachi is also sometimes used as a synonym for Japanese swords. Odachi means "great sword", and Nodachi translates to "field sword". These greatswords were used during war, as the longer sword gave a foot soldier a reach advantage. These swords are now illegal in Japan. Citizens are not allowed to possess an odachi unless it is for ceremonial purposes.
Here is a list of lengths for different types of blades:
Blades whose length is next to a different classification type are described with a prefix 'O-' (for great) or 'Ko-' (for small), e.g. a Wakizashi with a length of 59 cm is called an O-wakizashi (almost a Katana) whereas a Katana of 61 cm is called a Ko-Katana (for small Katana; but note that a small accessory blade sometimes found in the sheath of a long sword is also a "kogatana" (小刀)).
Since 1867, restrictions and/or the deconstruction of the samurai class meant that most blades have been worn jindachi-zukuri style, like Western navy officers. Since 1953, there has been a resurgence in the buke-zukuri style, permitted only for demonstration purposes.
The production of swords in Japan is divided into specific time periods: jōkotō (ancient swords, until around 900 A.D.), kotō (old swords from around 900–1596), shintō (new swords 1596–1780), shinshintō (new new swords 1781–1876), gendaitō (modern or contemporary swords 1876–present)
Early examples of iron swords were straight tsurugi, chokutō and others with unusual shapes, some of the styles and techniques were derived from Chinese dao, and some directly imported through trade. The swords of this period were a mixture of swords of Japanese original style and those of Chinese style brought to Japan via the Korean Peninsula and East China Sea. The cross-sectional shape of the blades of these early swords was an isosceles triangular hira-zukuri, and the kiriha-zukuri sword, which sharpened only the part close to the cutting edge side of a planar blade, gradually appeared. Swords of this period are classified as jōkotō and are often referred to in distinction from Japanese swords.
The direct predecessor of the tachi (太刀) has been called Warabitetō (ja:蕨手刀) by the Emishi (Not to be confused with Ainu) of Tohoku. The Nihonto Meikan shows the earliest and by far the largest group of Ōshū smiths from the beginning of the 8th century were from the Mokusa school, listing over 100 Mokusa smiths before the beginning of the Kamakura period. Archaeological excavations of the Ōshū Tohoku region show iron ore smelting sites dating back to the early Nara period. The Tohoku region and indeed the whole Ōshū district in the 8th century was controlled and populated by the Emishi. Archaeological evidence of recovered Warabitetō (蕨手刀) show a high concentration in the burial goods of the Ōshū and Hokkaido regions. Mokusa Area was famous for legendary swordsmiths in the Heian Period (AD 794–1185). They are considered as the original producers of the Japanese swords known as "Warabitetō " which can date back to the sixth to eighth centuries. "Warabitetō " gained its fame through the series of battles between Emishi people (蝦夷) and the Yamato-chotei government (大 和朝廷) in the late eighth century. Using "Warabitetō," the small number of Emishi soldiers could resist against the numerous Yamato-chotei army over a Thirty-Eight Years' War (三十八年戦争) (AD 770–811). The Meikan describes that from earlier time there was a list of forty two famous swordsmiths in the Toukou Meikan 刀工銘鑑 at Kanchiin 観智院. Eight of the swordsmiths on this list were from Ōshū schools. Five from Mokusa being Onimaru 鬼丸, Yoyasu 世安, Morifusa 森房, Hatafusa 幡房 and Gaan 瓦安, two from the Tamatsukuri Fuju 諷誦,Houji 寶次 and one from Gassan signing just Gassan 月山. According to the Nihonto Meikan, the Ōshū swordsmith group consists of the Mokusa (舞草), the Gassan (月山) and the Tamatsukuri (玉造), later to become the Hoju (寶壽) schools. Ōshū swords appear in various old books of this time, for example Heiji Monogatari 平治物語 (Tale of Heiji), Konjaku Monogatari 今昔物語 (Anthology of tales from the past), Kojidan 古事談 (Japanese collection of Setsuwa 説話), and Gikeiki 義経記 (War tale that focuses on the legends of Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 and his followers). Ōshū swordsmiths appeared in books in quite early times compared to others. Tales in these books tell of the Emishi-to in the capital city and these swords seem to have been quite popular with the Bushi. Maybe a badge of honour being captured weapons. For example, In “Nihongiryaku” 日本紀略 983AD :” the number of people wearing a funny looking Tachi 太刀 is increasing.” In “Kauyagokau” 高野御幸 1124AD :“ when emperor Shirakawa 白河法皇 visited Kouyasan 高 野山, Fujiwara Zaemon Michisue 藤原左衛門通季 was wearing a Fushū sword “ In “Heihanki” 兵範記 1158AD there was a line that mentioned the Emperor himself had Fushū Tachi.” It seems that during the late Heian the Emishi-to was gaining popularity in Kyoto.
In the middle of the Heian period (794–1185), samurai improved on the Warabitetō to develop Kenukigata-tachi (ja:毛抜形太刀) -early Japanese sword-. To be more precise, it is thought that the Emishi improved the warabitetō and developed Kenukigata-warabitetō (ja:毛抜形蕨手刀) with a hole in the hilt and kenukigatatō (ja:毛抜形刀) without decorations on the tip of the hilt, and the samurai developed kenukigata-tachi based on these swords. Kenukigata-tachi, which was developed in the first half of the 10th century, has a three-dimensional cross-sectional shape of an elongated pentagonal or hexagonal blade called shinogi-zukuri and a gently curved single-edged blade, which are typical features of Japanese swords. There is no wooden hilt attached to kenukigata-tachi, and the tang (nakago) which is integrated with the blade is directly gripped and used. The term kenukigata is derived from the fact that the central part of tang is hollowed out in the shape of an ancient Japanese tweezers (kenuki).
In the tachi developed after kenukigata-tachi, a structure in which the hilt is fixed to the tang (nakago) with a pin called mekugi was adopted. As a result, a sword with three basic external elements of Japanese swords, the cross-sectional shape of shinogi-zukuri, a gently curved single-edged blade, and the structure of nakago, was completed. Its shape may reflects the changing form of warfare in Japan. Cavalry were now the predominant fighting unit and the older straight chokutō were particularly unsuitable for fighting from horseback. The curved sword is a far more efficient weapon when wielded by a warrior on horseback where the curve of the blade adds considerably to the downward force of a cutting action. Early models had uneven curves with the deepest part of the curve at the hilt. As eras changed the center of the curve tended to move up the blade.
The tachi is a sword which is generally larger than a katana, and is worn suspended with the cutting edge down. This was the standard form of carrying the sword for centuries, and would eventually be displaced by the katana style where the blade was worn thrust through the belt, edge up. The tachi was worn slung across the left hip. The signature on the tang of the blade was inscribed in such a way that it would always be on the outside of the sword when worn. This characteristic is important in recognizing the development, function, and different styles of wearing swords from this time onwards.
When worn with full armour, the tachi would be accompanied by a shorter blade in the form known as koshigatana (腰刀, "waist sword"); a type of short sword with no handguard, and where the hilt and scabbard meet to form the style of mounting called an aikuchi ("meeting mouth"). Daggers (tantō), were also carried for close combat fighting as well as carried generally for personal protection.
By the 11th century during the Heian period, Japanese swords had already been exported to neighboring countries in Asia. For example, in the poem "The Song of Japanese Swords" Ouyang Xiu, a statesman of the Song Dynasty in China, described Japanese swords as "It is a treasured sword with a scabbard made of fragrant wood covered with fish skin, decorated with brass and copper, and capable of exorcising evil spirits. It is imported at a great cost.".
From the Heian period (794－1185), ordinary samurai wore swords of the style called kurourusi tachi (kokushitsu no tachi, 黒漆太刀), which meant black lacquer tachi. The hilt of a tachi is wrapped in leather or ray skin, and it is wrapped with black thread or leather cord, and the scabbard is coated with black lacquer. On the other hand, court nobles wore tachi decorated with precisely carved metal and jewels for ceremonial purposes. High-ranking court nobles wore swords of the style called kazari tachi or kaza tachi (飾太刀, 飾剣), which meant decorative tachi, and lower-ranking court nobles wore simplified kazatachi swords of the style called hosodachi (細太刀), which meant thin tachi. The kazatachi and hosodachi worn by nobles were initially straight like a chokutō, but since the Kamakura period they have had a gentle curve under the influence of tachi. Since tachi worn by court nobles were for ceremonial use, they generally had an iron plate instead of a blade.
In the Kamakura period (1185－1333), high-ranking samurai wore hyogo gusari tachi (hyogo kusari no tachi, 兵庫鎖太刀), which meant a sword with chains in the arsenal. The scabbard of the tachi was covered with a gilt copper plate and hung by chains at the waist. At the end of the Kamakura period, simplified hyogo gusari tachi came to be made as an offering to the kami of Shinto shrines and fell out of use as weapons. On the other hand, in the Kamakura period, there was a type of tachi called hirumaki tachi (蛭巻太刀) with a scabbard covered with metal, which was used as a weapon until the Muromachi period. The meaning was a sword wrapped around a leech, and its feature was that a thin metal plate was spirally wrapped around the scabbard, so it was both sturdy and decorative, and chains were not used to hang the scabbard around the waist.
The Mongol invasions of Japan in the 13th century during the Kamakura period spurred further evolution of the Japanese sword. The swordsmiths of the Sōshū school represented by Masamune studied tachi that were broken or bent in battle, developed new production methods, and created innovative Japanese swords. They forged the blade using a combination of soft and hard steel to optimize the temperature and timing of the heating and cooling of the blade, resulting in a lighter but more robust blade. They also made the curve of the blade gentle, lengthened the tip linearly, widened the width from the cutting edge to the opposite side of the blade, and thinned the cross section to improve the penetration and cutting ability of the blade.
Historically in Japan, the ideal blade of a Japanese sword has been considered to be the kotō (古刀) (lit., "old swords") in the Kamakura period, and the swordsmiths from the Edo period (1603–1868) to the present day from the shinō (新刀) (lit., "new swords") period focused on reproducing the blade of the Japanese sword made in Kamakura period. There are more than 100 Japanese swords designated as National Treasures in Japan, of which the Kotō of the Kamakura period account for 80% and the tachi account for 70%.
From the end of the Kamakura period to the end of the Muromachi period (1333－1573), kawatsutsumi tachi (革包太刀), which means a tachi wrapped in leather, was popular. The kawatsutsumi tachi was stronger than the kurourushi tachi because its hilt was wrapped in leather or ray skin, lacquer was painted on top of it, leather straps and cords were wrapped around it, and the scabbard and sometimes the tsuba (hand guard) were also wrapped in leather.
In the Nanboku-chō period (1336－1392) which corresponds to the early Muromachi period (1336－1573), huge Japanese swords such as ōdachi became popular. The reason for this is thought to be that the conditions for making a practical large-sized sword were established due to the nationwide spread of strong and sharp swords of the Sōshū school. In the case of ōdachi whose blade was 150 cm long, it was impossible to draw a sword from the scabbard on the waist, so people carried it on their back or had their servants carry it. Large naginata and kanabō were also popular in this period.
Katana originates from sasuga, a kind of tantō used by lower-ranking samurai who fought on foot in the Kamakura period. Their main weapon was a long naginata and sasuga was a spare weapon. In the Nanboku-chō period, long weapons such as ōdachi were popular, and along with this, sasuga lengthened and finally became katana. Also, there is a theory that koshigatana (腰刀), a kind of tantō which was equipped by high ranking samurai together with tachi, developed to katana through the same historical background as sasuga, and it is possible that both developed to katana. The oldest katana in existence today is called Hishizukuri uchigatana, which was forged in the Nanbokuchō period, and was dedicated to Kasuga Shrine later.
By the 15th century, Japanese swords had already gained international fame by being exported to China and Korea. For example, Korea learned how to make Japanese swords by sending swordsmiths to Japan and inviting Japanese swordsmiths to Korea. According to the record of June 1, 1430 in the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, a Korean swordsmith who went to Japan and mastered the method of making Japanese swords presented a Japanese sword to the King of Korea and was rewarded for the excellent work which was no different from the swords made by the Japanese.
Traditionally, yumi (bows) were the main weapon of war in Japan, and tachi and naginata were used only for close combat. The Ōnin War in the late 15th century in the Muromachi period expanded into a large-scale domestic war, in which employed farmers called ashigaru were mobilized in large numbers. They fought on foot using katana shorter than tachi. In the Sengoku period (1467－1615, period of warring states) in the late Muromachi period, the war became bigger and ashigaru fought in a close formation using yari (spears) lent to them. Furthermore, in the late 16th century, tanegashima (muskets) were introduced from Portugal, and Japanese swordsmiths mass-produced improved products, with ashigaru fighting with leased guns. On the battlefield in Japan, guns and spears became main weapons in addition to bows. Due to the changes in fighting styles in these wars, the tachi and naginata became obsolete among samurai, and the katana, which was easy to carry, became the mainstream. The dazzling looking tachi gradually became a symbol of the authority of high-ranking samurai.
On the other hand, kenjutsu (swordsmanship) that makes use of the characteristics of katana was invented. The quicker draw of the sword was well suited to combat where victory depended heavily on short response times. (The practice and martial art for drawing the sword quickly and responding to a sudden attack was called ‘Battōjutsu’, which is still kept alive through the teaching of Iaido.) The katana further facilitated this by being worn thrust through a belt-like sash (obi) with the sharpened edge facing up. Ideally, samurai could draw the sword and strike the enemy in a single motion. Previously, the curved tachi had been worn with the edge of the blade facing down and suspended from a belt.
From the 15th century, low-quality swords were mass-produced under the influence of the large-scale war. These swords, along with spears, were lent to recruited farmers called ashigaru and swords ware exported . Such mass-produced swords are called kazuuchimono, and swordsmiths of the Bisen school and Mino school produced them by division of labor. The export of Japanese sword reached its height during the Muromachi period when at least 200,000 swords were shipped to Ming Dynasty China in official trade in an attempt to soak up the production of Japanese weapons and make it harder for pirates in the area to arm. In the Ming Dynasty of China, Japanese swords and their tactics were studied to repel pirates, and wodao and miaodao were developed based on Japanese swords.
From this period, the tang (nakago) of many old tachi were cut and shortened into katana. This kind of remake is called suriage (磨上げ). For example, many of the tachi that Masamune forged during the Kamakura period were converted into katana, so his only existing works are katana and tantō. During this period, a great flood occurred in Bizen, which was the largest production area of Japanese swords, and the Bizen school rapidly declined, after which the Mino school flourished.
From around the 16th century, many Japanese swords were exported to Thailand, where katana-style swords were made and prized for battle and art work, and some of them are in the collections of the Thai royal family.
In the Sengoku period (1467－1615) or the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568－1600), the itomaki tachi (itomaki no tachi, 糸巻太刀), which means a tachi wound with thread, appeared and became the mainstream of tachi after that. itomaki tachi was decorated with gorgeous lacquer decorations with lots of maki-e and flashy colored threads, and was used as a gift, a ceremony, or an offering to the kami of Shinto shrines.
In later Japanese feudal history, during the Sengoku and Edo periods, certain high-ranking warriors of what became the ruling class would wear their sword tachi-style (edge-downward), rather than with the scabbard thrust through the belt with the edge upward. This style of swords is called handachi, "half tachi". In handachi, both styles were often mixed, for example, fastening to the obi was katana style, but metalworking of the scabbard was tachi style.
In the Muromachi period, especially the Sengoku period, anybody such as farmers, townspeople and monks could equip a sword. However, in 1588 during the Azuchi–Momoyama period, Toyotomi Hideyoshi conducted a sword hunt and banned farmers from owning them with weapons.
However, Toyotomi's sword hunt couldn't disarm peasants. Farmers and townspeople could wear daisho until 1683. And most of them kept wearing wakizashi on a daily basis until the middle of the 18th century. After then they wore it special times(travel, wedding, funeral) until meiji restoration.
Swords forged after 1596 in the Keichō period of the Azuchi-Momoyama period are classified as shintō (New swords). Japanese swords since shintō are different from kotō in forging method and steel (tamahagane). This is thought to be because Bizen school, which was the largest swordsmith group of Japanese swords, was destroyed by a great flood in 1590 and the mainstream shifted to Mino school, and because Toyotomi Hideyoshi virtually unified Japan, uniform steel began to be distributed throughout Japan. The kotō swords, especially the Bizen school swords made in the Kamakura period, had a midare-utsuri like a white mist between hamon and shinogi, but the swords since shinto have almost disappeared. In addition, the whole body of the blade became whitish and hard. Almost no one was able to reproduce midare-utsurii until Kunihira Kawachi reproduced it in 2014.
Japanese swords since the sintō period often have gorgeous decorations carved on the blade and lacquered maki-e decorations on the scabbard. This was due to the economic development and the increased value of swords as arts and crafts as the Sengoku Period ended and the peaceful Edo Period began. The Umetada school led by Umetada Myoju who was considered to be the founder of shinto led the improvement of the artistry of Japanese swords in this period. They were both swordsmiths and metalsmiths, and were famous for carving the blade, making metal accouterments such as tsuba (handguard), remodeling from tachi to katana (suriage), and inscriptions inlaid with gold.
During this period, the Tokugawa shogunate required samurai to wear Katana and shorter swords in pairs. These short swords were wakizashi and tantō, and wakizashi were mainly selected. This set of two is called a daishō. Only samurai could wear the daishō: it represented their social power and personal honour. Samurai could wear decorative sword mountings in their daily lives, but the Tokugawa shogunate regulated the formal sword that samurai wore when visiting a castle by regulating it as a daisho made of a black scabbard, a hilt wrapped with white ray skin and black string.
Townspeople (Chōnin) and farmers were allowed to equip a short wakizashi, and the public were often equipped with wakizashi on their travels. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, swordmaking and the use of firearms declined. Japanese swords made in this period is classified as shintō.
In the late 18th century, swordsmith Suishinshi Masahide criticized that the present katana blades only emphasized decoration and had a problem with their toughness. He insisted that the bold and strong kotō blade from the Kamakura period to the Nanboku-chō period was the ideal Japanese sword, and started a movement to restore the production method and apply it to katana. Katana made after this is classified as a shinshintō (新々刀), "new revival swords" or literally "new-new swords." One of the most popular swordsmiths in Japan today is Minamoto Kiyomaro who was active in this shinshintō period. His popularity is due to his timeless exceptional skill, as he was nicknamed "Masamune in Yotsuya" and his disastrous life. His works were traded at high prices and exhibitions were held at museums all over Japan from 2013 to 2014.
The arrival of Matthew Perry in 1853 and the subsequent Convention of Kanagawa caused chaos in Japanese society. Conflicts began to occur frequently between the forces of sonnō jōi (尊王攘夷派), who wanted to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate and rule by the Emperor, and the forces of sabaku (佐幕派), who wanted the Tokugawa Shogunate to continue. These political activists, called the shishi (志士), fought using a practical katana, called the kinnōtō (勤皇刀) or the bakumatsutō (幕末刀). Their katana were often longer than 90 cm (35.43 in) in blade length, less curved, and had a big and sharp point, which was advantageous for stabbing in indoor battles.
In 1867, the Tokugawa Shogunate declared the return of Japan's sovereignty to the Emperor, and from 1868, the government by the Emperor and rapid modernization of Japan began, which was called the Meiji Restoration. The Haitōrei Edict in 1876 all but banned carrying swords and guns on streets. Overnight, the market for swords died, many swordsmiths were left without a trade to pursue, and valuable skills were lost. Swords forged after the Haitōrei Edict are classified as gendaitō. The craft of making swords was kept alive through the efforts of some individuals, notably Miyamoto kanenori (宮本包則, 1830–1926) and Gassan Sadakazu (月山貞一, 1836–1918), who were appointed Imperial Household Artist. These smiths produced fine works that stand with the best of the older blades for the Emperor and other high-ranking officials. The businessman Mitsumura Toshimo (光村利藻, 1877－1955）tried to preserve their skills by ordering swords and sword mountings from the swordsmiths and craftsmen. He was especially enthusiastic about collecting sword mountings, and he collected about 3,000 precious sword mountings from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period. About 1200 items from a part of the collection are now in the Nezu Museum.
The Japanese sword remained in use in some occupations such as the police force. At the same time, kendo was incorporated into police training so that police officers would have at least the training necessary to properly use one. In time, it was rediscovered that soldiers needed to be armed with swords, and over the decades at the beginning of the 20th century swordsmiths again found work. These swords, derisively called guntō, were often oil-tempered, or simply stamped out of steel and given a serial number rather than a chiseled signature. The mass-produced ones often look like Western cavalry sabers rather than Japanese swords, with blades slightly shorter than blades of the shintō and shinshintō periods. In 1934 the Japanese government issued a military specification for the shin guntō (new army sword), the first version of which was the Type 94 Katana, and many machine- and hand-crafted swords used in World War II conformed to this and later shin guntō specifications.
Under the United States occupation at the end of World War II all armed forces in occupied Japan were disbanded and production of Japanese swords with edges was banned except under police or government permit. The ban was overturned through a personal appeal by Dr. Junji Honma. During a meeting with General Douglas MacArthur, Honma produced blades from the various periods of Japanese history and MacArthur was able to identify very quickly what blades held artistic merit and which could be considered purely weapons. As a result of this meeting, the ban was amended so that guntō weapons would be destroyed while swords of artistic merit could be owned and preserved. Even so, many Japanese swords were sold to American soldiers at a bargain price; in 1958 there were more Japanese swords in America than in Japan. The vast majority of these one million or more swords were guntō, but there were still a sizable number of older swords.
After the Edo period, swordsmiths turned increasingly to the production of civilian goods. The Occupation and its regulations almost put an end to the production of Japanese swords. A few smiths continued their trade, and Honma went on to be a founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Japanese Sword (日本美術刀剣保存協会, Nippon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai), who made it their mission to preserve the old techniques and blades. Thanks to the efforts of other like-minded individuals, the Japanese swords did not disappear, many swordsmiths continued the work begun by Masahide, and the old swordmaking techniques were rediscovered.
Nowadays, iaitō is used for iaidō. Due to their popularity in modern media, display-only Japanese swords have become widespread in the sword marketplace. Ranging from small letter openers to scale replica "wallhangers", these items are commonly made from stainless steel (which makes them either brittle (if made from cutlery-grade 400-series stainless steel) or poor at holding an edge (if made from 300-series stainless steel)) and have either a blunt or very crude edge. There are accounts of good quality stainless steel Japanese swords, however, these are rare at best. Some replica Japanese swords have been used in modern-day armed robberies. As a part of marketing, modern ahistoric blade styles and material properties are often stated as traditional and genuine, promulgating disinformation. Some companies and independent smiths outside Japan produce katana as well, with varying levels of quality. According to the Parliamentary Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Japanese Swords, organized by Japanese Diet members, many Japanese swords distributed around the world as of the 21st century are fake Japanese-style swords made in China. The Sankei Shimbun analyzed that this is because the Japanese government allowed swordsmiths to make only 24 Japanese swords per person per year in order to maintain the quality of Japanese swords.
In Japan, genuine edged hand-made Japanese swords, whether antique or modern, are classified as art objects (and not weapons) and must have accompanying certification in order to be legally owned. Prior to WWII Japan had 1.5million swords in the country – 200,000 of which had been manufactured in factories during the Meiji Restoration. As of 2008, only 100,000 swords remain in Japan. It is estimated that 250,000–350,000 sword have been brought to other nations as souvenirs, art pieces or for Museum purposes. 70% of daito (long swords), formerly owned by Japanese officers, have been exported or brought to the United States.
Many swordsmiths since the Edo period have tried to reproduce the sword of the Kamakura period which is considered as the best sword in the history of Japanese swords, but they have failed. Then, in 2014, Kunihira Kawachi succeeded in reproducing it and won the Masamune Prize, the highest honor as a swordsmith. No one could win the Masamune Prize unless he made an extraordinary achievement, and in the section of tachi and katana, no one had won for 18 years before Kawauchi.
The events of Japanese society have shaped the craft of sword making, as has the sword itself influenced the course of cultural and social development within the nation.
The Museum of Fine Arts states that when an artisan plunged the newly crafted sword into the cold water, a portion of his spirit was transferred into the sword. His spirit, morals and state of mind at the time became crucial to the defining of the swords moral and physical characteristics
During the Jōmon Period (10,000-1000BCE) swords resembled iron knife blades and were used for hunting, fishing and farming. There is the idea that swords were more than a tool during the Jōmon period, no swords have been recovered to back this hypothesis.
The Yayoi Period (1000BCE-300CE) saw the establishment of villages and the cultivation of rice farming within Japan. Rice farming came as a result of Chinese and Korean influence, they were the first group of people to introduce swords into the Japanese Isles. Subsequently, bronze swords were used for religious ceremonies. The Yayoi period saw swords be used primarily for religious and ceremonial purposes.
During the Kofun Period (250-538CE) Animism was introduced into Japanese society. Animism is the belief that everything in life contains or is connected to a divine spirits. This connection to the spirit world premediates the introduction of Buddhism into Japan. During this time, China was craving steel blades on the Korean Peninsula. Japan saw this as a threat to national security and felt the need to develop their military technology. As a result, clan leaders took power as military elites, fighting one another for power and territory. As dominant figures took power, loyalty and servitude became an important part of Japanese life – this became the catalyst for the honour culture that is often affiliated with Japanese people.
In the Edo period (1603–1868), swords gained prominence in everyday life as the “most important” part of a warrior's amour. The Edo era saw swords became a mechanism for bonding between Daimyo and Samurai. Daimyo would gift samurai's with swords as a token of their appreciation for their services. In turn, samurai would gift Daimyo swords as a sign of respect, most Daimyo would keep these swords as family heirlooms. In this period, it was believed that swords were multifunctional; in spirit they represent proof of military accomplishment, in practice they are coveted weapons of war and diplomatic gifts.
The peace of the Edo period saw the demand for swords fall. To retaliate, in 1719 the eighth Tokugawa shogun, Yoshimune, compiled a list of “most famous swords”. Masamune, Awatacuchi Yoshimitsu, and Go no Yoshihiro were dubbed the “Three Famous Smiths”, their swords became sought after by the Daimyo. The prestige and demand for these status symbols spiked the price for these fine pieces.
During the Late-Edo period, Suishinshi Masahide wrote that swords should be less extravagant. Swords began to be simplified and altered to be durable, sturdy and made to cut well. In 1543 guns arrived in Japan, changing military dynamic and practicality of swords and samurai's. This period also saw introduction of martial arts as a means to connecting to the spirit world and allowed common people to participate in samurai culture.
The Meiji Period (1868–1912) saw the dissolution of the samurai class, after foreign powers demanded Japan open their borders to international trade – 300-hundred years of Japanese isolation came to an end. In 1869 and 1873, two petition were submitted to government to abolish the custom of sword wearing because people feared the outside world would view swords as a “tool for bloodshed” and would consequentially associate Japanese people as violent. Haitōrei (1876) outlawed and prohibited wearing swords in public, with the exception for those in the military and government official; swords lost their meaning within society. Emperor Meiji was determined to westernize Japan with the influence of American technological and scientific advances; however, he himself appreciated the art of sword making. The Meiji era marked the final moments of samurai culture, as samurai's were no match for conscript soldiers who were trained to use western firearms. Some samurai found it difficult to assimilate to the new culture as they were forced to give up their privileges, while others preferred this less-hierarchical way of life. Even with the ban, the Sino-Japanese War (1894) saw Japanese troops wear swords into battle, not for practical use but for symbolic reasons.
The Meiji era also saw the integration of Buddhism into Shinto Japanese beliefs. Swords were no longer necessary, in war or lifestyle, and those who practiced martial arts became the “modern samurai” – young children were still groomed to serve the emperor and put loyalty and honour above all else, as this new era of rapid development required loyal, hard working men. The practice of sword making was prohibited, thus swords during the Meiji period were obsolete and a mere symbol of status. Swords were left to rust, sold or melted into more ‘practical’ objects for everyday life.
Prior to and during WWII, even with the modernization of the army, the demand for swords exceeded the number of swordsmiths still capable of making them. As a result, swords of this era are of poor quality. In 1933, during the Shōwa era (1926–1989), a sword making factory designed to re-establish the “spirit of Japan” through the art of sword making was built to preserve the legacy and art of swordsmiths and sword making. The government at the time feared that the warrior spirit (loyalty and honour) was disappearing within Japan, along with the integrity and quality of swords.
For a portion of the US occupation of Japan, sword making, swordsmiths and wielding of swords was prohibited. As a means to preserve the warrior culture of Japan, martial arts was put into the school curriculum. In 1953, America finally lifted the ban on swords after realizing that sword making is an important cultural asset to preserving Japanese history and legacy.
The origins of Japanese swords and their effects and influence on society differs depending on the story that is followed.
There is a rich relationship between swords, Japanese culture, and societal development. The different interpretations of the origins of swords and their connection to the spirit world, each hold their own merit within Japanese society, past and present. Which one and how modern-day samurai interpret the history of swords, help influence the kind of samurai and warrior they choose to be.
Japanese swords are generally made by a division of labor between six and eight craftsmen. Tosho (Toko, Katanakaji) is in charge of forging blades, togishi is in charge of polishing blades, kinkosi (chokinshi) is in charge of making metal fittings for sword fittings, shiroganeshi is in charge of making habaki (blade collar), sayashi is in charge of making scabbards, nurishi is in charge of applying lacquer to scabbards, tsukamakishi is in charge of making hilt, and tsubashi is in charge of making tsuba (hand guard). Tosho use apprentice swordsmiths as assistants. Prior to the Muromachi period, tosho and kacchushi (armorer) used surplus metal to make tsuba, but from the Muromachi period onwards, specialized craftsmen began to make tsuba. Nowadays, kinkoshi sometimes serves as shiroganeshi and tsubashi.
Typical features of Japanese swords represented by katana and tachi are a three-dimensional cross-sectional shape of an elongated pentagonal or hexagonal blade called shinogi-zukuri, a style in which the blade and the tang (nakago) are integrated and fixed to the hilt (tsuka) with a pin called mekugi, and a gentle curve. When a shinogi-zukuri sword is viewed from the side, there is a ridge line of the thickest part of the blade called shinogi between the cutting edge side and the back side. This shinogi contributes to lightening and toughening of the blade and high cutting ability.
Japanese swords were often forged with different profiles, different blade thicknesses, and varying amounts of grind. Wakizashi and tantō, for instance, were not simply scaled-down versions of katana; they were often forged in a shape called hira-zukuri, in which the cross-sectional shape of the blade becomes an isosceles triangle.
The daishō was not always forged together. If a samurai was able to afford a daishō, it was often composed of whichever two swords could be conveniently acquired, sometimes by different smiths and in different styles. Even when a daishō contained a pair of blades by the same smith, they were not always forged as a pair or mounted as one. Daishō made as a pair, mounted as a pair, and owned/worn as a pair, are therefore uncommon and considered highly valuable, especially if they still retain their original mountings (as opposed to later mountings, even if the later mounts are made as a pair).
The forging of a Japanese blade typically took weeks or even months and was considered a sacred art. As with many complex endeavors, rather than a single craftsman, several artists were involved. There was a smith to forge the rough shape, often a second smith (apprentice) to fold the metal, a specialist polisher (called a togi) as well as the various artisans that made the koshirae (the various fittings used to decorate the finished blade and saya (sheath) including the tsuka (hilt), fuchi (collar), kashira (pommel), and tsuba (hand guard)). It is said that the sharpening and polishing process takes just as long as the forging of the blade itself.
The legitimate Japanese sword is made from Japanese steel "Tamahagane". The most common lamination method the Japanese sword blade is formed from is a combination of two different steels: a harder outer jacket of steel wrapped around a softer inner core of steel. This creates a blade which has a hard, razor sharp cutting edge with the ability to absorb shock in a way which reduces the possibility of the blade breaking when used in combat. The hadagane, for the outer skin of the blade, is produced by heating a block of raw steel, which is then hammered out into a bar, and the flexible back portion. This is then cooled and broken up into smaller blocks which are checked for further impurities and then reassembled and reforged. During this process the billet of steel is heated and hammered, split and folded back upon itself many times and re-welded to create a complex structure of many thousands of layers. Each different steel is folded differently, in order to provide the necessary strength and flexibility to the different steels. The precise way in which the steel is folded, hammered and re-welded determines the distinctive grain pattern of the blade, the jihada, (also called jigane when referring to the actual surface of the steel blade) a feature which is indicative of the period, place of manufacture and actual maker of the blade. The practice of folding also ensures a somewhat more homogeneous product, with the carbon in the steel being evenly distributed and the steel having no voids that could lead to fractures and failure of the blade in combat.
The shingane (for the inner core of the blade) is of a relatively softer steel with a lower carbon content than the hadagane. For this, the block is again hammered, folded and welded in a similar fashion to the hadagane, but with fewer folds. At this point, the hadagane block is once again heated, hammered out and folded into a ‘U’ shape, into which the shingane is inserted to a point just short of the tip. The new composite steel billet is then heated and hammered out ensuring that no air or dirt is trapped between the two layers of steel. The bar increases in length during this process until it approximates the final size and shape of the finished sword blade. A triangular section is cut off from the tip of the bar and shaped to create what will be the kissaki. At this point in the process, the blank for the blade is of rectangular section. This rough shape is referred to as a sunobe.
The sunobe is again heated, section by section and hammered to create a shape which has many of the recognisable characteristics of the finished blade. These are a thick back (mune), a thinner edge (ha), a curved tip (kissaki), notches on the edge (hamachi) and back (munemachi) which separate the blade from the tang (nakago). Details such as the ridge line (shinogi) another distinctive characteristic of the Japanese sword, are added at this stage of the process. The smith's skill at this point comes into play as the hammering process causes the blade to naturally curve in an erratic way, the thicker back tending to curve towards the thinner edge, and he must skillfully control the shape to give it the required upward curvature. The sunobe is finished by a process of filing and scraping which leaves all the physical characteristics and shapes of the blade recognisable. The surface of the blade is left in a relatively rough state, ready for the hardening processes. The sunobe is then covered all over with a clay mixture which is applied more thickly along the back and sides of the blade than along the edge. The blade is left to dry while the smith prepares the forge for the final heat treatment of the blade, the yaki-ire, the hardening of the cutting edge.
This process takes place in a darkened smithy, traditionally at night, in order that the smith can judge by eye the colour and therefore the temperature of the sword as it is repeatedly passed through the glowing charcoal. When the time is deemed right (traditionally the blade should be the colour of the moon in February and August which are the two months that appear most commonly on dated inscriptions on the tang), the blade is plunged edge down and point forward into a tank of water. The precise time taken to heat the sword, the temperature of the blade and of the water into which it is plunged are all individual to each smith and they have generally been closely guarded secrets. Legend tells of a particular smith who cut off his apprentice's hand for testing the temperature of the water he used for the hardening process. In the different schools of swordmakers there are many subtle variations in the materials used in the various processes and techniques outlined above, specifically in the form of clay applied to the blade prior to the yaki-ire, but all follow the same general procedures.
The application of the clay in different thicknesses to the blade allows the steel to cool more quickly along the thinner coated edge when plunged into the tank of water and thereby develop into the harder form of steel called martensite, which can be ground to razor-like sharpness. The thickly coated back cools more slowly retaining the pearlite steel characteristics of relative softness and flexibility. The precise way in which the clay is applied, and partially scraped off at the edge, is a determining factor in the formation of the shape and features of the crystalline structure known as the hamon. This distinctive tempering line found near the edge is one of the main characteristics to be assessed when examining a blade.
The martensitic steel which forms from the edge of the blade to the hamon is in effect the transition line between these two different forms of steel, and is where most of the shapes, colours and beauty in the steel of the Japanese sword are to be found. The variations in the form and structure of the hamon are all indicative of the period, smith, school or place of manufacture of the sword. As well as the aesthetic qualities of the hamon, there are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, real practical functions. The hardened edge is where most of any potential damage to the blade will occur in battle. This hardened edge is capable of being reground and sharpened many times, although the process will alter the shape of the blade. Altering the shape will allow more resistance when fighting in hand-to-hand combat.
Almost all blades are decorated, although not all blades are decorated on the visible part of the blade. Once the blade is cool, and the mud is scraped off, grooves and markings (hi or bo-hi) may be cut into it. One of the most important markings on the sword is performed here: the file markings. These are cut into the tang or the hilt-section of the blade, where they will be covered by the hilt later. The tang is never supposed to be cleaned; doing this can reduce the value of the sword by half or more. The purpose is to show how well the steel ages.
Some other marks on the blade are aesthetic: dedications written in Kanji characters as well as engravings called horimono depicting gods, dragons, or other acceptable beings. Some are more practical. The presence of a groove (the most basic type is called a hi) reduces the weight of the sword yet keeps its structural integrity and strength.
The tachi became the primary weapon on the battlefield during the Kamakura period, used by cavalry. The sword was mostly considered as a secondary weapon until then, used in the battlefield only after the bow and polearm were no longer feasible. During the Edo period samurai went about on foot unarmored, and with much less combat being fought on horseback in open battlefields the need for an effective close quarter weapon resulted in samurai being armed with daishō.
Testing of swords, called tameshigiri, was practiced on a variety of materials (often the bodies of executed criminals) to test the sword's sharpness and practice cutting techniques.
Kenjutsu is the Japanese martial art of using the Japanese swords in combat. The Japanese swords are primarily a cutting weapon, or more specifically, a slicing one. Its moderate curve, however, allowed for effective thrusting as well. The hilt was held with two hands, though a fair amount of one-handed techniques exist. The placement of the right hand was dictated by both the length of the handle and the length of the wielder's arm. Two other martial arts were developed specifically for training to draw the sword and attack in one motion. They are battōjutsu and iaijutsu, which are superficially similar, but do generally differ in training theory and methods.
For cutting, there was a specific technique called "ten-uchi." Ten-uchi refers to an organized motion made by arms and wrist, during a descending strike. As the sword is swung downwards, the elbow joint drastically extends at the last instant, popping the sword into place. This motion causes the swordsman's grip to twist slightly and if done correctly, is said to feel like wringing a towel (Thomas Hooper reference). This motion itself caused the sword's blade to impact its target with sharp force, and is used to break initial resistance. From there, fluidly continuing along the motion wrought by ten-uchi, the arms would follow through with the stroke, dragging the sword through its target. Because the Japanese swords slices rather than chops, it is this "dragging" which allows it to do maximum damage, and is thus incorporated into the cutting technique. At full speed, the swing will appear to be full stroke, the sword passing through the targeted object. The segments of the swing are hardly visible, if at all. Assuming that the target is, for example, a human torso, ten-uchi will break the initial resistance supplied by shoulder muscles and the clavicle. The follow through would continue the slicing motion, through whatever else it would encounter, until the blade inherently exited the body, due to a combination of the motion and its curved shape.
Nearly all styles of kenjutsu share the same five basic guard postures. They are as follows; chūdan-no-kamae (middle posture), jōdan-no-kamae (high posture), gedan-no-kamae (low posture), hassō-no-kamae (eight-sided posture), and waki-gamae (side posture).
The Japanese swords razor-edge was so hard that upon hitting an equally hard or harder object, such as another sword's edge, chipping became a definite risk. As such, blocking an oncoming blow blade-to-blade was generally avoided. In fact, evasive body maneuvers were preferred over blade contact by most, but, if such was not possible, the flat or the back of the blade was used for defense in many styles, rather than the precious edge. A popular method for defeating descending slashes was to simply beat the sword aside. In some instances, an "umbrella block", positioning the blade overhead, diagonally (point towards the ground, pommel towards the sky), would create an effective shield against a descending strike. If the angle of the block was drastic enough, the curve of the Japanese swords blade would cause the attacker's blade to slide along its counter and off to the side.
Japanese swords were carried in several different ways, varying throughout Japanese history. The style most commonly seen in "samurai" movies is called buke-zukuri, with the katana (and wakizashi, if also present) carried edge up, with the sheath thrust through the obi (sash).
The sword would be carried in a sheath and tucked into the samurai's belt. Originally, they would carry the sword with the blade turned down. This was a more comfortable way for the armored samurai to carry his very long sword or to draw while mounted. The bulk of the samurai armor made it difficult to draw the sword from any other place on his body. When unarmored, samurai would carry their sword with the blade facing up. This made it possible to draw the sword and strike in one quick motion. In one such method of drawing the sword, the samurai would turn the sheath downward ninety degrees and pull it out of his sash just a bit with his left hand, then gripping the hilt with his right hand he would slide it out while sliding the sheath back to its original position.
Historically, Japanese swords have been regarded not only as weapons but also as works of art, especially for high-quality ones. For a long time, Japanese people have developed a unique appreciation method in which the blade is regarded as the core of their aesthetic evaluation rather than the sword mountings decorated with luxurious lacquer or metal works.
It is said that the following three objects are the most noteworthy objects when appreciating a blade. The first is the overall shape referred to as sugata. Curvature, length, width, tip, and shape of tang of the sword are the objects for appreciation. The second is a fine pattern on the surface of the blade, which is referred to as hada or jigane. By repeatedly folding and forging the blade, fine patterns such as fingerprints, tree rings and bark are formed on its surface. The third is hamon. Hamon is a white pattern of the cutting edge produced by quenching and tempering. The object of appreciation is the shape of hammon and the crystal particles formed at the boundary of hammon. Depending on the size of the particles, they can be divided into two types, a nie and a nioi, which makes them look like stars or mist. In addition to these three objects, a swordsmith signature and a file pattern engraved on tang, and a carving inscribed on the blade, which is referred to as horimono, are also the objects of appreciation.
The Hon'ami clan, which was an authority of appraisal of Japanese swords, rated Japanese swords from these artistic points of view. In addition, experts of modern Japanese swords judge when and by which swordsmith school the sword was made from these artistic points of view.
Generally, the blade and the sword mounting of Japanese swords are displayed separately in museums, and this tendency is remarkable in Japan. For example, the Nagoya Japanese Sword Museum "Nagoya Touken World", one of Japan's largest sword museums, posts separate videos of the blade and the sword mounting on its official website and YouTube.
In Japan, Japanese swords are rated by authorities of each period, and some of the authority of the rating is still valid today.
In 1719, Tokugawa Yoshimune, the 8th shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, ordered Hon'ami Kōchū, who was an authority of sword appraisal, to record swords possessed by daimyo all over Japan in books. In the completed "Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō" (享保名物帳) 249 precious swords were described, and additional 25 swords were described later. The list also includes 81 swords that had been destroyed in previous fires. The precious swords described in this book were called "Meibutsu" (名物) and the criteria for selection were artistic elements, origins and legends. The list of "Meibutsu" includes 59 swords made by Masamune, 34 by Awataguchi Yoshimitsu and 22 by Go Yoshihiro, and these 3 swordsmiths were considered special. Daimyo hid some swords for fear that they would be confiscated by the Tokugawa Shogunate, so even some precious swords were not listed in the book. For example, Daihannya Nagamitsu and Yamatorige, which are now designated as National Treasures, were not listed.
Yamada Asaemon V, who was the official sword cutting ability examiner and executioner of the Tokugawa shogunate, published a book "Kaiho Kenjaku" (懐宝剣尺) in 1797 in which he ranked the cutting ability of swords. The book lists 228 swordsmiths, whose forged swords are called "Wazamono" (業物) and the highest "Saijo Ō Wazamono" (最上大業物) has 12 selected. In the reprinting in 1805, 1 swordsmith was added to the highest grade, and in the major revised edition in 1830 "Kokon Kajibiko" (古今鍛冶備考), 2 swordsmiths were added to the highest grade, and in the end, 15 swordsmiths were ranked as the highest grade. The katana forged by Nagasone Kotetsu, one of the top-rated swordsmith, became very popular at the time when the book was published, and many counterfeits were made. In these books, the 3 swordsmiths treated specially in "Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō" and Muramasa, who was famous at that time for forging swords with high cutting ability, were not mentioned. The reasons for this are considered to be that Yamada was afraid of challenging the authority of the shogun, that he could not use the precious sword possessed by the daimyo in the examination, and that he was considerate of the legend of Muramasa's curse.
At present, by the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, important swords of high historical value are designated as Important Cultural Properties (Jūyō Bunkazai, 重要文化財), and special swords among them are designated as National Treasures (Kokuhō, 国宝). The swords designated as cultural properties based on the law of 1930, which was already abolished, have the rank next to Important Cultural Properties as Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin, 重要美術品). In addition, The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords, a public interest incorporated foundation, rates high-value swords in four grades, and the highest grade Special Important Sword (Tokubetsu Juyo Token, 特別重要刀剣) is considered to be equivalent to the value of Important Art Object. Although swords owned by the Japanese Imperial Family are not designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties because they are outside the jurisdiction of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, there are many swords of the National Treasure class, and they are called "Gyobutsu" (御物).
Currently, there are several authoritative rating systems for swordsmiths. According to the rating approved by the Japanese government, from 1890 to 1947, 2 swordsmiths who were appointed as Imperial Household Artist and after 1955, 6 swordsmiths who were designated as Living National Treasure are regarded as the best swordsmiths. According to the rating approved by The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords, a public interest incorporated foundation, 39 swordsmiths who were designated as Mukansa (無鑑査) since 1958 are considered to be the highest ranking swordsmiths. The best sword forged by Japanese swordsmiths is awarded the most honorable Masamune prize by The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords. Since 1961, 8 swordsmiths have received the Masamune Prize, and among them, 3 swordsmiths, Masamine Sumitani, Akitsugu Amata and Toshihira Osumi, have received the prize 3 times each and Sadakazu Gassan II has received the prize 2 times. These 4 persons were designated both Living National Treasures and Mukansa.
Generally, the blade and the sword mounting of Japanese swords are displayed separately in museums, and this tendency is remarkable in Japan. For example, the Nagoya Japanese Sword Museum "Nagoya Touken World", one of Japan's largest sword museums, posts separate videos of the blade and the sword mounting on its official website and YouTube.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A Japanese sword (Japanese: 日本刀, Hepburn: nihontō) is one of several types of traditionally made swords from Japan. Bronze swords were made as early as the Yayoi period (1,000 BC–300 AD), though most people generally refer to the curved blades made from the Heian period (794–1185) to the present day when speaking of \"Japanese swords\". There are many types of Japanese swords that differ by size, shape, field of application and method of manufacture. Some of the more commonly known types of Japanese swords are the uchigatana, tachi, ōdachi, wakizashi, and tantō.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In modern times the most commonly known type of Japanese sword is the Shinogi-Zukuri katana, which is a single-edged and usually curved longsword traditionally worn by samurai from the 15th century onwards. Western historians have said that Japanese katana were among the finest cutting weapons in world military history, for their intended use.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Other types of Japanese swords include: tsurugi or ken, which is a straight double-edged sword; ōdachi, tachi, which are older styles of a very long curved single-edged sword; uchigatana, a slightly shorter curved single-edged long sword; wakizashi, a medium-sized sword; and tantō, which is an even smaller knife-sized sword. naginata, nagamaki, and yari, despite being polearms, are still considered to be swords, which is a common misconception; naginata, nagamaki, yari and even ōdachi are in reality not swords.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The type classifications for Japanese swords indicate the combination of a blade and its mounts as this, then, determines the style of use of the blade. An unsigned and shortened blade that was once made and intended for use as a tachi may be alternately mounted in tachi koshirae and katana koshirae. It is properly distinguished, then, by the style of mount it currently inhabits. A long tanto may be classified as a wakizashi due to its length being over 30 cm (12 in), however it may have originally been mounted and used as a tanto making the length distinction somewhat arbitrary but necessary when referring to unmounted short blades. When the mounts are taken out of the equation, a tanto and wakizashi will be determined by length under or over 30 cm (12 in), unless their intended use can be absolutely determined or the speaker is rendering an opinion on the intended use of the blade. In this way, a blade formally attributed as a wakizashi due to length may be informally discussed between individuals as a tanto because the blade was made during an age where tanto were popular and the wakizashi as a companion sword to katana did not yet exist.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The following are types of Japanese swords:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "There are other bladed weapons made in the same traditional manner as Japanese swords, which are not swords, but are still classified as Japanese swords (nihontō) (as \"tō\" means \"blade\", rather than specifically \"sword\") because of the way they are made in a similar manner to Japanese swords:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Other edged weapons or tools that are made using the same methods as Japanese swords:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Each Japanese sword is classified according to when the blade was made.:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Historically in Japan, the ideal blade of a Japanese sword has been considered to be the kotō in the Kamakura period, and the swordsmiths from the Edo period to the present day from the Shinto period focused on reproducing the blade of a Japanese sword in the Kamakura period. There are more than 100 Japanese swords designated as National Treasures in Japan, of which the Kotō of the Kamakura period account for 80% and the tachi account for 70%.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Japanese swords since shintō are different from kotō in forging method and steel. This was due to the destruction of the Bizen school due to a great flood, the spread of the Mino school, and the virtual unification of Japan by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, which made almost no difference in the steel used by each school. Japanese swords since the Shintō period often have gorgeous decorations carved on the blade and lacquered maki-e decorations on the scabbard. This was due to the economic development and the increased value of swords as arts and crafts as the Sengoku Period ended and the peaceful Edo Period began.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Japanese swords are still commonly seen today; antique and modern forged swords can be found and purchased. Modern, authentic Japanese swords (nihontō) are made by a few hundred swordsmiths. Many examples can be seen at an annual competition hosted by the All Japan Swordsmith Association, under the auspices of the Nihontō Bunka Shinkō Kyōkai (Society for the Promotion of Japanese Sword Culture). However, in order to maintain the quality of Japanese swords, the Japanese government limits the number of Japanese swords a swordsmith can make in a year to 24 (up to 2 swords per month). Therefore, many of the swords called \"Japanese sword\" distributed around the world today are made in China, and the manufacturing process and quality are not authorized.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Many old Japanese swords can be traced back to one of five provinces, each of which had its own school, traditions, and \"trademarks\" (e.g., the swords from Mino province were \"from the start famous for their sharpness\"). These schools are known as Gokaden (The Five Traditions). In the Kotō era there were several other schools that did not fit within the Five Traditions or were known to mix elements of each Gokaden, and they were called wakimono (small school). There were 19 commonly referenced wakimono. The number of swordsmiths of Gokaden, as confirmed by signatures and documents, were 4005 in Bizen, 1269 in Mino, 1025 in Yamato, 847 in Yamashiro and 438 in Sōshū. These traditions and provinces are as follows:",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Yamato school is a school that originated in Yamato Province corresponding to present-day Nara Prefecture. Nara was the capital of ancient Japan. Since there is a legend that it was a swordsmith named Amakuni who first signed the tang of a sword, he is sometimes regarded as the founder and the oldest school. However, the founder identified in the material is Yukinobu in the Heian period. They forged the swords that were often worn by monk warriors called sōhei in Nara's large temples. The Yamato school consists of five schools: Senjuin, Shikkake, Taima, Tegai, and Hōshō. Each school forged swords under the supervision of a different temple. In the middle of the Muromachi period, swordsmiths moved to various places such as Mino, and the school disappeared. Their swords are often characterized by a deep curve, a narrow width from blade to back, a high central ridge, and a small tip. There are direct lines on the surface of the blade, the hamon is linear, and the grain at the boundary of the hamon is medium in size. It is often evaluated as a sword with a simple and strong impression.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Yamashiro school is a school that originated in Yamashiro Province, corresponding to present-day Kyoto Prefecture. When Emperor Kanmu relocated the capital to Kyoto in 794, swordsmiths began to gather. The founder of the school was Sanjō Munechika in the late 10th century in the Heian period. The Yamashiro school consisted of schools such as Sanjō, Ayanokōji, Awataguchi, and Rai. At first, they often forged swords in response to aristocrats' demands, so importance was placed on aesthetics and practicality was not emphasized. However, when a domestic conflict occurred at the end of the Heian period, practicality was emphasized and a swordsmith was invited from the Bizen school. In the Kamakura period, tachi from a magnificent rai school became popular among samurai. After that, they also adopted the forging method of Sōshū school. Their swords are often characterized as long and narrow, curved from the base or center, and have a sparkle on the surface of the blade, with the hamon being straight and the grains on the boundary of the hamon being small. It is often evaluated as a sword with an elegant impression.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Bizen school is a school that originated in Bizen Province, corresponding to present-day Okayama Prefecture. Bizen has been a major production area of high quality iron sand since ancient times. The Ko-bizen school in the mid Heian period was the originator. The Bizen school consisted of schools such as Ko-bizen, Fukuoka-ichimonji, Osafune, and Hatakeda. According to a sword book written in the Kamakura period, out of the 12 best swordsmiths in Japan who were convened by the Retired Emperor Go-Toba, 10 were from the Bizen school. Great swordsmiths were born one after another in the Osafune school which started in the Kamakura period, and it developed to the largest school in the history of Japanese swords. Kanemitsu and Nagayoshi of the Osafune school were apprentices to Masamune of the Sōshū school, the greatest swordsmith in Japan. While they forged high-quality swords by order, at the same time, from the Muromachi period, when wars became large-scale, they mass-produced low-quality swords for drafted farmers and for export. The Bizen school had enjoyed the highest prosperity for a long time, but declined rapidly due to a great flood which occurred in the late 16th century during the Sengoku period. Their swords are often characterized as curved from the base, with irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, while the hamon has a flashy pattern like a series of cloves, and there is little grain but a color gradient at the boundary of the hamon. It is often evaluated as a sword with a showy and gorgeous impression.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Sōshū school is a school that originated in Sagami Province, corresponding to present-day Kanagawa Prefecture. Sagami Province was the political center of Japan where the Kamakura shogunate was established in the Kamakura period. At the end of the 13th century, the Kamakura shogunate invited swordsmiths from Yamashiro school and Bizen school, and swordsmiths began to gather. Shintōgo Kunimitsu forged experimental swords by combining the forging technology of Yamashiro school and Bizen school. Masamune, who learned from Shintōgo Kunimitsu, became the greatest swordsmith in Japan. From the lessons of the Mongol invasion of Japan, they revolutionized the forging process to make stronger swords. Although this forging method is not fully understood to date, one of the elements is heating at higher temperatures and rapid cooling. Their revolution influenced other schools to make the highest quality swords, but this technique was lost before the Azuchi–Momoyama period (Shintō period). The Sōshū school declined after the fall of the Kamakura shogunate. Their swords are often characterized by a shallow curve, a wide blade to the back, and a thin cross-section. There are irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, the hamon has a pattern of undulations with continuous roundness, and the grains at the boundary of the hamon are large.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Mino school is a school that originated in Mino Province, corresponding to present-day Gifu Prefecture. Mino Province was a strategic traffic point connecting the Kanto and Kansai regions, and was surrounded by powerful daimyo (feudal lords). The Mino school started in the middle of the Kamakura period, when swordsmiths of the Yamato school who learned from the Sōshū school gathered in Mino. The Mino school became the largest production area of Japanese swords after the Bizen school declined due to a great flood. The production rate of katana was high, because it was the newest school among 5 big schools. Their swords are often characterized by a slightly higher central ridge and a thinner back. There are irregular fingerprint-like patterns on the surface of the blade, the hamon are various, and the grain on the border of the hamon are hardly visible.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The word katana was used in ancient Japan and is still used today, whereas the old usage of the word nihontō is found in the poem the Song of Nihontō, by the Song dynasty poet Ouyang Xiu. The word nihontō became more common in Japan in the late Tokugawa shogunate. Due to importation of Western swords, the word nihontō was adopted in order to distinguish it from the Western sword (洋刀, yōtō).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Meibutsu (noted swords) is a special designation given to sword masterpieces which are listed in a compilation from the 18th century called the \"Kyoho Meibutsucho\". The swords listed are Koto blades from several different provinces; 100 of the 166 swords listed are known to exist today, with Sōshū blades being very well represented. The \"Kyoho Meibutsucho\" also listed the nicknames, prices, history and length of the Meibutsu, with swords by Yoshimitsu, Masamune, Yoshihiro, and Sadamune being very highly priced.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Each blade has a unique profile, mostly dependent on the swordsmith and the construction method. The most prominent part is the middle ridge, or shinogi. In the earlier picture, the examples were flat to the shinogi, then tapering to the blade edge. However, swords could narrow down to the shinogi, then narrow further to the blade edge, or even expand outward towards the shinogi then shrink to the blade edge (producing a trapezoidal shape). A flat or narrowing shinogi is called shinogi-hikushi, whereas a flat blade is called a shinogi-takushi.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The shinogi can be placed near the back of the blade for a longer, sharper, more fragile tip or a more moderate shinogi near the center of the blade.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The sword also has an exact tip shape, which is considered an extremely important characteristic: the tip can be long (ōkissaki), medium (chūkissaki), short (kokissaki), or even hooked backwards (ikuri-ōkissaki). In addition, whether the front edge of the tip is more curved (fukura-tsuku) or (relatively) straight (fukura-kareru) is also important.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The kissaki (point) is not usually a \"chisel-like\" point, and the Western knife interpretation of a \"tantō point\" is rarely found on true Japanese swords; a straight, linearly sloped point has the advantage of being easy to grind, but less stabbing/piercing capabilities compared to traditional Japanese kissaki Fukura (curvature of the cutting edge of tip) types. Kissaki usually have a curved profile, and smooth three-dimensional curvature across their surface towards the edge—though they are bounded by a straight line called the yokote and have crisp definition at all their edges. While the straight tip on the \"American tanto\" is identical to traditional Japanese fukura, two characteristics set it apart from Japanese sword makes: The absolute lack of curve only possible with modern tools, and the use of the word \"tanto\" in the nomenclature of the western tribute is merely a nod to the Japanese word for knife or short sword, rather than a tip style.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Although it is not commonly known, the \"chisel point\" kissaki originated in Japan. Examples of such are shown in the book \"The Japanese Sword\" by Kanzan Sato. Because American bladesmiths use this design extensively it is a common misconception that the design originated in America.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A hole is punched through the tang nakago, called a mekugi-ana. It is used to anchor the blade using a mekugi, a small bamboo pin that is inserted into another cavity in the handle tsuka and through the mekugi-ana, thus restricting the blade from slipping out. To remove the handle one removes the mekugi. The swordsmith's signature mei is carved on the tang.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In Japanese, the scabbard is referred to as a saya, and the handguard piece, often intricately designed as an individual work of art—especially in later years of the Edo period—was called the tsuba. Other aspects of the mountings (koshirae), such as the menuki (decorative grip swells), habaki (blade collar and scabbard wedge), fuchi and kashira (handle collar and cap), kozuka (small utility knife handle), kogai (decorative skewer-like implement), saya lacquer, and tsuka-ito (professional handle wrap, also named tsukamaki), received similar levels of artistry.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The mei is the signature inscribed on to the tang of the Japanese sword. Fake signatures (\"gimei\") are common not only due to centuries of forgeries but potentially misleading ones that acknowledge prominent smiths and guilds, and those commissioned to a separate signer.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Sword scholars collect and study oshigata, or paper tang-rubbings, taken from a blade: to identify the mei, the hilt is removed and the sword is held point side up. The mei is chiseled onto the tang on the side which traditionally faces away from the wearer's body while being worn; since the katana and wakizashi are always worn with the cutting edge up, the edge should be held to the viewer's left. The inscription will be viewed as kanji on the surface of the tang: the first two kanji represent the province; the next pair is the smith; and the last, when present, is sometimes a variation of 'made by', or, 'respectfully'. The date will be inscribed near the mei, either with the reign name; the Zodiacal Method; or those calculated from the reign of the legendary Emperor Jimmu, dependent upon the period.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "What generally differentiates the different swords is their length. Japanese swords are measured in units of shaku. Since 1891, the modern Japanese shaku is approximately equal to a foot (11.93 inches), calibrated with the meter to equal exactly 10 meters per 33 shaku (30.30 cm).",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "However, the historical shaku was slightly longer (13.96 inches or 35.45 cm). Thus, there may sometimes be confusion about the blade lengths, depending on which shaku value is being assumed when converting to metric or U.S. customary measurements.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The three main divisions of Japanese blade length are:",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "A blade shorter than one shaku is considered a tantō (knife). A blade longer than one shaku but less than two is considered a shōtō (short sword). The wakizashi and kodachi are in this category. The length is measured in a straight line across the back of the blade from tip to munemachi (where blade meets tang). Most blades that fall into the \"shōtō\" size range are wakizashi. However, some daitō were designed with blades slightly shorter than 2 shaku. These were called kodachi and are somewhere in between a true daitō and a wakizashi. A shōtō and a daitō together are called a daishō (literally, \"big-little\"). The daishō was the symbolic armament of the Edo period samurai.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "A blade longer than two shaku is considered a daitō, or long sword. To qualify as a daitō the sword must have a blade longer than 2 shaku (approximately 24 inches or 60 centimeters) in a straight line. While there is a well defined lower limit to the length of a daitō, the upper limit is not well enforced; a number of modern historians, swordsmiths, etc. say that swords that are over 3 shaku in blade length are \"longer than normal daitō\" and are usually referred to as ōdachi. The word \"daitō\" is often used when explaining the related terms shōtō (short sword) and daishō (the set of both large and small sword). Miyamoto Musashi refers to the long sword in The Book of Five Rings. He is referring to the katana in this, and refers to the nodachi and the odachi as \"extra-long swords\".",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Before about 1500 most swords were usually worn suspended from cords on a belt, edge-down. This style is called jindachi-zukuri, and daitō worn in this fashion are called tachi (average blade length of 75–80 cm). From 1600 to 1867, more swords were worn through an obi (sash), paired with a smaller blade; both worn edge-up. This style is called buke-zukuri, and all daitō worn in this fashion are katana, averaging 70–74 cm (2 shaku 3 sun to 2 shaku 4 sun 5 bu) in blade length. However, Japanese swords of longer lengths also existed, including lengths up to 78 cm (2 shaku 5 sun 5 bu).",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "It was not simply that the swords were worn by cords on a belt, as a 'style' of sorts. Such a statement trivializes an important function of such a manner of bearing the sword. It was a very direct example of 'form following function.' At this point in Japanese history, much of the warfare was fought on horseback. Being so, if the sword or blade were in a more vertical position, it would be cumbersome, and awkward to draw. Suspending the sword by 'cords' allowed the sheath to be more horizontal, and far less likely to bind while drawing it in that position.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Abnormally long blades (longer than 3 shaku), usually carried across the back, are called ōdachi or nodachi. The word ōdachi is also sometimes used as a synonym for Japanese swords. Odachi means \"great sword\", and Nodachi translates to \"field sword\". These greatswords were used during war, as the longer sword gave a foot soldier a reach advantage. These swords are now illegal in Japan. Citizens are not allowed to possess an odachi unless it is for ceremonial purposes.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Here is a list of lengths for different types of blades:",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Blades whose length is next to a different classification type are described with a prefix 'O-' (for great) or 'Ko-' (for small), e.g. a Wakizashi with a length of 59 cm is called an O-wakizashi (almost a Katana) whereas a Katana of 61 cm is called a Ko-Katana (for small Katana; but note that a small accessory blade sometimes found in the sheath of a long sword is also a \"kogatana\" (小刀)).",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Since 1867, restrictions and/or the deconstruction of the samurai class meant that most blades have been worn jindachi-zukuri style, like Western navy officers. Since 1953, there has been a resurgence in the buke-zukuri style, permitted only for demonstration purposes.",
"title": "Anatomy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The production of swords in Japan is divided into specific time periods: jōkotō (ancient swords, until around 900 A.D.), kotō (old swords from around 900–1596), shintō (new swords 1596–1780), shinshintō (new new swords 1781–1876), gendaitō (modern or contemporary swords 1876–present)",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Early examples of iron swords were straight tsurugi, chokutō and others with unusual shapes, some of the styles and techniques were derived from Chinese dao, and some directly imported through trade. The swords of this period were a mixture of swords of Japanese original style and those of Chinese style brought to Japan via the Korean Peninsula and East China Sea. The cross-sectional shape of the blades of these early swords was an isosceles triangular hira-zukuri, and the kiriha-zukuri sword, which sharpened only the part close to the cutting edge side of a planar blade, gradually appeared. Swords of this period are classified as jōkotō and are often referred to in distinction from Japanese swords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The direct predecessor of the tachi (太刀) has been called Warabitetō (ja:蕨手刀) by the Emishi (Not to be confused with Ainu) of Tohoku. The Nihonto Meikan shows the earliest and by far the largest group of Ōshū smiths from the beginning of the 8th century were from the Mokusa school, listing over 100 Mokusa smiths before the beginning of the Kamakura period. Archaeological excavations of the Ōshū Tohoku region show iron ore smelting sites dating back to the early Nara period. The Tohoku region and indeed the whole Ōshū district in the 8th century was controlled and populated by the Emishi. Archaeological evidence of recovered Warabitetō (蕨手刀) show a high concentration in the burial goods of the Ōshū and Hokkaido regions. Mokusa Area was famous for legendary swordsmiths in the Heian Period (AD 794–1185). They are considered as the original producers of the Japanese swords known as \"Warabitetō \" which can date back to the sixth to eighth centuries. \"Warabitetō \" gained its fame through the series of battles between Emishi people (蝦夷) and the Yamato-chotei government (大 和朝廷) in the late eighth century. Using \"Warabitetō,\" the small number of Emishi soldiers could resist against the numerous Yamato-chotei army over a Thirty-Eight Years' War (三十八年戦争) (AD 770–811). The Meikan describes that from earlier time there was a list of forty two famous swordsmiths in the Toukou Meikan 刀工銘鑑 at Kanchiin 観智院. Eight of the swordsmiths on this list were from Ōshū schools. Five from Mokusa being Onimaru 鬼丸, Yoyasu 世安, Morifusa 森房, Hatafusa 幡房 and Gaan 瓦安, two from the Tamatsukuri Fuju 諷誦,Houji 寶次 and one from Gassan signing just Gassan 月山. According to the Nihonto Meikan, the Ōshū swordsmith group consists of the Mokusa (舞草), the Gassan (月山) and the Tamatsukuri (玉造), later to become the Hoju (寶壽) schools. Ōshū swords appear in various old books of this time, for example Heiji Monogatari 平治物語 (Tale of Heiji), Konjaku Monogatari 今昔物語 (Anthology of tales from the past), Kojidan 古事談 (Japanese collection of Setsuwa 説話), and Gikeiki 義経記 (War tale that focuses on the legends of Minamoto no Yoshitsune 源義経 and his followers). Ōshū swordsmiths appeared in books in quite early times compared to others. Tales in these books tell of the Emishi-to in the capital city and these swords seem to have been quite popular with the Bushi. Maybe a badge of honour being captured weapons. For example, In “Nihongiryaku” 日本紀略 983AD :” the number of people wearing a funny looking Tachi 太刀 is increasing.” In “Kauyagokau” 高野御幸 1124AD :“ when emperor Shirakawa 白河法皇 visited Kouyasan 高 野山, Fujiwara Zaemon Michisue 藤原左衛門通季 was wearing a Fushū sword “ In “Heihanki” 兵範記 1158AD there was a line that mentioned the Emperor himself had Fushū Tachi.” It seems that during the late Heian the Emishi-to was gaining popularity in Kyoto.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In the middle of the Heian period (794–1185), samurai improved on the Warabitetō to develop Kenukigata-tachi (ja:毛抜形太刀) -early Japanese sword-. To be more precise, it is thought that the Emishi improved the warabitetō and developed Kenukigata-warabitetō (ja:毛抜形蕨手刀) with a hole in the hilt and kenukigatatō (ja:毛抜形刀) without decorations on the tip of the hilt, and the samurai developed kenukigata-tachi based on these swords. Kenukigata-tachi, which was developed in the first half of the 10th century, has a three-dimensional cross-sectional shape of an elongated pentagonal or hexagonal blade called shinogi-zukuri and a gently curved single-edged blade, which are typical features of Japanese swords. There is no wooden hilt attached to kenukigata-tachi, and the tang (nakago) which is integrated with the blade is directly gripped and used. The term kenukigata is derived from the fact that the central part of tang is hollowed out in the shape of an ancient Japanese tweezers (kenuki).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In the tachi developed after kenukigata-tachi, a structure in which the hilt is fixed to the tang (nakago) with a pin called mekugi was adopted. As a result, a sword with three basic external elements of Japanese swords, the cross-sectional shape of shinogi-zukuri, a gently curved single-edged blade, and the structure of nakago, was completed. Its shape may reflects the changing form of warfare in Japan. Cavalry were now the predominant fighting unit and the older straight chokutō were particularly unsuitable for fighting from horseback. The curved sword is a far more efficient weapon when wielded by a warrior on horseback where the curve of the blade adds considerably to the downward force of a cutting action. Early models had uneven curves with the deepest part of the curve at the hilt. As eras changed the center of the curve tended to move up the blade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The tachi is a sword which is generally larger than a katana, and is worn suspended with the cutting edge down. This was the standard form of carrying the sword for centuries, and would eventually be displaced by the katana style where the blade was worn thrust through the belt, edge up. The tachi was worn slung across the left hip. The signature on the tang of the blade was inscribed in such a way that it would always be on the outside of the sword when worn. This characteristic is important in recognizing the development, function, and different styles of wearing swords from this time onwards.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "When worn with full armour, the tachi would be accompanied by a shorter blade in the form known as koshigatana (腰刀, \"waist sword\"); a type of short sword with no handguard, and where the hilt and scabbard meet to form the style of mounting called an aikuchi (\"meeting mouth\"). Daggers (tantō), were also carried for close combat fighting as well as carried generally for personal protection.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "By the 11th century during the Heian period, Japanese swords had already been exported to neighboring countries in Asia. For example, in the poem \"The Song of Japanese Swords\" Ouyang Xiu, a statesman of the Song Dynasty in China, described Japanese swords as \"It is a treasured sword with a scabbard made of fragrant wood covered with fish skin, decorated with brass and copper, and capable of exorcising evil spirits. It is imported at a great cost.\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "From the Heian period (794－1185), ordinary samurai wore swords of the style called kurourusi tachi (kokushitsu no tachi, 黒漆太刀), which meant black lacquer tachi. The hilt of a tachi is wrapped in leather or ray skin, and it is wrapped with black thread or leather cord, and the scabbard is coated with black lacquer. On the other hand, court nobles wore tachi decorated with precisely carved metal and jewels for ceremonial purposes. High-ranking court nobles wore swords of the style called kazari tachi or kaza tachi (飾太刀, 飾剣), which meant decorative tachi, and lower-ranking court nobles wore simplified kazatachi swords of the style called hosodachi (細太刀), which meant thin tachi. The kazatachi and hosodachi worn by nobles were initially straight like a chokutō, but since the Kamakura period they have had a gentle curve under the influence of tachi. Since tachi worn by court nobles were for ceremonial use, they generally had an iron plate instead of a blade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In the Kamakura period (1185－1333), high-ranking samurai wore hyogo gusari tachi (hyogo kusari no tachi, 兵庫鎖太刀), which meant a sword with chains in the arsenal. The scabbard of the tachi was covered with a gilt copper plate and hung by chains at the waist. At the end of the Kamakura period, simplified hyogo gusari tachi came to be made as an offering to the kami of Shinto shrines and fell out of use as weapons. On the other hand, in the Kamakura period, there was a type of tachi called hirumaki tachi (蛭巻太刀) with a scabbard covered with metal, which was used as a weapon until the Muromachi period. The meaning was a sword wrapped around a leech, and its feature was that a thin metal plate was spirally wrapped around the scabbard, so it was both sturdy and decorative, and chains were not used to hang the scabbard around the waist.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Mongol invasions of Japan in the 13th century during the Kamakura period spurred further evolution of the Japanese sword. The swordsmiths of the Sōshū school represented by Masamune studied tachi that were broken or bent in battle, developed new production methods, and created innovative Japanese swords. They forged the blade using a combination of soft and hard steel to optimize the temperature and timing of the heating and cooling of the blade, resulting in a lighter but more robust blade. They also made the curve of the blade gentle, lengthened the tip linearly, widened the width from the cutting edge to the opposite side of the blade, and thinned the cross section to improve the penetration and cutting ability of the blade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Historically in Japan, the ideal blade of a Japanese sword has been considered to be the kotō (古刀) (lit., \"old swords\") in the Kamakura period, and the swordsmiths from the Edo period (1603–1868) to the present day from the shinō (新刀) (lit., \"new swords\") period focused on reproducing the blade of the Japanese sword made in Kamakura period. There are more than 100 Japanese swords designated as National Treasures in Japan, of which the Kotō of the Kamakura period account for 80% and the tachi account for 70%.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "From the end of the Kamakura period to the end of the Muromachi period (1333－1573), kawatsutsumi tachi (革包太刀), which means a tachi wrapped in leather, was popular. The kawatsutsumi tachi was stronger than the kurourushi tachi because its hilt was wrapped in leather or ray skin, lacquer was painted on top of it, leather straps and cords were wrapped around it, and the scabbard and sometimes the tsuba (hand guard) were also wrapped in leather.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In the Nanboku-chō period (1336－1392) which corresponds to the early Muromachi period (1336－1573), huge Japanese swords such as ōdachi became popular. The reason for this is thought to be that the conditions for making a practical large-sized sword were established due to the nationwide spread of strong and sharp swords of the Sōshū school. In the case of ōdachi whose blade was 150 cm long, it was impossible to draw a sword from the scabbard on the waist, so people carried it on their back or had their servants carry it. Large naginata and kanabō were also popular in this period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Katana originates from sasuga, a kind of tantō used by lower-ranking samurai who fought on foot in the Kamakura period. Their main weapon was a long naginata and sasuga was a spare weapon. In the Nanboku-chō period, long weapons such as ōdachi were popular, and along with this, sasuga lengthened and finally became katana. Also, there is a theory that koshigatana (腰刀), a kind of tantō which was equipped by high ranking samurai together with tachi, developed to katana through the same historical background as sasuga, and it is possible that both developed to katana. The oldest katana in existence today is called Hishizukuri uchigatana, which was forged in the Nanbokuchō period, and was dedicated to Kasuga Shrine later.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "By the 15th century, Japanese swords had already gained international fame by being exported to China and Korea. For example, Korea learned how to make Japanese swords by sending swordsmiths to Japan and inviting Japanese swordsmiths to Korea. According to the record of June 1, 1430 in the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, a Korean swordsmith who went to Japan and mastered the method of making Japanese swords presented a Japanese sword to the King of Korea and was rewarded for the excellent work which was no different from the swords made by the Japanese.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Traditionally, yumi (bows) were the main weapon of war in Japan, and tachi and naginata were used only for close combat. The Ōnin War in the late 15th century in the Muromachi period expanded into a large-scale domestic war, in which employed farmers called ashigaru were mobilized in large numbers. They fought on foot using katana shorter than tachi. In the Sengoku period (1467－1615, period of warring states) in the late Muromachi period, the war became bigger and ashigaru fought in a close formation using yari (spears) lent to them. Furthermore, in the late 16th century, tanegashima (muskets) were introduced from Portugal, and Japanese swordsmiths mass-produced improved products, with ashigaru fighting with leased guns. On the battlefield in Japan, guns and spears became main weapons in addition to bows. Due to the changes in fighting styles in these wars, the tachi and naginata became obsolete among samurai, and the katana, which was easy to carry, became the mainstream. The dazzling looking tachi gradually became a symbol of the authority of high-ranking samurai.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "On the other hand, kenjutsu (swordsmanship) that makes use of the characteristics of katana was invented. The quicker draw of the sword was well suited to combat where victory depended heavily on short response times. (The practice and martial art for drawing the sword quickly and responding to a sudden attack was called ‘Battōjutsu’, which is still kept alive through the teaching of Iaido.) The katana further facilitated this by being worn thrust through a belt-like sash (obi) with the sharpened edge facing up. Ideally, samurai could draw the sword and strike the enemy in a single motion. Previously, the curved tachi had been worn with the edge of the blade facing down and suspended from a belt.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "From the 15th century, low-quality swords were mass-produced under the influence of the large-scale war. These swords, along with spears, were lent to recruited farmers called ashigaru and swords ware exported . Such mass-produced swords are called kazuuchimono, and swordsmiths of the Bisen school and Mino school produced them by division of labor. The export of Japanese sword reached its height during the Muromachi period when at least 200,000 swords were shipped to Ming Dynasty China in official trade in an attempt to soak up the production of Japanese weapons and make it harder for pirates in the area to arm. In the Ming Dynasty of China, Japanese swords and their tactics were studied to repel pirates, and wodao and miaodao were developed based on Japanese swords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "From this period, the tang (nakago) of many old tachi were cut and shortened into katana. This kind of remake is called suriage (磨上げ). For example, many of the tachi that Masamune forged during the Kamakura period were converted into katana, so his only existing works are katana and tantō. During this period, a great flood occurred in Bizen, which was the largest production area of Japanese swords, and the Bizen school rapidly declined, after which the Mino school flourished.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "From around the 16th century, many Japanese swords were exported to Thailand, where katana-style swords were made and prized for battle and art work, and some of them are in the collections of the Thai royal family.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In the Sengoku period (1467－1615) or the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568－1600), the itomaki tachi (itomaki no tachi, 糸巻太刀), which means a tachi wound with thread, appeared and became the mainstream of tachi after that. itomaki tachi was decorated with gorgeous lacquer decorations with lots of maki-e and flashy colored threads, and was used as a gift, a ceremony, or an offering to the kami of Shinto shrines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In later Japanese feudal history, during the Sengoku and Edo periods, certain high-ranking warriors of what became the ruling class would wear their sword tachi-style (edge-downward), rather than with the scabbard thrust through the belt with the edge upward. This style of swords is called handachi, \"half tachi\". In handachi, both styles were often mixed, for example, fastening to the obi was katana style, but metalworking of the scabbard was tachi style.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In the Muromachi period, especially the Sengoku period, anybody such as farmers, townspeople and monks could equip a sword. However, in 1588 during the Azuchi–Momoyama period, Toyotomi Hideyoshi conducted a sword hunt and banned farmers from owning them with weapons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "However, Toyotomi's sword hunt couldn't disarm peasants. Farmers and townspeople could wear daisho until 1683. And most of them kept wearing wakizashi on a daily basis until the middle of the 18th century. After then they wore it special times(travel, wedding, funeral) until meiji restoration.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Swords forged after 1596 in the Keichō period of the Azuchi-Momoyama period are classified as shintō (New swords). Japanese swords since shintō are different from kotō in forging method and steel (tamahagane). This is thought to be because Bizen school, which was the largest swordsmith group of Japanese swords, was destroyed by a great flood in 1590 and the mainstream shifted to Mino school, and because Toyotomi Hideyoshi virtually unified Japan, uniform steel began to be distributed throughout Japan. The kotō swords, especially the Bizen school swords made in the Kamakura period, had a midare-utsuri like a white mist between hamon and shinogi, but the swords since shinto have almost disappeared. In addition, the whole body of the blade became whitish and hard. Almost no one was able to reproduce midare-utsurii until Kunihira Kawachi reproduced it in 2014.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Japanese swords since the sintō period often have gorgeous decorations carved on the blade and lacquered maki-e decorations on the scabbard. This was due to the economic development and the increased value of swords as arts and crafts as the Sengoku Period ended and the peaceful Edo Period began. The Umetada school led by Umetada Myoju who was considered to be the founder of shinto led the improvement of the artistry of Japanese swords in this period. They were both swordsmiths and metalsmiths, and were famous for carving the blade, making metal accouterments such as tsuba (handguard), remodeling from tachi to katana (suriage), and inscriptions inlaid with gold.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "During this period, the Tokugawa shogunate required samurai to wear Katana and shorter swords in pairs. These short swords were wakizashi and tantō, and wakizashi were mainly selected. This set of two is called a daishō. Only samurai could wear the daishō: it represented their social power and personal honour. Samurai could wear decorative sword mountings in their daily lives, but the Tokugawa shogunate regulated the formal sword that samurai wore when visiting a castle by regulating it as a daisho made of a black scabbard, a hilt wrapped with white ray skin and black string.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Townspeople (Chōnin) and farmers were allowed to equip a short wakizashi, and the public were often equipped with wakizashi on their travels. Under the Tokugawa shogunate, swordmaking and the use of firearms declined. Japanese swords made in this period is classified as shintō.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In the late 18th century, swordsmith Suishinshi Masahide criticized that the present katana blades only emphasized decoration and had a problem with their toughness. He insisted that the bold and strong kotō blade from the Kamakura period to the Nanboku-chō period was the ideal Japanese sword, and started a movement to restore the production method and apply it to katana. Katana made after this is classified as a shinshintō (新々刀), \"new revival swords\" or literally \"new-new swords.\" One of the most popular swordsmiths in Japan today is Minamoto Kiyomaro who was active in this shinshintō period. His popularity is due to his timeless exceptional skill, as he was nicknamed \"Masamune in Yotsuya\" and his disastrous life. His works were traded at high prices and exhibitions were held at museums all over Japan from 2013 to 2014.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The arrival of Matthew Perry in 1853 and the subsequent Convention of Kanagawa caused chaos in Japanese society. Conflicts began to occur frequently between the forces of sonnō jōi (尊王攘夷派), who wanted to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate and rule by the Emperor, and the forces of sabaku (佐幕派), who wanted the Tokugawa Shogunate to continue. These political activists, called the shishi (志士), fought using a practical katana, called the kinnōtō (勤皇刀) or the bakumatsutō (幕末刀). Their katana were often longer than 90 cm (35.43 in) in blade length, less curved, and had a big and sharp point, which was advantageous for stabbing in indoor battles.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In 1867, the Tokugawa Shogunate declared the return of Japan's sovereignty to the Emperor, and from 1868, the government by the Emperor and rapid modernization of Japan began, which was called the Meiji Restoration. The Haitōrei Edict in 1876 all but banned carrying swords and guns on streets. Overnight, the market for swords died, many swordsmiths were left without a trade to pursue, and valuable skills were lost. Swords forged after the Haitōrei Edict are classified as gendaitō. The craft of making swords was kept alive through the efforts of some individuals, notably Miyamoto kanenori (宮本包則, 1830–1926) and Gassan Sadakazu (月山貞一, 1836–1918), who were appointed Imperial Household Artist. These smiths produced fine works that stand with the best of the older blades for the Emperor and other high-ranking officials. The businessman Mitsumura Toshimo (光村利藻, 1877－1955）tried to preserve their skills by ordering swords and sword mountings from the swordsmiths and craftsmen. He was especially enthusiastic about collecting sword mountings, and he collected about 3,000 precious sword mountings from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period. About 1200 items from a part of the collection are now in the Nezu Museum.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Japanese sword remained in use in some occupations such as the police force. At the same time, kendo was incorporated into police training so that police officers would have at least the training necessary to properly use one. In time, it was rediscovered that soldiers needed to be armed with swords, and over the decades at the beginning of the 20th century swordsmiths again found work. These swords, derisively called guntō, were often oil-tempered, or simply stamped out of steel and given a serial number rather than a chiseled signature. The mass-produced ones often look like Western cavalry sabers rather than Japanese swords, with blades slightly shorter than blades of the shintō and shinshintō periods. In 1934 the Japanese government issued a military specification for the shin guntō (new army sword), the first version of which was the Type 94 Katana, and many machine- and hand-crafted swords used in World War II conformed to this and later shin guntō specifications.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Under the United States occupation at the end of World War II all armed forces in occupied Japan were disbanded and production of Japanese swords with edges was banned except under police or government permit. The ban was overturned through a personal appeal by Dr. Junji Honma. During a meeting with General Douglas MacArthur, Honma produced blades from the various periods of Japanese history and MacArthur was able to identify very quickly what blades held artistic merit and which could be considered purely weapons. As a result of this meeting, the ban was amended so that guntō weapons would be destroyed while swords of artistic merit could be owned and preserved. Even so, many Japanese swords were sold to American soldiers at a bargain price; in 1958 there were more Japanese swords in America than in Japan. The vast majority of these one million or more swords were guntō, but there were still a sizable number of older swords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "After the Edo period, swordsmiths turned increasingly to the production of civilian goods. The Occupation and its regulations almost put an end to the production of Japanese swords. A few smiths continued their trade, and Honma went on to be a founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Japanese Sword (日本美術刀剣保存協会, Nippon Bijutsu Tōken Hozon Kyōkai), who made it their mission to preserve the old techniques and blades. Thanks to the efforts of other like-minded individuals, the Japanese swords did not disappear, many swordsmiths continued the work begun by Masahide, and the old swordmaking techniques were rediscovered.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Nowadays, iaitō is used for iaidō. Due to their popularity in modern media, display-only Japanese swords have become widespread in the sword marketplace. Ranging from small letter openers to scale replica \"wallhangers\", these items are commonly made from stainless steel (which makes them either brittle (if made from cutlery-grade 400-series stainless steel) or poor at holding an edge (if made from 300-series stainless steel)) and have either a blunt or very crude edge. There are accounts of good quality stainless steel Japanese swords, however, these are rare at best. Some replica Japanese swords have been used in modern-day armed robberies. As a part of marketing, modern ahistoric blade styles and material properties are often stated as traditional and genuine, promulgating disinformation. Some companies and independent smiths outside Japan produce katana as well, with varying levels of quality. According to the Parliamentary Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Japanese Swords, organized by Japanese Diet members, many Japanese swords distributed around the world as of the 21st century are fake Japanese-style swords made in China. The Sankei Shimbun analyzed that this is because the Japanese government allowed swordsmiths to make only 24 Japanese swords per person per year in order to maintain the quality of Japanese swords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In Japan, genuine edged hand-made Japanese swords, whether antique or modern, are classified as art objects (and not weapons) and must have accompanying certification in order to be legally owned. Prior to WWII Japan had 1.5million swords in the country – 200,000 of which had been manufactured in factories during the Meiji Restoration. As of 2008, only 100,000 swords remain in Japan. It is estimated that 250,000–350,000 sword have been brought to other nations as souvenirs, art pieces or for Museum purposes. 70% of daito (long swords), formerly owned by Japanese officers, have been exported or brought to the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Many swordsmiths since the Edo period have tried to reproduce the sword of the Kamakura period which is considered as the best sword in the history of Japanese swords, but they have failed. Then, in 2014, Kunihira Kawachi succeeded in reproducing it and won the Masamune Prize, the highest honor as a swordsmith. No one could win the Masamune Prize unless he made an extraordinary achievement, and in the section of tachi and katana, no one had won for 18 years before Kawauchi.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "The events of Japanese society have shaped the craft of sword making, as has the sword itself influenced the course of cultural and social development within the nation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The Museum of Fine Arts states that when an artisan plunged the newly crafted sword into the cold water, a portion of his spirit was transferred into the sword. His spirit, morals and state of mind at the time became crucial to the defining of the swords moral and physical characteristics",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "During the Jōmon Period (10,000-1000BCE) swords resembled iron knife blades and were used for hunting, fishing and farming. There is the idea that swords were more than a tool during the Jōmon period, no swords have been recovered to back this hypothesis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The Yayoi Period (1000BCE-300CE) saw the establishment of villages and the cultivation of rice farming within Japan. Rice farming came as a result of Chinese and Korean influence, they were the first group of people to introduce swords into the Japanese Isles. Subsequently, bronze swords were used for religious ceremonies. The Yayoi period saw swords be used primarily for religious and ceremonial purposes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "During the Kofun Period (250-538CE) Animism was introduced into Japanese society. Animism is the belief that everything in life contains or is connected to a divine spirits. This connection to the spirit world premediates the introduction of Buddhism into Japan. During this time, China was craving steel blades on the Korean Peninsula. Japan saw this as a threat to national security and felt the need to develop their military technology. As a result, clan leaders took power as military elites, fighting one another for power and territory. As dominant figures took power, loyalty and servitude became an important part of Japanese life – this became the catalyst for the honour culture that is often affiliated with Japanese people.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "In the Edo period (1603–1868), swords gained prominence in everyday life as the “most important” part of a warrior's amour. The Edo era saw swords became a mechanism for bonding between Daimyo and Samurai. Daimyo would gift samurai's with swords as a token of their appreciation for their services. In turn, samurai would gift Daimyo swords as a sign of respect, most Daimyo would keep these swords as family heirlooms. In this period, it was believed that swords were multifunctional; in spirit they represent proof of military accomplishment, in practice they are coveted weapons of war and diplomatic gifts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The peace of the Edo period saw the demand for swords fall. To retaliate, in 1719 the eighth Tokugawa shogun, Yoshimune, compiled a list of “most famous swords”. Masamune, Awatacuchi Yoshimitsu, and Go no Yoshihiro were dubbed the “Three Famous Smiths”, their swords became sought after by the Daimyo. The prestige and demand for these status symbols spiked the price for these fine pieces.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "During the Late-Edo period, Suishinshi Masahide wrote that swords should be less extravagant. Swords began to be simplified and altered to be durable, sturdy and made to cut well. In 1543 guns arrived in Japan, changing military dynamic and practicality of swords and samurai's. This period also saw introduction of martial arts as a means to connecting to the spirit world and allowed common people to participate in samurai culture.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The Meiji Period (1868–1912) saw the dissolution of the samurai class, after foreign powers demanded Japan open their borders to international trade – 300-hundred years of Japanese isolation came to an end. In 1869 and 1873, two petition were submitted to government to abolish the custom of sword wearing because people feared the outside world would view swords as a “tool for bloodshed” and would consequentially associate Japanese people as violent. Haitōrei (1876) outlawed and prohibited wearing swords in public, with the exception for those in the military and government official; swords lost their meaning within society. Emperor Meiji was determined to westernize Japan with the influence of American technological and scientific advances; however, he himself appreciated the art of sword making. The Meiji era marked the final moments of samurai culture, as samurai's were no match for conscript soldiers who were trained to use western firearms. Some samurai found it difficult to assimilate to the new culture as they were forced to give up their privileges, while others preferred this less-hierarchical way of life. Even with the ban, the Sino-Japanese War (1894) saw Japanese troops wear swords into battle, not for practical use but for symbolic reasons.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "The Meiji era also saw the integration of Buddhism into Shinto Japanese beliefs. Swords were no longer necessary, in war or lifestyle, and those who practiced martial arts became the “modern samurai” – young children were still groomed to serve the emperor and put loyalty and honour above all else, as this new era of rapid development required loyal, hard working men. The practice of sword making was prohibited, thus swords during the Meiji period were obsolete and a mere symbol of status. Swords were left to rust, sold or melted into more ‘practical’ objects for everyday life.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Prior to and during WWII, even with the modernization of the army, the demand for swords exceeded the number of swordsmiths still capable of making them. As a result, swords of this era are of poor quality. In 1933, during the Shōwa era (1926–1989), a sword making factory designed to re-establish the “spirit of Japan” through the art of sword making was built to preserve the legacy and art of swordsmiths and sword making. The government at the time feared that the warrior spirit (loyalty and honour) was disappearing within Japan, along with the integrity and quality of swords.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "For a portion of the US occupation of Japan, sword making, swordsmiths and wielding of swords was prohibited. As a means to preserve the warrior culture of Japan, martial arts was put into the school curriculum. In 1953, America finally lifted the ban on swords after realizing that sword making is an important cultural asset to preserving Japanese history and legacy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The origins of Japanese swords and their effects and influence on society differs depending on the story that is followed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "There is a rich relationship between swords, Japanese culture, and societal development. The different interpretations of the origins of swords and their connection to the spirit world, each hold their own merit within Japanese society, past and present. Which one and how modern-day samurai interpret the history of swords, help influence the kind of samurai and warrior they choose to be.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Japanese swords are generally made by a division of labor between six and eight craftsmen. Tosho (Toko, Katanakaji) is in charge of forging blades, togishi is in charge of polishing blades, kinkosi (chokinshi) is in charge of making metal fittings for sword fittings, shiroganeshi is in charge of making habaki (blade collar), sayashi is in charge of making scabbards, nurishi is in charge of applying lacquer to scabbards, tsukamakishi is in charge of making hilt, and tsubashi is in charge of making tsuba (hand guard). Tosho use apprentice swordsmiths as assistants. Prior to the Muromachi period, tosho and kacchushi (armorer) used surplus metal to make tsuba, but from the Muromachi period onwards, specialized craftsmen began to make tsuba. Nowadays, kinkoshi sometimes serves as shiroganeshi and tsubashi.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Typical features of Japanese swords represented by katana and tachi are a three-dimensional cross-sectional shape of an elongated pentagonal or hexagonal blade called shinogi-zukuri, a style in which the blade and the tang (nakago) are integrated and fixed to the hilt (tsuka) with a pin called mekugi, and a gentle curve. When a shinogi-zukuri sword is viewed from the side, there is a ridge line of the thickest part of the blade called shinogi between the cutting edge side and the back side. This shinogi contributes to lightening and toughening of the blade and high cutting ability.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Japanese swords were often forged with different profiles, different blade thicknesses, and varying amounts of grind. Wakizashi and tantō, for instance, were not simply scaled-down versions of katana; they were often forged in a shape called hira-zukuri, in which the cross-sectional shape of the blade becomes an isosceles triangle.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "The daishō was not always forged together. If a samurai was able to afford a daishō, it was often composed of whichever two swords could be conveniently acquired, sometimes by different smiths and in different styles. Even when a daishō contained a pair of blades by the same smith, they were not always forged as a pair or mounted as one. Daishō made as a pair, mounted as a pair, and owned/worn as a pair, are therefore uncommon and considered highly valuable, especially if they still retain their original mountings (as opposed to later mountings, even if the later mounts are made as a pair).",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The forging of a Japanese blade typically took weeks or even months and was considered a sacred art. As with many complex endeavors, rather than a single craftsman, several artists were involved. There was a smith to forge the rough shape, often a second smith (apprentice) to fold the metal, a specialist polisher (called a togi) as well as the various artisans that made the koshirae (the various fittings used to decorate the finished blade and saya (sheath) including the tsuka (hilt), fuchi (collar), kashira (pommel), and tsuba (hand guard)). It is said that the sharpening and polishing process takes just as long as the forging of the blade itself.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "The legitimate Japanese sword is made from Japanese steel \"Tamahagane\". The most common lamination method the Japanese sword blade is formed from is a combination of two different steels: a harder outer jacket of steel wrapped around a softer inner core of steel. This creates a blade which has a hard, razor sharp cutting edge with the ability to absorb shock in a way which reduces the possibility of the blade breaking when used in combat. The hadagane, for the outer skin of the blade, is produced by heating a block of raw steel, which is then hammered out into a bar, and the flexible back portion. This is then cooled and broken up into smaller blocks which are checked for further impurities and then reassembled and reforged. During this process the billet of steel is heated and hammered, split and folded back upon itself many times and re-welded to create a complex structure of many thousands of layers. Each different steel is folded differently, in order to provide the necessary strength and flexibility to the different steels. The precise way in which the steel is folded, hammered and re-welded determines the distinctive grain pattern of the blade, the jihada, (also called jigane when referring to the actual surface of the steel blade) a feature which is indicative of the period, place of manufacture and actual maker of the blade. The practice of folding also ensures a somewhat more homogeneous product, with the carbon in the steel being evenly distributed and the steel having no voids that could lead to fractures and failure of the blade in combat.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The shingane (for the inner core of the blade) is of a relatively softer steel with a lower carbon content than the hadagane. For this, the block is again hammered, folded and welded in a similar fashion to the hadagane, but with fewer folds. At this point, the hadagane block is once again heated, hammered out and folded into a ‘U’ shape, into which the shingane is inserted to a point just short of the tip. The new composite steel billet is then heated and hammered out ensuring that no air or dirt is trapped between the two layers of steel. The bar increases in length during this process until it approximates the final size and shape of the finished sword blade. A triangular section is cut off from the tip of the bar and shaped to create what will be the kissaki. At this point in the process, the blank for the blade is of rectangular section. This rough shape is referred to as a sunobe.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "The sunobe is again heated, section by section and hammered to create a shape which has many of the recognisable characteristics of the finished blade. These are a thick back (mune), a thinner edge (ha), a curved tip (kissaki), notches on the edge (hamachi) and back (munemachi) which separate the blade from the tang (nakago). Details such as the ridge line (shinogi) another distinctive characteristic of the Japanese sword, are added at this stage of the process. The smith's skill at this point comes into play as the hammering process causes the blade to naturally curve in an erratic way, the thicker back tending to curve towards the thinner edge, and he must skillfully control the shape to give it the required upward curvature. The sunobe is finished by a process of filing and scraping which leaves all the physical characteristics and shapes of the blade recognisable. The surface of the blade is left in a relatively rough state, ready for the hardening processes. The sunobe is then covered all over with a clay mixture which is applied more thickly along the back and sides of the blade than along the edge. The blade is left to dry while the smith prepares the forge for the final heat treatment of the blade, the yaki-ire, the hardening of the cutting edge.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "This process takes place in a darkened smithy, traditionally at night, in order that the smith can judge by eye the colour and therefore the temperature of the sword as it is repeatedly passed through the glowing charcoal. When the time is deemed right (traditionally the blade should be the colour of the moon in February and August which are the two months that appear most commonly on dated inscriptions on the tang), the blade is plunged edge down and point forward into a tank of water. The precise time taken to heat the sword, the temperature of the blade and of the water into which it is plunged are all individual to each smith and they have generally been closely guarded secrets. Legend tells of a particular smith who cut off his apprentice's hand for testing the temperature of the water he used for the hardening process. In the different schools of swordmakers there are many subtle variations in the materials used in the various processes and techniques outlined above, specifically in the form of clay applied to the blade prior to the yaki-ire, but all follow the same general procedures.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The application of the clay in different thicknesses to the blade allows the steel to cool more quickly along the thinner coated edge when plunged into the tank of water and thereby develop into the harder form of steel called martensite, which can be ground to razor-like sharpness. The thickly coated back cools more slowly retaining the pearlite steel characteristics of relative softness and flexibility. The precise way in which the clay is applied, and partially scraped off at the edge, is a determining factor in the formation of the shape and features of the crystalline structure known as the hamon. This distinctive tempering line found near the edge is one of the main characteristics to be assessed when examining a blade.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The martensitic steel which forms from the edge of the blade to the hamon is in effect the transition line between these two different forms of steel, and is where most of the shapes, colours and beauty in the steel of the Japanese sword are to be found. The variations in the form and structure of the hamon are all indicative of the period, smith, school or place of manufacture of the sword. As well as the aesthetic qualities of the hamon, there are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, real practical functions. The hardened edge is where most of any potential damage to the blade will occur in battle. This hardened edge is capable of being reground and sharpened many times, although the process will alter the shape of the blade. Altering the shape will allow more resistance when fighting in hand-to-hand combat.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Almost all blades are decorated, although not all blades are decorated on the visible part of the blade. Once the blade is cool, and the mud is scraped off, grooves and markings (hi or bo-hi) may be cut into it. One of the most important markings on the sword is performed here: the file markings. These are cut into the tang or the hilt-section of the blade, where they will be covered by the hilt later. The tang is never supposed to be cleaned; doing this can reduce the value of the sword by half or more. The purpose is to show how well the steel ages.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Some other marks on the blade are aesthetic: dedications written in Kanji characters as well as engravings called horimono depicting gods, dragons, or other acceptable beings. Some are more practical. The presence of a groove (the most basic type is called a hi) reduces the weight of the sword yet keeps its structural integrity and strength.",
"title": "Manufacturing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "The tachi became the primary weapon on the battlefield during the Kamakura period, used by cavalry. The sword was mostly considered as a secondary weapon until then, used in the battlefield only after the bow and polearm were no longer feasible. During the Edo period samurai went about on foot unarmored, and with much less combat being fought on horseback in open battlefields the need for an effective close quarter weapon resulted in samurai being armed with daishō.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Testing of swords, called tameshigiri, was practiced on a variety of materials (often the bodies of executed criminals) to test the sword's sharpness and practice cutting techniques.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Kenjutsu is the Japanese martial art of using the Japanese swords in combat. The Japanese swords are primarily a cutting weapon, or more specifically, a slicing one. Its moderate curve, however, allowed for effective thrusting as well. The hilt was held with two hands, though a fair amount of one-handed techniques exist. The placement of the right hand was dictated by both the length of the handle and the length of the wielder's arm. Two other martial arts were developed specifically for training to draw the sword and attack in one motion. They are battōjutsu and iaijutsu, which are superficially similar, but do generally differ in training theory and methods.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "For cutting, there was a specific technique called \"ten-uchi.\" Ten-uchi refers to an organized motion made by arms and wrist, during a descending strike. As the sword is swung downwards, the elbow joint drastically extends at the last instant, popping the sword into place. This motion causes the swordsman's grip to twist slightly and if done correctly, is said to feel like wringing a towel (Thomas Hooper reference). This motion itself caused the sword's blade to impact its target with sharp force, and is used to break initial resistance. From there, fluidly continuing along the motion wrought by ten-uchi, the arms would follow through with the stroke, dragging the sword through its target. Because the Japanese swords slices rather than chops, it is this \"dragging\" which allows it to do maximum damage, and is thus incorporated into the cutting technique. At full speed, the swing will appear to be full stroke, the sword passing through the targeted object. The segments of the swing are hardly visible, if at all. Assuming that the target is, for example, a human torso, ten-uchi will break the initial resistance supplied by shoulder muscles and the clavicle. The follow through would continue the slicing motion, through whatever else it would encounter, until the blade inherently exited the body, due to a combination of the motion and its curved shape.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Nearly all styles of kenjutsu share the same five basic guard postures. They are as follows; chūdan-no-kamae (middle posture), jōdan-no-kamae (high posture), gedan-no-kamae (low posture), hassō-no-kamae (eight-sided posture), and waki-gamae (side posture).",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "The Japanese swords razor-edge was so hard that upon hitting an equally hard or harder object, such as another sword's edge, chipping became a definite risk. As such, blocking an oncoming blow blade-to-blade was generally avoided. In fact, evasive body maneuvers were preferred over blade contact by most, but, if such was not possible, the flat or the back of the blade was used for defense in many styles, rather than the precious edge. A popular method for defeating descending slashes was to simply beat the sword aside. In some instances, an \"umbrella block\", positioning the blade overhead, diagonally (point towards the ground, pommel towards the sky), would create an effective shield against a descending strike. If the angle of the block was drastic enough, the curve of the Japanese swords blade would cause the attacker's blade to slide along its counter and off to the side.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Japanese swords were carried in several different ways, varying throughout Japanese history. The style most commonly seen in \"samurai\" movies is called buke-zukuri, with the katana (and wakizashi, if also present) carried edge up, with the sheath thrust through the obi (sash).",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The sword would be carried in a sheath and tucked into the samurai's belt. Originally, they would carry the sword with the blade turned down. This was a more comfortable way for the armored samurai to carry his very long sword or to draw while mounted. The bulk of the samurai armor made it difficult to draw the sword from any other place on his body. When unarmored, samurai would carry their sword with the blade facing up. This made it possible to draw the sword and strike in one quick motion. In one such method of drawing the sword, the samurai would turn the sheath downward ninety degrees and pull it out of his sash just a bit with his left hand, then gripping the hilt with his right hand he would slide it out while sliding the sheath back to its original position.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Historically, Japanese swords have been regarded not only as weapons but also as works of art, especially for high-quality ones. For a long time, Japanese people have developed a unique appreciation method in which the blade is regarded as the core of their aesthetic evaluation rather than the sword mountings decorated with luxurious lacquer or metal works.",
"title": "Appreciation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "It is said that the following three objects are the most noteworthy objects when appreciating a blade. The first is the overall shape referred to as sugata. Curvature, length, width, tip, and shape of tang of the sword are the objects for appreciation. The second is a fine pattern on the surface of the blade, which is referred to as hada or jigane. By repeatedly folding and forging the blade, fine patterns such as fingerprints, tree rings and bark are formed on its surface. The third is hamon. Hamon is a white pattern of the cutting edge produced by quenching and tempering. The object of appreciation is the shape of hammon and the crystal particles formed at the boundary of hammon. Depending on the size of the particles, they can be divided into two types, a nie and a nioi, which makes them look like stars or mist. In addition to these three objects, a swordsmith signature and a file pattern engraved on tang, and a carving inscribed on the blade, which is referred to as horimono, are also the objects of appreciation.",
"title": "Appreciation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Hon'ami clan, which was an authority of appraisal of Japanese swords, rated Japanese swords from these artistic points of view. In addition, experts of modern Japanese swords judge when and by which swordsmith school the sword was made from these artistic points of view.",
"title": "Appreciation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Generally, the blade and the sword mounting of Japanese swords are displayed separately in museums, and this tendency is remarkable in Japan. For example, the Nagoya Japanese Sword Museum \"Nagoya Touken World\", one of Japan's largest sword museums, posts separate videos of the blade and the sword mounting on its official website and YouTube.",
"title": "Appreciation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "In Japan, Japanese swords are rated by authorities of each period, and some of the authority of the rating is still valid today.",
"title": "Rating of Japanese swords and swordsmiths"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "In 1719, Tokugawa Yoshimune, the 8th shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate, ordered Hon'ami Kōchū, who was an authority of sword appraisal, to record swords possessed by daimyo all over Japan in books. In the completed \"Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō\" (享保名物帳) 249 precious swords were described, and additional 25 swords were described later. The list also includes 81 swords that had been destroyed in previous fires. The precious swords described in this book were called \"Meibutsu\" (名物) and the criteria for selection were artistic elements, origins and legends. The list of \"Meibutsu\" includes 59 swords made by Masamune, 34 by Awataguchi Yoshimitsu and 22 by Go Yoshihiro, and these 3 swordsmiths were considered special. Daimyo hid some swords for fear that they would be confiscated by the Tokugawa Shogunate, so even some precious swords were not listed in the book. For example, Daihannya Nagamitsu and Yamatorige, which are now designated as National Treasures, were not listed.",
"title": "Rating of Japanese swords and swordsmiths"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Yamada Asaemon V, who was the official sword cutting ability examiner and executioner of the Tokugawa shogunate, published a book \"Kaiho Kenjaku\" (懐宝剣尺) in 1797 in which he ranked the cutting ability of swords. The book lists 228 swordsmiths, whose forged swords are called \"Wazamono\" (業物) and the highest \"Saijo Ō Wazamono\" (最上大業物) has 12 selected. In the reprinting in 1805, 1 swordsmith was added to the highest grade, and in the major revised edition in 1830 \"Kokon Kajibiko\" (古今鍛冶備考), 2 swordsmiths were added to the highest grade, and in the end, 15 swordsmiths were ranked as the highest grade. The katana forged by Nagasone Kotetsu, one of the top-rated swordsmith, became very popular at the time when the book was published, and many counterfeits were made. In these books, the 3 swordsmiths treated specially in \"Kyōhō Meibutsu Chō\" and Muramasa, who was famous at that time for forging swords with high cutting ability, were not mentioned. The reasons for this are considered to be that Yamada was afraid of challenging the authority of the shogun, that he could not use the precious sword possessed by the daimyo in the examination, and that he was considerate of the legend of Muramasa's curse.",
"title": "Rating of Japanese swords and swordsmiths"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "At present, by the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, important swords of high historical value are designated as Important Cultural Properties (Jūyō Bunkazai, 重要文化財), and special swords among them are designated as National Treasures (Kokuhō, 国宝). The swords designated as cultural properties based on the law of 1930, which was already abolished, have the rank next to Important Cultural Properties as Important Art Object (Jūyō Bijutsuhin, 重要美術品). In addition, The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords, a public interest incorporated foundation, rates high-value swords in four grades, and the highest grade Special Important Sword (Tokubetsu Juyo Token, 特別重要刀剣) is considered to be equivalent to the value of Important Art Object. Although swords owned by the Japanese Imperial Family are not designated as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties because they are outside the jurisdiction of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties, there are many swords of the National Treasure class, and they are called \"Gyobutsu\" (御物).",
"title": "Rating of Japanese swords and swordsmiths"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Currently, there are several authoritative rating systems for swordsmiths. According to the rating approved by the Japanese government, from 1890 to 1947, 2 swordsmiths who were appointed as Imperial Household Artist and after 1955, 6 swordsmiths who were designated as Living National Treasure are regarded as the best swordsmiths. According to the rating approved by The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords, a public interest incorporated foundation, 39 swordsmiths who were designated as Mukansa (無鑑査) since 1958 are considered to be the highest ranking swordsmiths. The best sword forged by Japanese swordsmiths is awarded the most honorable Masamune prize by The Society for Preservation of Japanese Art Swords. Since 1961, 8 swordsmiths have received the Masamune Prize, and among them, 3 swordsmiths, Masamine Sumitani, Akitsugu Amata and Toshihira Osumi, have received the prize 3 times each and Sadakazu Gassan II has received the prize 2 times. These 4 persons were designated both Living National Treasures and Mukansa.",
"title": "Rating of Japanese swords and swordsmiths"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Generally, the blade and the sword mounting of Japanese swords are displayed separately in museums, and this tendency is remarkable in Japan. For example, the Nagoya Japanese Sword Museum \"Nagoya Touken World\", one of Japan's largest sword museums, posts separate videos of the blade and the sword mounting on its official website and YouTube.",
"title": "Gallery"
}
] |
A Japanese sword is one of several types of traditionally made swords from Japan. Bronze swords were made as early as the Yayoi period, though most people generally refer to the curved blades made from the Heian period (794–1185) to the present day when speaking of "Japanese swords". There are many types of Japanese swords that differ by size, shape, field of application and method of manufacture. Some of the more commonly known types of Japanese swords are the uchigatana, tachi, ōdachi, wakizashi, and tantō.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_sword
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Kurt Vonnegut
|
Kurt Vonnegut (/ˈvɒnəɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. Vonnegut adopted three of his sister's sons after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.
Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors.
Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, titled Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and his wife Edith (née Lieber). His older siblings were Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917). He had descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. His father and grandfather Bernard were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called "The Athenæum"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city with their fortune deriving from ownership of a successful brewery.
Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent German speakers, but the ill feeling toward Germany during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture in order to show their American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach Vonnegut to speak German or introduce him to German literature and traditions, leaving him feeling "ignorant and rootless". Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and giving him values; he said, "she gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me", and "was as great an influence on me as anybody". He described her as "humane and wise" and added that "the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs" came from her.
The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers' brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent of prohibition. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce. Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school called Public School No. 43 (now the James Whitcomb Riley School). He was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune. His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a "dreamy artist". His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was "as corrosive as hydrochloric acid". She unsuccessfully tried to sell short stories she had written to Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines.
Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became a co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) for the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut said that his tenure with the Echo allowed him to write for a large audience—his fellow students—rather than for a teacher, an experience, he said, was "fun and easy". "It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people", Vonnegut observed. "Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it."
After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a "useful" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies. As his father had been a member at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did. He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. By the end of his first year, he was writing a column titled "Innocents Abroad", which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a piece "Well All Right" focusing on pacifism, a cause he strongly supported, arguing against US intervention in World War II.
The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII. Vonnegut was a member of Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but poor grades and a satirical article in Cornell's newspaper cost him his place there. He was placed on academic probation in May 1942 and dropped out the following January. No longer eligible for a deferment as a member of ROTC, he faced likely conscription into the United States Army. Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Army and in March 1943 reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training. Vonnegut was trained to fire and maintain howitzers and later received instruction in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP).
In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout. He lived so close to his home that he was "able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends".
On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Possible factors that contributed to Edith Vonnegut's suicide include the family's loss of wealth and status, Vonnegut's forthcoming deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer. She was inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs.
Three months after his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of the war. During the battle, the 106th Infantry Division, which had only recently reached the front and was assigned to a "quiet" sector due to its inexperience, was overrun by advancing German armored forces. Over 500 members of the division were killed, and over 6,000 were captured.
On December 22, Vonnegut was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in the German province of Saxony. During the journey, the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains carrying Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war, killing about 150 of them. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the "first fancy city [he had] ever seen". He lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked in a factory that made malt syrup for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever another city was bombed. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. "There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories."
On February 13, 1945, Dresden became the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies engaged in a firebombing of the city. The offensive subsided on February 15, with about 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing. Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it. He had survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. "It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around", Vonnegut said. "When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town down." Vonnegut and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as a "terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt".
The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after US General George S. Patton captured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers. Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart, about which he remarked: "I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite." He was discharged from the US Army and returned to Indianapolis.
After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high-school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The pair relocated to Chicago; there, Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year joint undergraduate/graduate program that conferred a master's degree. There, he studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield, his "most famous professor". He augmented his income by working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night.
Jane, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane dropped out of the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), while Kurt also left the university without any degree (despite having completed his undergraduate education). Vonnegut failed to write a dissertation, as his ideas had all been rejected. One abandoned topic was about the Ghost Dance and Cubist movements. A later topic, rejected "unanimously", had to do with the shapes of stories. Vonnegut received his graduate degree in anthropology 25 years after he left, when the university accepted his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of his master's thesis.
Shortly thereafter, General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a technical writer, then publicist, for the company's Schenectady, New York, News Bureau, a publicity department that operated like a newsroom. His brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, focusing mainly on a silver-iodide-based cloud seeding project that quickly became a joint GE-US Army Signal Corps program, Project Cirrus. In The Brothers Vonnegut Ginger Strand draws connections between many real events at General Electric, including Bernard's work, and Vonnegut's early stories, which were regularly being rejected everywhere he sent them. Throughout this period, Jane Vonnegut encouraged him, editing his stories, strategizing about submissions, and buoying his spirits.
In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", published in the February 11, 1950, issue of Collier's, for which he received $750. The story concerned a scientist who fears that his invention will be used as a weapon, much as Bernard was fearing at the time about his cloudseeding work. Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's, Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950. While Burger supported Vonnegut's writing, he was shocked when Vonnegut quit GE as of January 1, 1951, later stating: "I never said he should give up his job and devote himself to fiction. I don't trust the freelancer's life, it's tough." Nevertheless, in early 1951 Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to write full time, leaving GE behind. He initially moved to Osterville, but he ended up purchasing a home in Barnstable.
In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-Third World War setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines. Player Piano draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. The novel is set at a General Electric-like company and includes many scenes based on things Vonnegut saw there. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in Player Piano is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who have all the material goods they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning revolution. Player Piano expresses Vonnegut's opposition to McCarthyism, something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one character as "fellow travelers".
In Player Piano, Vonnegut originates many of the techniques he would use in his later works. The comic, heavy-drinking Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this dystopian corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an insider would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For example, when taken to see the artificially intelligent supercomputer EPICAC, the Shah asks it "what are people for?" and receives no answer. Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a "false god". This type of alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's literature.
The New York Times writer and critic Granville Hicks gave Player Piano a positive review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Hicks called Vonnegut a "sharp-eyed satirist". None of the reviewers considered the novel particularly important. Several editions were printed—one by Bantam with the title Utopia 14, and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club—whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre and deplored a perceived sentiment that "no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works".
After Player Piano, Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became Cat's Cradle), he struggled to complete it, and the work languished for years. In 1954, the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional sources of income as well. In 1957, he and a partner opened a Saab automobile dealership on Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year.
In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adams' young sons—James, Steven, and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively. A fourth Adams son, Peter (2), also stayed with the Vonneguts for about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in Georgia.
Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot. The Sirens of Titan (1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth, as experienced by a bored billionaire Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that causes him to appear on Earth every 59 days. The billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home—human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as the Kremlin, are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.
Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, also physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described this way: he "put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up." William Rodney Allen, in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the fictional political figures who would play major roles in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird.
Mother Night, published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who is raised in Germany from age 11 and joins the Nazi party during the war as a double agent for the US Office of Strategic Services, rising to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition: "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be". Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to illustrate the tendency for "impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion".
Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level "handicaps" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that "Harrison Bergeron" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high-school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows "in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom". Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on "Harrison Bergeron", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War understandings of communism and socialism.
With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, "Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time". The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, "ice-nine", solid water stable at room temperature, but more dense than liquid water. If a particle of ice-nine is dropped in water, all of the surrounding water becomes ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker is based on Bernard Vonnegut's boss at the GE Research Lab, Irving Langmuir, and the way ice-nine is described in the novel is reminiscent of how Bernard Vonnegut explained his own invention, silver-iodide cloudseeding, to Kurt. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted) give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.
Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964), on an accountant he knew on Cape Cod, who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department and by giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Allen deemed God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater more "a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time.
In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999, he wrote in The New York Times: "I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids..." But then, on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a teaching job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man.
After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. At the time of the bombing, Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and based on early figures, he came to believe that 135,000 had died there.
Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned from the war, but had never been able to write anything acceptable to himself or his publishers—chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties. Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes—Billy's death in 1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's first pages. In 1970, Vonnegut was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War.
Slaughterhouse-Five received generally positive reviews, with Michael Crichton writing in The New Republic:
The book went immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War. He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden.
After Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished professor during the 1973–1974 academic year. He was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7, 1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film, which the author said was "flawless".
Meanwhile, Vonnegut's personal life was disintegrating. His wife Jane had embraced Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and with five of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said that the two were forced to find "other sorts of seemingly important work to do". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreements "painful" and said that the resulting split was a "terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand". The couple divorced but remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond his marriage, he was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist weekly.
When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 2005
Vonnegut's difficulties materialized in numerous ways, including the painfully slow progress made on his next novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions. In 1971, he stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S. Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and Screen, Breakfast of Champions was called "funny and outlandish", but reviewers noted that it "lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness". Vonnegut's 1976 novel Slapstick, which meditates on the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In The New York Times's review of Slapstick, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said that Vonnegut "seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before" and that "it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all". At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints.
In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), and Hocus Pocus (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s, Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later, Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School. The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels, Timequake (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut biographer Gregory Sumner said, "a reflection of an aging man facing mortality and testimony to an embattled faith in the resilience of human awareness and agency". Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.
Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike—he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.
Lev Grossman, Time, 2007
In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Vonnegut sardonically stated that he would sue the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, the maker of the Pall Mall-branded cigarettes he had been smoking since he was around 12 or 14 years old, for false advertising: "And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me."
Vonnegut died in Manhattan, a borough of New York City, on the night of April 11, 2007, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior, from a fall at his brownstone home. His death was reported by his wife Jill. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death, he had written fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction books. A book composed of his unpublished pieces, Armageddon in Retrospect, was compiled and posthumously published by his son Mark in 2008.
When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich stated that he has "much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian." Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez said that the author will "rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture", and Dinitia Smith of The New York Times dubbed Vonnegut the "counterculture's novelist".
Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973 the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in 2012. Late 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies: Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes. Shields's biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to The Guardian, the book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty. "Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes", said The Daily Beast's Wendy Smith. "Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose", said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth.
Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?
Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, 2007
Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, has been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances. In the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on Slaughterhouse-Five—which the board had called "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy"—and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouri, decided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the district.
Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him. "The time for scholars to say 'Here's why Vonnegut is worth reading' has definitively ended, thank goodness. We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know." Todd F. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal readers, who have "significant influence as they continue to purchase Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his entire canon in print—an impressive list of more than twenty books that [Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover designs." Donald E. Morse notes that Vonnegut "is now firmly, if somewhat controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as well as in high school, college and graduate curricula". Tally writes of Vonnegut's work:
Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of postmodern American experience ... That he does not actually succeed in representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is beside the point. What matters is the attempt, and the recognition that ... we must try to map this unstable and perilous terrain, even if we know in advance that our efforts are doomed.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor. A crater on the planet Mercury has also been named in his honor. In 2021, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association. In 1986, the University of Evansville library located in Evansville, Indiana was named after Vonnegut, where he spoke during the dedication ceremony.
The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.
In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party, who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—"Yes, I guess", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?" In the novel, Vonnegut's character continues: "What he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death". Vonnegut was a pacifist.
In 2011, NPR wrote: "Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s." Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview: "my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.
Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that "wars were partly encouraged by books and movies", starring "Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991): "I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima".
Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.
Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ... I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999
Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for Playboy, he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. Vonnegut did not, however, disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says that he is a "Christ-worshipping agnostic". During a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a "Christ-loving atheist". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian.
Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book Fates Worse than Death, Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, "anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American". In Palm Sunday, he wrote that "the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade". However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.
Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric and was prone to using such expressions as "God forbid" and "thank God". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout—the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example, in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Slaughterhouse-Five sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism.
Vonnegut's thoughts on politics were shaped in large part by Robert Redfield, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought, and one of Vonnegut's professors during his time at the university. In a commencement address, Vonnegut remarked that "Dr. Redfield's theory of the Folk Society ... has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are". Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism and mused on the specious simplicity of American politics, saying facetiously: "If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said: "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."
Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of "survival of the fittest" in American society, believing that "socialism would be a good for the common man". Vonnegut would often return to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free." Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American and believed that they offered beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems.
Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity and a skeptical take on religion and, as Vonnegut put it, were both "associated with the enemy in a major war", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story "twerps".
Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. "I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel also included ideas from mathematician Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as "a hero of [his]" and an "enormous influence". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. "[My] mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses."
Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.
The book Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and his longtime friend and former student Suzanne McConnell, published posthumously by Rosetta Books and Seven Stories Press in 2019, delves into the style, humor, and methodologism employed by Vonnegut, including his belief that one should "Write like a human being. Write like a writer."
I've heard the Vonnegut voice described as "manic depressive", and there's certainly something to this. It has an incredible amount of energy married to a very deep and dark sense of despair. It's frequently over-the-top, and scathingly satirical, but it never strays too far from pathos—from an immense sympathy for society's vulnerable, oppressed and powerless. But, then, it also contains a huge allotment of warmth. Most of the time, reading Kurt Vonnegut feels more like being spoken to by a very close friend. There's an inclusiveness to his writing that draws you in, and his narrative voice is seldom absent from the story for any length of time. Usually, it's right there in the foreground—direct, involving and extremely idiosyncratic.
Gavin Extence, The Huffington Post, 2013
In his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward; his sentences concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions are also laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.
Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points: much of Player Piano leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states: "every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote: "rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness". Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large artificial families that the US population is formed into in Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism, with people giving no help to those not part of their group, and with the extended family's place in the social hierarchy becoming vital.
In the introduction to their essay "Kurt Vonnegut and Humor", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a "black humorist", but a "frustrated idealist" who used "comic parables" to teach the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. "Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies." Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label's stereotype.
Vonnegut's works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He also resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes that are often associated with those genres. In several of his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in works of science fiction. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate absurdities and idiosyncrasies in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often humorizes the problems that plague societies, as is done in satirical works. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction that Vonnegut "reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the humanizing value of laughter."
Postmodernism often entails a response to the theory that the truths of the world will be discovered through science. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective, rather than objective, as it is biased towards each individual's beliefs and outlook on the world. They often use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook, as it seeks to represent actual historical events while problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that. This is encapsulated in the opening lines of the novel: "All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." This bombastic opening—"All this happened"—"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis", which is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and "[t]his creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at one and the same time". While Vonnegut does use elements as fragmentation and metafictional elements, in some of his works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril posed by individuals who find subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, then proceed to impose these truths on others.
Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In The Sirens of Titan, the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances, as the lives of both groups' members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views.
In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: "Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic foundations of the United States." Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a "hereditary aristocracy" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism and a "survival of the fittest" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune and fails to help them out of their poverty because "they deserve their fate".
Science and the ethical obligations of scientists are also a common theme in Vonnegut's works. His first published story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect", like many of his early stories, centered on a scientist concerned about the uses of his own invention. Player Piano and Cat's Cradle explore the effects on humans of scientific advances. In 1969, Vonnegut gave a speech to the American Association of Physics Teachers called "The Virtuous Physicist". Asked afterwards what a virtuous scientist was, Vonnegut replied, "one who declines to work on weapons."
Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views free will as heretical.
The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in Player Piano called their manager's spouse "Mom". In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A "karass", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his will, and a "granfalloon", defined by Marvin as a "meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation". Similarly, in Slapstick, the US government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families.
Fear of the loss of one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel, Player Piano, where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work, as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software.
Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that "many people are not fond of life". He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which he claims is designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.
"What is the point of life?" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question "What is the purpose of life?" written in a bathroom, his response is: "To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool." Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that, "[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports come in". In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his son Mark and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life: "We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, and the date in parentheses is the date the work was published:
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"text": "Kurt Vonnegut (/ˈvɒnəɡət/; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.",
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"text": "Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. Vonnegut adopted three of his sister's sons after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.",
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"text": "Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors.",
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"text": "Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, titled Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.",
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"text": "Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in Indianapolis on November 11, 1922, the youngest of three children of Kurt Vonnegut Sr. and his wife Edith (née Lieber). His older siblings were Bernard (born 1914) and Alice (born 1917). He had descended from German immigrants who settled in the United States in the mid-19th century; his paternal great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, settled in Indianapolis and founded the Vonnegut Hardware Company. His father and grandfather Bernard were architects; the architecture firm under Kurt Sr. designed such buildings as Das Deutsche Haus (now called \"The Athenæum\"), the Indiana headquarters of the Bell Telephone Company, and the Fletcher Trust Building. Vonnegut's mother was born into Indianapolis high society, as her family, the Liebers, were among the wealthiest in the city with their fortune deriving from ownership of a successful brewery.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Both of Vonnegut's parents were fluent German speakers, but the ill feeling toward Germany during and after World War I caused them to abandon German culture in order to show their American patriotism. Thus, they did not teach Vonnegut to speak German or introduce him to German literature and traditions, leaving him feeling \"ignorant and rootless\". Vonnegut later credited Ida Young, his family's African-American cook and housekeeper during the first decade of his life, for raising him and giving him values; he said, \"she gave me decent moral instruction and was exceedingly nice to me\", and \"was as great an influence on me as anybody\". He described her as \"humane and wise\" and added that \"the compassionate, forgiving aspects of [his] beliefs\" came from her.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The financial security and social prosperity that the Vonneguts had once enjoyed were destroyed in a matter of years. The Liebers' brewery was closed in 1921 after the advent of prohibition. When the Great Depression hit, few people could afford to build, causing clients at Kurt Sr.'s architectural firm to become scarce. Vonnegut's brother and sister had finished their primary and secondary educations in private schools, but Vonnegut was placed in a public school called Public School No. 43 (now the James Whitcomb Riley School). He was bothered by the Great Depression, and both his parents were affected deeply by their economic misfortune. His father withdrew from normal life and became what Vonnegut called a \"dreamy artist\". His mother became depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and abusive. She labored to regain the family's wealth and status, and Vonnegut said that she expressed hatred for her husband that was \"as corrosive as hydrochloric acid\". She unsuccessfully tried to sell short stories she had written to Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Vonnegut enrolled at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in 1936. While there, he played clarinet in the school band and became a co-editor (along with Madelyn Pugh) for the Tuesday edition of the school newspaper, The Shortridge Echo. Vonnegut said that his tenure with the Echo allowed him to write for a large audience—his fellow students—rather than for a teacher, an experience, he said, was \"fun and easy\". \"It just turned out that I could write better than a lot of other people\", Vonnegut observed. \"Each person has something he can do easily and can't imagine why everybody else has so much trouble doing it.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After graduating from Shortridge in 1940, Vonnegut enrolled at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He wanted to study the humanities or become an architect like his father, but his father and brother Bernard, an atmospheric scientist, urged him to study a \"useful\" discipline. As a result, Vonnegut majored in biochemistry, but he had little proficiency in the area and was indifferent towards his studies. As his father had been a member at MIT, Vonnegut was entitled to join the Delta Upsilon fraternity, and did. He overcame stiff competition for a place at the university's independent newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, first serving as a staff writer, then as an editor. By the end of his first year, he was writing a column titled \"Innocents Abroad\", which reused jokes from other publications. He later penned a piece \"Well All Right\" focusing on pacifism, a cause he strongly supported, arguing against US intervention in World War II.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into WWII. Vonnegut was a member of Reserve Officers' Training Corps, but poor grades and a satirical article in Cornell's newspaper cost him his place there. He was placed on academic probation in May 1942 and dropped out the following January. No longer eligible for a deferment as a member of ROTC, he faced likely conscription into the United States Army. Instead of waiting to be drafted, he enlisted in the Army and in March 1943 reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for basic training. Vonnegut was trained to fire and maintain howitzers and later received instruction in mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee as part of the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP).",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In early 1944, the ASTP was canceled due to the Army's need for soldiers to support the D-Day invasion, and Vonnegut was ordered to an infantry battalion at Camp Atterbury, south of Indianapolis in Edinburgh, Indiana, where he trained as a scout. He lived so close to his home that he was \"able to sleep in [his] own bedroom and use the family car on weekends\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother's Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills. Possible factors that contributed to Edith Vonnegut's suicide include the family's loss of wealth and status, Vonnegut's forthcoming deployment overseas, and her own lack of success as a writer. She was inebriated at the time and under the influence of prescription drugs.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Three months after his mother's suicide, Vonnegut was sent to Europe as an intelligence scout with the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of the war. During the battle, the 106th Infantry Division, which had only recently reached the front and was assigned to a \"quiet\" sector due to its inexperience, was overrun by advancing German armored forces. Over 500 members of the division were killed, and over 6,000 were captured.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "On December 22, Vonnegut was captured with about 50 other American soldiers. Vonnegut was taken by boxcar to a prison camp south of Dresden, in the German province of Saxony. During the journey, the Royal Air Force mistakenly attacked the trains carrying Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war, killing about 150 of them. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden, the \"first fancy city [he had] ever seen\". He lived in a slaughterhouse when he got to the city, and worked in a factory that made malt syrup for pregnant women. Vonnegut recalled the sirens going off whenever another city was bombed. The Germans did not expect Dresden to be bombed, Vonnegut said. \"There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "On February 13, 1945, Dresden became the target of Allied forces. In the hours and days that followed, the Allies engaged in a firebombing of the city. The offensive subsided on February 15, with about 25,000 civilians killed in the bombing. Vonnegut marveled at the level of both the destruction in Dresden and the secrecy that attended it. He had survived by taking refuge in a meat locker three stories underground. \"It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around\", Vonnegut said. \"When we came up the city was gone ... They burnt the whole damn town down.\" Vonnegut and other American prisoners were put to work immediately after the bombing, excavating bodies from the rubble. He described the activity as a \"terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The American POWs were evacuated on foot to the border of Saxony and Czechoslovakia after US General George S. Patton captured Leipzig. With the captives abandoned by their guards, Vonnegut reached a prisoner-of-war repatriation camp in Le Havre, France, before the end of May 1945, with the aid of the Soviets. He returned to the United States and continued to serve in the Army, stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, typing discharge papers for other soldiers. Soon after he was awarded a Purple Heart, about which he remarked: \"I myself was awarded my country's second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite.\" He was discharged from the US Army and returned to Indianapolis.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "After he returned to the United States, 22-year-old Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high-school girlfriend and classmate since kindergarten, on September 1, 1945. The pair relocated to Chicago; there, Vonnegut enrolled in the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill, as an anthropology student in an unusual five-year joint undergraduate/graduate program that conferred a master's degree. There, he studied under anthropologist Robert Redfield, his \"most famous professor\". He augmented his income by working as a reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago at night.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Jane, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore, accepted a scholarship from the university to study Russian literature as a graduate student. Jane dropped out of the program after becoming pregnant with the couple's first child, Mark (born May 1947), while Kurt also left the university without any degree (despite having completed his undergraduate education). Vonnegut failed to write a dissertation, as his ideas had all been rejected. One abandoned topic was about the Ghost Dance and Cubist movements. A later topic, rejected \"unanimously\", had to do with the shapes of stories. Vonnegut received his graduate degree in anthropology 25 years after he left, when the university accepted his novel Cat's Cradle in lieu of his master's thesis.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Shortly thereafter, General Electric (GE) hired Vonnegut as a technical writer, then publicist, for the company's Schenectady, New York, News Bureau, a publicity department that operated like a newsroom. His brother Bernard had worked at GE since 1945, focusing mainly on a silver-iodide-based cloud seeding project that quickly became a joint GE-US Army Signal Corps program, Project Cirrus. In The Brothers Vonnegut Ginger Strand draws connections between many real events at General Electric, including Bernard's work, and Vonnegut's early stories, which were regularly being rejected everywhere he sent them. Throughout this period, Jane Vonnegut encouraged him, editing his stories, strategizing about submissions, and buoying his spirits.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1949, Kurt and Jane had a daughter named Edith. Still working for GE, Vonnegut had his first piece, titled \"Report on the Barnhouse Effect\", published in the February 11, 1950, issue of Collier's, for which he received $750. The story concerned a scientist who fears that his invention will be used as a weapon, much as Bernard was fearing at the time about his cloudseeding work. Vonnegut wrote another story, after being coached by the fiction editor at Collier's, Knox Burger, and again sold it to the magazine, this time for $950. While Burger supported Vonnegut's writing, he was shocked when Vonnegut quit GE as of January 1, 1951, later stating: \"I never said he should give up his job and devote himself to fiction. I don't trust the freelancer's life, it's tough.\" Nevertheless, in early 1951 Vonnegut moved with his family to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to write full time, leaving GE behind. He initially moved to Osterville, but he ended up purchasing a home in Barnstable.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1952, Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano, was published by Scribner's. The novel has a post-Third World War setting, in which factory workers have been replaced by machines. Player Piano draws upon Vonnegut's experience as an employee at GE. The novel is set at a General Electric-like company and includes many scenes based on things Vonnegut saw there. He satirizes the drive to climb the corporate ladder, one that in Player Piano is rapidly disappearing as automation increases, putting even executives out of work. His central character, Paul Proteus, has an ambitious wife, a backstabbing assistant, and a feeling of empathy for the poor. Sent by his boss, Kroner, as a double agent among the poor (who have all the material goods they want, but little sense of purpose), he leads them in a machine-smashing, museum-burning revolution. Player Piano expresses Vonnegut's opposition to McCarthyism, something made clear when the Ghost Shirts, the revolutionary organization Paul penetrates and eventually leads, is referred to by one character as \"fellow travelers\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In Player Piano, Vonnegut originates many of the techniques he would use in his later works. The comic, heavy-drinking Shah of Bratpuhr, an outsider to this dystopian corporate United States, is able to ask many questions that an insider would not think to ask, or would cause offense by doing so. For example, when taken to see the artificially intelligent supercomputer EPICAC, the Shah asks it \"what are people for?\" and receives no answer. Speaking for Vonnegut, he dismisses it as a \"false god\". This type of alien visitor would recur throughout Vonnegut's literature.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The New York Times writer and critic Granville Hicks gave Player Piano a positive review, favorably comparing it to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Hicks called Vonnegut a \"sharp-eyed satirist\". None of the reviewers considered the novel particularly important. Several editions were printed—one by Bantam with the title Utopia 14, and another by the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club—whereby Vonnegut gained the repute of a science fiction writer, a genre held in disdain by writers at that time. He defended the genre and deplored a perceived sentiment that \"no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After Player Piano, Vonnegut continued to sell short stories to various magazines. Contracted to produce a second novel (which eventually became Cat's Cradle), he struggled to complete it, and the work languished for years. In 1954, the couple had a third child, Nanette. With a growing family and no financially successful novels yet, Vonnegut's short stories helped to sustain the family, though he frequently needed to find additional sources of income as well. In 1957, he and a partner opened a Saab automobile dealership on Cape Cod, but it went bankrupt by the end of the year.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1958, his sister, Alice, died of cancer two days after her husband, James Carmalt Adams, was killed in a train accident. The Vonneguts took in three of the Adams' young sons—James, Steven, and Kurt, aged 14, 11, and 9, respectively. A fourth Adams son, Peter (2), also stayed with the Vonneguts for about a year before being given to the care of a paternal relative in Georgia.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Grappling with family challenges, Vonnegut continued to write, publishing novels vastly dissimilar in terms of plot. The Sirens of Titan (1959) features a Martian invasion of Earth, as experienced by a bored billionaire Malachi Constant. He meets Winston Niles Rumfoord, an aristocratic space traveler, who is virtually omniscient but stuck in a time warp that causes him to appear on Earth every 59 days. The billionaire learns that his actions and the events of all of history are determined by a race of robotic aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who need a replacement part that can only be produced by an advanced civilization in order to repair their spaceship and return home—human history has been manipulated to produce it. Some human structures, such as the Kremlin, are coded signals from the aliens to their ship as to how long it may expect to wait for the repair to take place. Reviewers were uncertain what to think of the book, with one comparing it to Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Rumfoord, who is based on Franklin D. Roosevelt, also physically resembles the former president. Rumfoord is described this way: he \"put a cigarette in a long, bone cigarette holder, lighted it. He thrust out his jaw. The cigarette holder pointed straight up.\" William Rodney Allen, in his guide to Vonnegut's works, stated that Rumfoord foreshadowed the fictional political figures who would play major roles in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and Jailbird.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Mother Night, published in 1961, received little attention at the time of its publication. Howard W. Campbell Jr., Vonnegut's protagonist, is an American who is raised in Germany from age 11 and joins the Nazi party during the war as a double agent for the US Office of Strategic Services, rising to the regime's highest ranks as a radio propagandist. After the war, the spy agency refuses to clear his name, and he is eventually imprisoned by the Israelis in the same cell block as Adolf Eichmann. Vonnegut wrote in a foreword to a later edition: \"we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be\". Literary critic Lawrence Berkove considered the novel, like Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to illustrate the tendency for \"impersonators to get carried away by their impersonations, to become what they impersonate and therefore to live in a world of illusion\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Also published in 1961 was Vonnegut's short story \"Harrison Bergeron\", set in a dystopic future where all are equal, even if that means disfiguring beautiful people and forcing the strong or intelligent to wear devices that negate their advantages. Fourteen-year-old Harrison is a genius and athlete forced to wear record-level \"handicaps\" and imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government. He escapes to a television studio, tears away his handicaps, and frees a ballerina from her lead weights. As they dance, they are killed by the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. Vonnegut, in a later letter, suggested that \"Harrison Bergeron\" might have sprung from his envy and self-pity as a high-school misfit. In his 1976 biography of Vonnegut, Stanley Schatt suggested that the short story shows \"in any leveling process, what really is lost, according to Vonnegut, is beauty, grace, and wisdom\". Darryl Hattenhauer, in his 1998 journal article on \"Harrison Bergeron\", theorized that the story was a satire on American Cold War understandings of communism and socialism.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "With Cat's Cradle (1963), Allen wrote, \"Vonnegut hit full stride for the first time\". The narrator, John, intends to write of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the atomic bomb, seeking to cover the scientist's human side. Hoenikker, in addition to the bomb, has developed another threat to mankind, \"ice-nine\", solid water stable at room temperature, but more dense than liquid water. If a particle of ice-nine is dropped in water, all of the surrounding water becomes ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker is based on Bernard Vonnegut's boss at the GE Research Lab, Irving Langmuir, and the way ice-nine is described in the novel is reminiscent of how Bernard Vonnegut explained his own invention, silver-iodide cloudseeding, to Kurt. Much of the second half of the book is spent on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where John explores a religion called Bokononism, whose holy books (excerpts from which are quoted) give the novel the moral core science does not supply. After the oceans are converted to ice-nine, wiping out most of humankind, John wanders the frozen surface, seeking to save himself and to make sure that his story survives.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Vonnegut based the title character of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964), on an accountant he knew on Cape Cod, who specialized in clients in trouble and often had to comfort them. Eliot Rosewater, the wealthy son of a Republican senator, seeks to atone for his wartime killing of noncombatant firefighters by serving in a volunteer fire department and by giving away money to those in trouble or need. Stress from a battle for control of his charitable foundation pushes him over the edge, and he is placed in a mental hospital. He recovers and ends the financial battle by declaring the children of his county to be his heirs. Allen deemed God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater more \"a cry from the heart than a novel under its author's full intellectual control\", that reflected family and emotional stresses Vonnegut was going through at the time.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the mid-1960s, Vonnegut contemplated abandoning his writing career. In 1999, he wrote in The New York Times: \"I had gone broke, was out of print and had a lot of kids...\" But then, on the recommendation of an admirer, he received a surprise offer of a teaching job at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, employment that he likened to the rescue of a drowning man.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "After spending almost two years at the writer's workshop at the University of Iowa, teaching one course each term, Vonnegut was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in Germany. By the time he won it, in March 1967, he was becoming a well-known writer. He used the funds to travel in Eastern Europe, including to Dresden, where he found many prominent buildings still in ruins. At the time of the bombing, Vonnegut had not appreciated the sheer scale of destruction in Dresden; his enlightenment came only slowly as information dribbled out, and based on early figures, he came to believe that 135,000 had died there.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Vonnegut had been writing about his war experiences at Dresden ever since he returned from the war, but had never been able to write anything acceptable to himself or his publishers—chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five tells of his difficulties. Released in 1969, the novel rocketed Vonnegut to fame. It tells of the life of Billy Pilgrim, who like Vonnegut was born in 1922 and survives the bombing of Dresden. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with many of the story's climaxes—Billy's death in 1976, his kidnapping by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore nine years earlier, and the execution of Billy's friend Edgar Derby in the ashes of Dresden for stealing a teapot—disclosed in the story's first pages. In 1970, Vonnegut was also a correspondent in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Slaughterhouse-Five received generally positive reviews, with Michael Crichton writing in The New Republic:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The book went immediately to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. Vonnegut's earlier works had appealed strongly to many college students, and the antiwar message of Slaughterhouse-Five resonated with a generation marked by the Vietnam War. He later stated that the loss of confidence in government that Vietnam caused finally allowed an honest conversation regarding events like Dresden.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "After Slaughterhouse-Five was published, Vonnegut embraced the fame and financial security that attended its release. He was hailed as a hero of the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States, was invited to speak at numerous rallies, and gave college commencement addresses around the country. In addition to briefly teaching at Harvard University as a lecturer in creative writing in 1970, Vonnegut taught at the City College of New York as a distinguished professor during the 1973–1974 academic year. He was later elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and given honorary degrees by, among others, Indiana University and Bennington College. Vonnegut also wrote a play called Happy Birthday, Wanda June, which opened on October 7, 1970, at New York's Theatre de Lys. Receiving mixed reviews, it closed on March 14, 1971. In 1972, Universal Pictures adapted Slaughterhouse-Five into a film, which the author said was \"flawless\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Meanwhile, Vonnegut's personal life was disintegrating. His wife Jane had embraced Christianity, which was contrary to Vonnegut's atheistic beliefs, and with five of their six children having left home, Vonnegut said that the two were forced to find \"other sorts of seemingly important work to do\". The couple battled over their differing beliefs until Vonnegut moved from their Cape Cod home to New York in 1971. Vonnegut called the disagreements \"painful\" and said that the resulting split was a \"terrible, unavoidable accident that we were ill-equipped to understand\". The couple divorced but remained friends until Jane's death in late 1986. Beyond his marriage, he was deeply affected when his son Mark suffered a mental breakdown in 1972, which exacerbated Vonnegut's chronic depression and led him to take Ritalin. When he stopped taking the drug in the mid-1970s, he began to see a psychologist weekly.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, \"It is done.\" People did not like it here.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 2005",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Vonnegut's difficulties materialized in numerous ways, including the painfully slow progress made on his next novel, the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions. In 1971, he stopped writing the novel altogether. When it was finally released in 1973, it was panned critically. In Thomas S. Hischak's book American Literature on Stage and Screen, Breakfast of Champions was called \"funny and outlandish\", but reviewers noted that it \"lacks substance and seems to be an exercise in literary playfulness\". Vonnegut's 1976 novel Slapstick, which meditates on the relationship between him and his sister (Alice), met a similar fate. In The New York Times's review of Slapstick, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said that Vonnegut \"seems to be putting less effort into [storytelling] than ever before\" and that \"it still seems as if he has given up storytelling after all\". At times, Vonnegut was disgruntled by the personal nature of his detractors' complaints.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 1979, Vonnegut married Jill Krementz, a photographer whom he met while she was working on a series about writers in the early 1970s. With Jill, he adopted a daughter, Lily, when the baby was three days old. In subsequent years, his popularity resurged as he published several satirical books, including Jailbird (1979), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galápagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), and Hocus Pocus (1990). Although he remained a prolific writer in the 1980s, Vonnegut struggled with depression and attempted suicide in 1984. Two years later, Vonnegut was seen by a younger generation when he played himself in Rodney Dangerfield's film Back to School. The last of Vonnegut's fourteen novels, Timequake (1997), was, as University of Detroit history professor and Vonnegut biographer Gregory Sumner said, \"a reflection of an aging man facing mortality and testimony to an embattled faith in the resilience of human awareness and agency\". Vonnegut's final book, a collection of essays entitled A Man Without a Country (2005), became a bestseller.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Vonnegut's sincerity, his willingness to scoff at received wisdom, is such that reading his work for the first time gives one the sense that everything else is rank hypocrisy. His opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike—he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction, whatever it took.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Lev Grossman, Time, 2007",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In a 2006 Rolling Stone interview, Vonnegut sardonically stated that he would sue the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, the maker of the Pall Mall-branded cigarettes he had been smoking since he was around 12 or 14 years old, for false advertising: \"And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Vonnegut died in Manhattan, a borough of New York City, on the night of April 11, 2007, as a result of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior, from a fall at his brownstone home. His death was reported by his wife Jill. He was 84 years old. At the time of his death, he had written fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction books. A book composed of his unpublished pieces, Armageddon in Retrospect, was compiled and posthumously published by his son Mark in 2008.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "When asked about the impact Vonnegut had on his work, author Josip Novakovich stated that he has \"much to learn from Vonnegut—how to compress things and yet not compromise them, how to digress into history, quote from various historical accounts, and not stifle the narrative. The ease with which he writes is sheerly masterly, Mozartian.\" Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez said that the author will \"rightly be remembered as a darkly humorous social critic and the premier novelist of the counterculture\", and Dinitia Smith of The New York Times dubbed Vonnegut the \"counterculture's novelist\".",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Vonnegut has inspired numerous posthumous tributes and works. In 2008, the Kurt Vonnegut Society was established, and in November 2010, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library was opened in Vonnegut's hometown of Indianapolis. The Library of America published a compendium of Vonnegut's compositions between 1963 and 1973 the following April, and another compendium of his earlier works in 2012. Late 2011 saw the release of two Vonnegut biographies: Gregory Sumner's Unstuck in Time and Charles J. Shields's And So It Goes. Shields's biography of Vonnegut created some controversy. According to The Guardian, the book portrays Vonnegut as distant, cruel and nasty. \"Cruel, nasty and scary are the adjectives commonly used to describe him by the friends, colleagues, and relatives Shields quotes\", said The Daily Beast's Wendy Smith. \"Towards the end he was very feeble, very depressed and almost morose\", said Jerome Klinkowitz of the University of Northern Iowa, who has examined Vonnegut in depth.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Like Mark Twain, Mr. Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, 2007",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Vonnegut's works have evoked ire on several occasions. His most prominent novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, has been objected to or removed at various institutions in at least 18 instances. In the case of Island Trees School District v. Pico, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a school district's ban on Slaughterhouse-Five—which the board had called \"anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy\"—and eight other novels was unconstitutional. When a school board in Republic, Missouri, decided to withdraw Vonnegut's novel from its libraries, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library offered a free copy to all the students of the district.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Tally, writing in 2013, suggests that Vonnegut has only recently become the subject of serious study rather than fan adulation, and much is yet to be written about him. \"The time for scholars to say 'Here's why Vonnegut is worth reading' has definitively ended, thank goodness. We know he's worth reading. Now tell us things we don't know.\" Todd F. Davis notes that Vonnegut's work is kept alive by his loyal readers, who have \"significant influence as they continue to purchase Vonnegut's work, passing it on to subsequent generations and keeping his entire canon in print—an impressive list of more than twenty books that [Dell Publishing] has continued to refurbish and hawk with new cover designs.\" Donald E. Morse notes that Vonnegut \"is now firmly, if somewhat controversially, ensconced in the American and world literary canon as well as in high school, college and graduate curricula\". Tally writes of Vonnegut's work:",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Vonnegut's 14 novels, while each does its own thing, together are nevertheless experiments in the same overall project. Experimenting with the form of the American novel itself, Vonnegut engages in a broadly modernist attempt to apprehend and depict the fragmented, unstable, and distressing bizarreries of postmodern American experience ... That he does not actually succeed in representing the shifting multiplicities of that social experience is beside the point. What matters is the attempt, and the recognition that ... we must try to map this unstable and perilous terrain, even if we know in advance that our efforts are doomed.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Vonnegut posthumously in 2015. The asteroid 25399 Vonnegut is named in his honor. A crater on the planet Mercury has also been named in his honor. In 2021, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis was designated a Literary Landmark by the Literary Landmarks Association. In 1986, the University of Evansville library located in Evansville, Indiana was named after Vonnegut, where he spoke during the dedication ceremony.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut recounts meeting the film producer Harrison Starr at a party, who asked him whether his forthcoming book was an anti-war novel—\"Yes, I guess\", replied Vonnegut. Starr responded: \"Why don't you write an anti-glacier novel?\" In the novel, Vonnegut's character continues: \"What he meant, of course, is that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn't keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death\". Vonnegut was a pacifist.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In 2011, NPR wrote: \"Kurt Vonnegut's blend of anti-war sentiment and satire made him one of the most popular writers of the 1960s.\" Vonnegut stated in a 1987 interview: \"my own feeling is that civilization ended in World War I, and we're still trying to recover from that\", and that he wanted to write war-focused works without glamorizing war itself. Vonnegut had not intended to publish again, but his anger against the George W. Bush administration led him to write A Man Without a Country.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Slaughterhouse-Five is the Vonnegut novel best known for its antiwar themes, but the author expressed his beliefs in ways beyond the depiction of the destruction of Dresden. One character, Mary O'Hare, opines that \"wars were partly encouraged by books and movies\", starring \"Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men\". Vonnegut made a number of comparisons between Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima in Slaughterhouse-Five and wrote in Palm Sunday (1991): \"I learned how vile that religion of mine could be when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima\".",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Nuclear war, or at least deployed nuclear arms, is mentioned in almost all of Vonnegut's novels. In Player Piano, the computer EPICAC is given control of the nuclear arsenal and is charged with deciding whether to use high-explosive or nuclear arms. In Cat's Cradle, John's original purpose in setting pen to paper was to write an account of what prominent Americans had been doing as Hiroshima was bombed.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. ... I myself have written, \"If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, 1999",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Vonnegut was an atheist, a humanist and a freethinker, serving as the honorary president of the American Humanist Association. In an interview for Playboy, he stated that his forebears who came to the United States did not believe in God, and he learned his atheism from his parents. Vonnegut did not, however, disdain those who seek the comfort of religion, hailing church associations as a type of extended family. He occasionally attended a Unitarian church, but with little consistency. In his autobiographical work Palm Sunday, Vonnegut says that he is a \"Christ-worshipping agnostic\". During a speech to the Unitarian Universalist Association, he called himself a \"Christ-loving atheist\". However, he was keen to stress that he was not a Christian.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Vonnegut was an admirer of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, particularly the Beatitudes, and incorporated it into his own doctrines. He also referred to it in many of his works. In his 1991 book Fates Worse than Death, Vonnegut suggests that during the Reagan administration, \"anything that sounded like the Sermon on the Mount was socialistic or communistic, and therefore anti-American\". In Palm Sunday, he wrote that \"the Sermon on the Mount suggests a mercifulness that can never waver or fade\". However, Vonnegut had a deep dislike for certain aspects of Christianity, often reminding his readers of the bloody history of the Crusades and other religion-inspired violence. He despised the televangelists of the late 20th century, feeling that their thinking was narrow-minded.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Religion features frequently in Vonnegut's work, both in his novels and elsewhere. He laced a number of his speeches with religion-focused rhetoric and was prone to using such expressions as \"God forbid\" and \"thank God\". He once wrote his own version of the Requiem Mass, which he then had translated into Latin and set to music. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Vonnegut goes to heaven after he is euthanized by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Once in heaven, he interviews 21 deceased celebrities, including Isaac Asimov, William Shakespeare, and Kilgore Trout—the last a fictional character from several of his novels. Vonnegut's works are filled with characters founding new faiths, and religion often serves as a major plot device, for example, in Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. In The Sirens of Titan, Rumfoord proclaims The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. Slaughterhouse-Five sees Billy Pilgrim, lacking religion himself, nevertheless become a chaplain's assistant in the military and display a large crucifix on his bedroom wall. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut invented the religion of Bokononism.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Vonnegut's thoughts on politics were shaped in large part by Robert Redfield, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, co-founder of the Committee on Social Thought, and one of Vonnegut's professors during his time at the university. In a commencement address, Vonnegut remarked that \"Dr. Redfield's theory of the Folk Society ... has been the starting point for my politics, such as they are\". Vonnegut did not particularly sympathize with liberalism or conservatism and mused on the specious simplicity of American politics, saying facetiously: \"If you want to take my guns away from me, and you're all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other ... you're a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you're a conservative. What could be simpler?\" Regarding political parties, Vonnegut said: \"The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.\"",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Vonnegut disregarded more mainstream American political ideologies in favor of socialism, which he thought could provide a valuable substitute for what he saw as social Darwinism and a spirit of \"survival of the fittest\" in American society, believing that \"socialism would be a good for the common man\". Vonnegut would often return to a quote by socialist and five-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: \"As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I'm of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.\" Vonnegut expressed disappointment that communism and socialism seemed to be unsavory topics to the average American and believed that they offered beneficial substitutes to contemporary social and economic systems.",
"title": "Views"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Vonnegut's writing was inspired by an eclectic mix of sources. When he was younger, Vonnegut stated that he read works of pulp fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure. He also read the classics, such as the plays of Aristophanes—like Vonnegut's works, humorous critiques of contemporary society. Vonnegut's life and work also share similarities with that of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn writer Mark Twain. Both shared pessimistic outlooks on humanity and a skeptical take on religion and, as Vonnegut put it, were both \"associated with the enemy in a major war\", as Twain briefly enlisted in the South's cause during the American Civil War, and Vonnegut's German name and ancestry connected him with the United States' enemy in both world wars. He also cited Ambrose Bierce as an influence, calling \"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge\" the greatest American short story and deeming any who disagreed or had not read the story \"twerps\".",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Vonnegut called George Orwell his favorite writer and admitted that he tried to emulate Orwell. \"I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity\", Vonnegut said. Vonnegut also said that Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel also included ideas from mathematician Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Vonnegut commented that Robert Louis Stevenson's stories were emblems of thoughtfully put together works that he tried to mimic in his own compositions. Vonnegut also hailed playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw as \"a hero of [his]\" and an \"enormous influence\". Within his own family, Vonnegut stated that his mother, Edith, had the greatest influence on him. \"[My] mother thought she might make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines. She took short-story courses at night. She studied writers the way gamblers study horses.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Early on in his career, Vonnegut decided to model his style after Henry David Thoreau, who wrote as if from the perspective of a child, allowing Thoreau's works to be more widely comprehensible. Using a youthful narrative voice allowed Vonnegut to deliver concepts in a modest and straightforward way. Other influences on Vonnegut include The War of the Worlds author H. G. Wells and satirist Jonathan Swift. Vonnegut credited American journalist and critic H. L. Mencken for inspiring him to become a journalist.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The book Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut and his longtime friend and former student Suzanne McConnell, published posthumously by Rosetta Books and Seven Stories Press in 2019, delves into the style, humor, and methodologism employed by Vonnegut, including his belief that one should \"Write like a human being. Write like a writer.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "I've heard the Vonnegut voice described as \"manic depressive\", and there's certainly something to this. It has an incredible amount of energy married to a very deep and dark sense of despair. It's frequently over-the-top, and scathingly satirical, but it never strays too far from pathos—from an immense sympathy for society's vulnerable, oppressed and powerless. But, then, it also contains a huge allotment of warmth. Most of the time, reading Kurt Vonnegut feels more like being spoken to by a very close friend. There's an inclusiveness to his writing that draws you in, and his narrative voice is seldom absent from the story for any length of time. Usually, it's right there in the foreground—direct, involving and extremely idiosyncratic.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Gavin Extence, The Huffington Post, 2013",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "In his book Popular Contemporary Writers, Michael D. Sharp describes Vonnegut's linguistic style as straightforward; his sentences concise, his language simple, his paragraphs brief, and his ordinary tone conversational. Vonnegut uses this style to convey normally complex subject matter in a way that is intelligible to a large audience. He credited his time as a journalist for his ability, pointing to his work with the Chicago City News Bureau, which required him to convey stories in telephone conversations. Vonnegut's compositions are also laced with distinct references to his own life, notably in Slaughterhouse-Five and Slapstick.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Vonnegut believed that ideas, and the convincing communication of those ideas to the reader, were vital to literary art. He did not always sugarcoat his points: much of Player Piano leads up to the moment when Paul, on trial and hooked up to a lie detector, is asked to tell a falsehood, and states: \"every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity\". Robert T. Tally Jr., in his volume on Vonnegut's novels, wrote: \"rather than tearing down and destroying the icons of twentieth-century, middle-class American life, Vonnegut gently reveals their basic flimsiness\". Vonnegut did not simply propose utopian solutions to the ills of American society, but showed how such schemes would not allow ordinary people to live lives free from want and anxiety. The large artificial families that the US population is formed into in Slapstick soon serve as an excuse for tribalism, with people giving no help to those not part of their group, and with the extended family's place in the social hierarchy becoming vital.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In the introduction to their essay \"Kurt Vonnegut and Humor\", Tally and Peter C. Kunze suggest that Vonnegut was not a \"black humorist\", but a \"frustrated idealist\" who used \"comic parables\" to teach the reader absurd, bitter or hopeless truths, with his grim witticisms serving to make the reader laugh rather than cry. \"Vonnegut makes sense through humor, which is, in the author's view, as valid a means of mapping this crazy world as any other strategies.\" Vonnegut resented being called a black humorist, feeling that, as with many literary labels, it allows readers to disregard aspects of a writer's work that do not fit the label's stereotype.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Vonnegut's works have, at various times, been labeled science fiction, satire and postmodern. He also resisted such labels, but his works do contain common tropes that are often associated with those genres. In several of his books, Vonnegut imagines alien societies and civilizations, as is common in works of science fiction. Vonnegut does this to emphasize or exaggerate absurdities and idiosyncrasies in our own world. Furthermore, Vonnegut often humorizes the problems that plague societies, as is done in satirical works. However, literary theorist Robert Scholes noted in Fabulation and Metafiction that Vonnegut \"reject[s] the traditional satirist's faith in the efficacy of satire as a reforming instrument. [He has] a more subtle faith in the humanizing value of laughter.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Postmodernism often entails a response to the theory that the truths of the world will be discovered through science. Postmodernists contend that truth is subjective, rather than objective, as it is biased towards each individual's beliefs and outlook on the world. They often use unreliable, first-person narration, and narrative fragmentation. One critic has argued that Vonnegut's most famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, features a metafictional, Janus-headed outlook, as it seeks to represent actual historical events while problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that. This is encapsulated in the opening lines of the novel: \"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.\" This bombastic opening—\"All this happened\"—\"reads like a declaration of complete mimesis\", which is radically called into question in the rest of the quote and \"[t]his creates an integrated perspective that seeks out extratextual themes [like war and trauma] while thematizing the novel's textuality and inherent constructedness at one and the same time\". While Vonnegut does use elements as fragmentation and metafictional elements, in some of his works, he more distinctly focuses on the peril posed by individuals who find subjective truths, mistake them for objective truths, then proceed to impose these truths on others.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Vonnegut was a vocal critic of American society, and this was reflected in his writings. Several key social themes recur in Vonnegut's works, such as wealth, the lack of it, and its unequal distribution among a society. In The Sirens of Titan, the novel's protagonist, Malachi Constant, is exiled to Saturn's moon Titan as a result of his vast wealth, which has made him arrogant and wayward. In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, readers may find it difficult to determine whether the rich or the poor are in worse circumstances, as the lives of both groups' members are ruled by their wealth or their poverty. Further, in Hocus Pocus, the protagonist is named Eugene Debs Hartke, a homage to the famed socialist Eugene V. Debs and Vonnegut's socialist views.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, Thomas F. Marvin states: \"Vonnegut points out that, left unchecked, capitalism will erode the democratic foundations of the United States.\" Marvin suggests that Vonnegut's works demonstrate what happens when a \"hereditary aristocracy\" develops, where wealth is inherited along familial lines: the ability of poor Americans to overcome their situations is greatly or completely diminished. Vonnegut also often laments social Darwinism and a \"survival of the fittest\" view of society. He points out that social Darwinism leads to a society that condemns its poor for their own misfortune and fails to help them out of their poverty because \"they deserve their fate\".",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Science and the ethical obligations of scientists are also a common theme in Vonnegut's works. His first published story, \"Report on the Barnhouse Effect\", like many of his early stories, centered on a scientist concerned about the uses of his own invention. Player Piano and Cat's Cradle explore the effects on humans of scientific advances. In 1969, Vonnegut gave a speech to the American Association of Physics Teachers called \"The Virtuous Physicist\". Asked afterwards what a virtuous scientist was, Vonnegut replied, \"one who declines to work on weapons.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Vonnegut also confronts the idea of free will in a number of his pieces. In Slaughterhouse-Five and Timequake the characters have no choice in what they do; in Breakfast of Champions, characters are very obviously stripped of their free will and even receive it as a gift; and in Cat's Cradle, Bokononism views free will as heretical.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The majority of Vonnegut's characters are estranged from their actual families and seek to build replacement or extended families. For example, the engineers in Player Piano called their manager's spouse \"Mom\". In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut devises two separate methods for loneliness to be combated: A \"karass\", which is a group of individuals appointed by God to do his will, and a \"granfalloon\", defined by Marvin as a \"meaningless association of people, such as a fraternal group or a nation\". Similarly, in Slapstick, the US government codifies that all Americans are a part of large extended families.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Fear of the loss of one's purpose in life is a theme in Vonnegut's works. The Great Depression forced Vonnegut to witness the devastation many people felt when they lost their jobs, and while at General Electric, Vonnegut witnessed machines being built to take the place of human labor. He confronts these things in his works through references to the growing use of automation and its effects on human society. This is most starkly represented in his first novel, Player Piano, where many Americans are left purposeless and unable to find work, as machines replace human workers. Loss of purpose is also depicted in Galápagos, where a florist rages at her spouse for creating a robot able to do her job, and in Timequake, where an architect kills himself when replaced by computer software.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Suicide by fire is another common theme in Vonnegut's works; the author often returns to the theory that \"many people are not fond of life\". He uses this as an explanation for why humans have so severely damaged their environments and made devices such as nuclear weapons that can make their creators extinct. In Deadeye Dick, Vonnegut features the neutron bomb, which he claims is designed to kill people, but leave buildings and structures untouched. He also uses this theme to demonstrate the recklessness of those who put powerful, apocalypse-inducing devices at the disposal of politicians.",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "\"What is the point of life?\" is a question Vonnegut often pondered in his works. When one of Vonnegut's characters, Kilgore Trout, finds the question \"What is the purpose of life?\" written in a bathroom, his response is: \"To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.\" Marvin finds Trout's theory curious, given that Vonnegut was an atheist, and thus for him, there is no Creator to report back to, and comments that, \"[as] Trout chronicles one meaningless life after another, readers are left to wonder how a compassionate creator could stand by and do nothing while such reports come in\". In the epigraph to Bluebeard, Vonnegut quotes his son Mark and gives an answer to what he believes is the meaning of life: \"We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.\"",
"title": "Writing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Unless otherwise cited, items in this list are taken from Thomas F. Marvin's 2002 book Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion, and the date in parentheses is the date the work was published:",
"title": "Works"
}
] |
Kurt Vonnegut was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. Vonnegut adopted three of his sister's sons after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago, while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau. Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, two of which—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection titled Welcome to the Monkey House in 1968. His breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures, and commencement addresses around the country, and received many awards and honors. Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essay and short-story collections, such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as one of the most important contemporary writers and a dark humor commentator on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, titled Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction, including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.
|
2001-10-02T07:31:26Z
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2023-12-21T18:30:29Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut
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16,862 |
Koan
|
A kōan (/ˈkoʊæn, -ɑːn/ KOH-a(h)n; Japanese: 公案; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn [kʊ́ŋ ân]; Korean: 화두, romanized: hwadu; Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement from the Chinese Chan-lore, supplemented with commentaries, that is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and initial insight of Zen-students. Prolonged koan-study shatters small-minded pride of, and identification with, this initial insight, and spurs further development of insight and compassion, and integration thereof in daily life and character.
The Japanese term kōan is the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese word gong'an (Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Wade–Giles: kung-an; lit. 'public case'). The term is a compound word, consisting of the characters 公 "public; official; governmental; common; collective; fair; equitable" and 案 "table; desk; (law) case; record; file; plan; proposal."
According to the Yuan dynasty Zen master Zhongfeng Mingben (中峰明本 1263–1323), gōng'àn originated as an abbreviation of gōngfǔ zhī àndú (公府之案牘, Japanese kōfu no antoku—literally the àndú "official correspondence; documents; files" of a gōngfǔ "government post"), which referred to a "public record" or the "case records of a public law court" in Tang dynasty China. Kōan/gong'an thus serves as a metaphor for principles of reality beyond the private opinion of one person, and a teacher may test the student's ability to recognize and understand that principle.
Commentaries in kōan collections bear some similarity to judicial decisions that cite and sometimes modify precedents. An article by T. Griffith Foulk claims
...Its literal meaning is the 'table' or 'bench' an of a 'magistrate' or 'judge' kung.
Gong'an was itself originally a metonym—an article of furniture involved in setting legal precedents came to stand for such precedents. For example, Di Gong'an (狄公案) is the original title of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, the famous Chinese detective novel based on a historical Tang dynasty judge. Similarly, Zen kōan collections are public records of the notable sayings and actions of Zen masters and disciples attempting to pass on their teachings.
The popular western understanding sees kōan as referring to an unanswerable question or a meaningless or absurd statement. However, in Zen practice, a kōan is not meaningless, and not a riddle or a puzzle. Teachers do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a kōan. According to Hori, a central theme of many koans is the 'identity of opposites':
[K]oan after koan explores the theme of nonduality. Hakuin's well-known koan, "Two hands clap and there is a sound, what is the sound of one hand?" is clearly about two and one. The koan asks, you know what duality is, now what is nonduality? In "What is your original face before your mother and father were born?" the phrase "father and mother" alludes to duality. This is obvious to someone versed in the Chinese tradition, where so much philosophical thought is presented in the imagery of paired opposites. The phrase "your original face" alludes to the original nonduality.
Comparable statements are: "Look at the flower and the flower also looks"; "Guest and host interchange". Koans are also understood as pointers to an unmediated "Pure Consciousness", devoid of cognitive activity. Victor Hori criticizes this understanding:
[A] pure consciousness without concepts, if there could be such a thing, would be a booming, buzzing confusion, a sensory field of flashes of light, unidentifiable sounds, ambiguous shapes, color patches without significance. This is not the consciousness of the enlightened Zen master.
Gong'an developed during the Tang dynasty (618–907) from the recorded sayings collections of Chán masters, which quoted many stories of "a famous past Chán figure's encounter with disciples or other interlocutors and then offering his own comment on it". Those stories and the accompanying comments were used to educate students, and broaden their insight into the Buddhist teachings.
Those stories came to be known as gong'an, "public cases". Such a story was only considered a gongan when it was commented upon by another Chán master. This practice of commenting on the words and deeds of past masters confirmed the master's position as an awakened master in a lineage of awakened masters of the past.
Kōan practice developed from a literary practice, styling snippets of encounter-dialogue into well-edited stories. It arose in interaction with "educated literati". There were dangers involved in such a literary approach, such as ascribing specific meanings to the cases. Dahui Zonggao is even said to have burned the woodblocks of the Blue Cliff Record, for the hindrance it had become to study of Chán by his students. Kōan literature was also influenced by the pre-Zen Chinese tradition of the "literary game"—a competition involving improvised poetry.
The style of writing of Zen texts has been influenced by "a variety of east Asian literary games":
During the Song dynasty (960–1297) the use of gong'an took a decisive turn. Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) introduced the use of kanhua, "observing the phrase". In this practice, students were to observe (kan) or concentrate on a single word or phrase (huatou), such as the famous mu of the mu-kōan.
In the 11th century, this practice had become common. A new literary genre developed from this tradition as well. Collections of such commented cases were compiled, which consisted of the case itself, accompanied by verse or prose commentary.
Dahui's invention was aimed at balancing the insight developed by reflection on the teachings with developing samatha, calmness of mind. Ironically, this development became in effect silent illumination, a "[re-absorbing] of kōan-study into the "silence" of meditation (ch'an)". It led to a rejection of Buddhist learning:
Some extent of Buddhist learning could easily have been recognized as a precondition for sudden awakening in Chán. Sung masters, however, tended to take the rejection literally and nondialectically. In effect, what they instituted was a form of Zen fundamentalism: the tradition came to be increasingly anti-intellectual in orientation and, in the process, reduced its complex heritage to simple formulae for which literal interpretations were thought adequate.
This development left Chinese Chán vulnerable to criticisms by neo-Confucianism, which developed after the Sung Dynasty. Its anti-intellectual rhetoric was no match for the intellectual discourse of the neo-Confucianists.
The recorded encounter dialogues, and the kōan collections which derived from this genre, mark a shift from solitary practice to interaction between master and student:
The essence of enlightenment came to be identified with the interaction between masters and students. Whatever insight dhyana might bring, its verification was always interpersonal. In effect, enlightenment came to be understood not so much as an insight, but as a way of acting in the world with other people
This mutual enquiry of the meaning of the encounters of masters and students of the past gave students a role model:
One looked at the enlightened activities of one's lineal forebears in order to understand one's own identity [...] taking the role of the participants and engaging in their dialogues instead
Kōan training requires a qualified teacher who has the ability to judge a disciple's handling of the tradition. In the Rinzai Zen school, which uses kōans extensively, the teacher certification process includes an appraisal of proficiency in using that school's extensive kōan curriculum.
According to Barbara O'Brien, "sanzen is the real point of the whole exercise," where one has to prove one's understanding.
Some of the earliest texts in which Kōans occur are the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall (Chinese Zǔtángjí), mid-10th century, and the hagiographical collection The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, also rendered into English as The Record of Transmitting the Light (Chinese Jǐngdé Chuándēnglù), early 11th century.
The Blue Cliff Record (Chinese: 碧巖錄 Bìyán Lù; Japanese: Hekiganroku) is a collection of 100 kōans compiled in 1125 by Yuanwu Keqin (圜悟克勤 1063–1135).
The Book of Equanimity or Book of Serenity (Chinese: 從容録 Cóngróng lù; Japanese: 従容録 Shōyōroku) is a collection of 100 Kōans by Hongzhi Zhengjue (Chinese: 宏智正覺; Japanese: Wanshi Shōgaku) (1091–1157), compiled with commentaries by Wansong Xingxiu (1166–1246). The full title is The Record of the Temple of Equanimity With the Classic Odes of Venerable Tiantong Jue and the Responsive Commentary of Old Man Wansong 萬松老評唱天童覺和尚 頌古從容庵錄 (Wansong Laoren Pingchang Tiantong Jue Heshang Songgu Congrong An Lu) (Taisho Tripitaka Vol. 48, No. 2004)
The Gateless Gate (Chinese: 無門關 Wumenguan; Japanese: Mumonkan) is a collection of 48 kōans and commentaries published in 1228 by Chinese monk Wumen (無門) (1183–1260). The title may be more accurately rendered as Gateless Barrier or Gateless Checkpoint).
Five kōans in the collection derive from the sayings and doings of Zhaozhou Congshen, (transliterated as Chao-chou in Wade-Giles and pronounced Jōshū in Japanese).
Dahui Zonggao (大慧宗杲) (1089–1163) the Zhengfayan zang (正法眼藏), "Treasury of the true dharma eye" (W-G.: Cheng-fa yen-tsang, (J.: Shōbōgenzō) a collection of koans and dialogues compiled between 1147 and 1150 by Dahui Zonggao . Dahui's 'Treasury' is composed of three scrolls prefaced by three short introductory pieces. The Zongmen liandeng huiyao 宗門聯燈會要 was compiled in 1183 by Huiweng Wuming 晦翁悟明 (n.d.), three generations after Dahui in the same line; the sermon is found in zh 20 (x 79: 173a).
In the officially recognized monasteries belonging to the Gozan (Five Mountain System) the Chinese system was fully continued. Senior monks were supposed to compose Chinese verse in a complex style of matched counterpoints known as bienli wen. It took a lot of literary and intellectual skills for a monk to succeed in this system.
The Rinka monasteries, the provincial temples with less control of the state, laid less stress on the correct command of the Chinese cultural idiom. These monasteries developed "more accessible methods of kōan instruction". It had three features:
By standardizing the kōan curriculum every generation of students proceeded to the same series of kōans. Students had to memorize a set number of stereotyped sayings, agyō, "appended words". The proper series of responses for each kōan were taught by the master in private instruction sessions to selected individual students who would inherit the dharma lineage.
Zhongfeng Mingben (1263–1323), a Chinese Chán-master who lived at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, revitalized the Rinzai-tradition, and put a strong emphasis on the use of koans. He saw the kung-ans as "work of literature [that] should be used as objective, universal standards to test the insight of monks who aspired to be recognized as Ch'an masters":
The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the hundreds and thousands of bodhisattvas of the three realms and ten directions. This principle accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic; it cannot be transmitted in words; it cannot be explained in writing; it cannot be measured by reason. It is like the poisoned drum that kills all who hear it, or like a great fire that consumes all who come near it. What is called "the special transmission of the Vulture Peak" was the transmission of this; what is called the "direct pointing of Bodhidharma at Shao-lin-ssu" is this.
When the Chán tradition was established in Japan in the 12th century, both Rinzai and Sōtō, took over the use of kōan study and commenting. In Sōtō-Zen, kōan commentary was not linked to seated meditation. Japanese monks had to master the Chinese language and specific expressions used in the kōan training. The desired "spontaneity" expressed by enlightened masters required a thorough study of Chinese language and poetry. Japanese Zen imitated the Chinese "syntax and stereotyped norms".
Accoridng to Eshin Nishimura, Japanese Rinzai-masters like En’ni-ben’nen (圓爾辨圓) (1202-1280) and Nampo-jyoumain (南浦紹明) (1235-1308) already divided the Chinese koans into three groups, comform the function they assigned to them, namely richi("ultimate truth"), kikan("skillful method") and koujyon ("non-attachment").
Musō Soseki (1275–1351) relativized the use of koans. Despite belonging to the Rinzai-school, Musō Soseki also made extensive use of richi (teaching), explaining the sutras, instead of kikan (koan). According to Musō Soseki, both are upaya, "skillful means" meant to educate students. Musō Soseki called both shōkogyu, "little jewels", tools to help the student to attain satori.
In the 18th century, the Rinzai school became dominated by the legacy of Hakuin, who laid a strong emphasis on kōan study as a means to gain kensho, but also not to get stuck in this initial insight and develop a compassionate, selfless attitude. After Hakuin, koan-study was systematized in a standard sequence and classification of koans. There are two curricula used in Rinzai, derived from two dharma-heirs of Gasan: the Takuju curriculum, and the Inzan curriculum. Both curricula have standardized answers.
During the late 18th and 19th century, the tradition of kōan commentary became suppressed in the Sōtō school, due to a reform movement that sought to standardise the procedures for dharma transmission. One reason for suppressing the kōan tradition in the Sōtō school may have been to highlight the differences with the Rinzai school, and create a clear identity. This movement also started to venerate Dogen as the founding teacher of the Sōtō school. His teachings became the standard for the Sōtō teachings, neglecting the fact that Dogen himself made extensive use of kōan commentary.
In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, the emphasis is on Hua Tou, "observing the phrase," contemplating one koan throughout one's lifetime, though Seung Sahn used the Rinzai-style of kōan practice in his Kwan Um School of Zen.
In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, the primary form of Koan-study is kanhua, "reflection on the koan", also called Hua Tou, "word head". In this practice, a fragment of the koan, such as "mu", or a "what is"-question is used by focusing on this fragment and repeating it over and over again:
Who is it who now repeats the Buddha's name?
Who is dragging this corpse about? What is this? What is it? What was the original face before my father and mother were born?
Who am I?
The student is assigned only one hua-tou for a lifetime. In contrast to the similar-sounding "who am I?" question of Ramana Maharshi, hua-tou involves raising "great doubt":
This koan becomes a touchstone of our practice: it is a place to put our doubt, to cultivate great doubt, to allow the revelation of great faith, and to focus our great energy.
Kōan practice is particularly important among Japanese practitioners of the Rinzai sect. The Japanese Rinzai-school uses extensive koan-curricula, checking questions, and jakogo ("capping phrases", quotations from Chinese poetry) in its use of koans,
Koan practice starts with the shokan, or "first barrier", usually the mu-koan or the question "What is the sound of one hand?" After having attained kensho, students continue their practice investigating subsequent koans. In the Takuju-school, after breakthrough students work through the Gateless Gate (Mumonkan), the Blue Cliff Record (Hekigan-roku), the Entangling Vines (Shumon Kattoshu), and the Collection of Wings of the Blackbird (鴆羽集, Chin'u shū). The Inzan-school uses its own internally generated list of koans.
In Rinzai a gradual succession of koans is studied. There are two general branches of curricula used within Rinzai, the Takuju curriculum, and the Inzan curriculum. However, there are a number of sub-branches of these, and additional variations of curriculum often exist between individual teaching lines which can reflect the recorded experiences of a particular lineage's members. Koan curricula are, in fact, subject to continued accretion and evolution over time, and thus are best considered living traditions of practice rather than set programs of study.
While Hakuin only refers to break-through koans, and "difficult to pass" koans to sharpen and refine the initial insight and foster compassion, Hakuin's descendants developed a fivefold classification system:
According to Akizuki there was an older classification-system, in which the fifth category was Kojo, "Directed upwards". This category too was meant to rid the monk of any "stink of Zen". The very advanced practitioner may also receive the Matsugo no rokan, "The last barrier, and Saigo no ikketsu, "The final confirmation". "The last barrier" is given when one left the training hall, for example "Sum up all of the records of Rinzai in one word!" It is not meant to be solved immediately, but to be carried around in order to keep practising. "The final confirmation" may be another word for the same kind of koan. Shin'ichi Hisamatsu gave "If nothing what you do will do, then what will you do?" as 'unanswerable' question, which keeps nagging on premature certainty.
In the Rinzai-school, the Sanbo Kyodan, and the White Plum Asanga, koan practice starts with the assignment of a hosshi or "break-through koan", usually the mu-koan or "the sound of one hand". Students are instructed to concentrate on the "word-head", like the phrase "mu". In the Wumenguan (Mumonkan), public case No. 1 ("Zhaozhou's Dog"), Wumen (Mumon) wrote:
... concentrate yourself into this 'Wú' ... making your whole body one great inquiry. Day and night work intently at it. Do not attempt nihilistic or dualistic interpretations."
Arousing this great inquiry or "Great Doubt" is an essential element of kōan practice. It builds up "strong internal pressure (gidan), never stopping knocking from within at the door of [the] mind, demanding to be resolved". To illustrate the enormous concentration required in kōan meditation, Zen Master Wumen commented,
It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can't.
Analysing the koan for its literal meaning won't lead to insight, though understanding the context from which koans emerged can make them more intelligible. For example, when a monk asked Zhaozhou (Joshu) "does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?", the monk was referring to the understanding of the teachings on Buddha-nature, which were understood in the Chinese context of absolute and relative reality.
The continuous pondering of the break-through koan (shokan) or Hua Tou, "word head", leads to kensho, an initial insight into "seeing the (Buddha-)nature.
The aim of the break-through koan is to see the "nonduality of subject and object":
The monk himself in his seeking is the koan. Realization of this is the insight; the response to the koan [...] Subject and object – this is two hands clapping. When the monk realizes that the koan is not merely an object of consciousness but is also he himself as the activity of seeking an answer to the koan, then subject and object are no longer separate and distinct [...] This is one hand clapping (sic).
Various accounts can be found which describe "becoming one" with the koan and the resulting breakthrough:
I was dead tired. That evening when I tried to settle down to sleep, the instant I laid my head on the pillow, I saw: "Ah, this outbreath is Mu!" Then: the in-breath too is Mu!" Next breath, too: Mu! Next breath: Mu, Mu! "Mu, a whole sequence of Mu! Croak, croak; meow, meow – these too are Mu! The bedding, the wall, the column, the sliding-door – these too are Mu! This, that and everything is Mu! Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha Ha! that roshi is a rascal! He's always tricking people with his 'Mu, Mu, Mu'!...
But the use of the mu-koan has also been criticised. According to Ama Samy, the main aim is merely to "'become one' with the koan". Showing to have 'become one' with the first koan is enough to pass the first koan. According to Samy, this is not equal to prajna:
The one-pointed, non-intellectual concentration on the hua-t'ou (or Mu) is a pressure-cooker tactic, a reduction to a technique which can produce some psychic experiences. These methods and techniques are forced efforts which can even run on auto-pilot. They can produce experiences but not prajna wisdom. Some speak of 'investigating' the hua-t’ou, but it is rather a matter of concentration, which sometimes can provide insights, yet no more than that.
Teachers may probe students about their kōan practice using sassho, "checking questions" to validate their satori (understanding) or kensho (seeing the nature). For the mu-koan and the clapping hand-koan there are twenty to a hundred checking questions, depending on the teaching lineage. The checking questions serve to deepen the insight or kyōgai of the student, but also to test his or her understanding.
Those checking questions, and their answers, are part of a standardised set of questions and answers. Ama Samy states that the "koans and their standard answers are fixed." Isshu Muira Roshi also states, in The Zen Koan: "In the Inzan and Takuju lines, the answers to the koans were more or less standardized for each line respectively." Missanroku and missanchō, "Records of secret instruction" have been preserved for various Rinzai lineages. They contain both the kōan curricula and the standardized answers.
In Sōtō-Zen they are called monsan, an abbreviation of monto hissan, "secret instructions of the lineage". The monsan follow a standard question-and-answer format. A series of questions is given, to be asked by the master. The answers are also given by the master, to be memorized by the student.
According to critics, students are learning a "ritual performance", learning how to behave and respond in specific ways, learning "clever repartees, ritualized language and gestures and be submissive to the master's diktat and arbitration."
In 1916 Tominaga Shūho, using the pseudonym "Hau Hōō", published a critique of the Rinzai kōan system, Gendai sōjizen no hyōron, which also contained a translation of a missanroku. The missanroku part has been translated by Yoel Hoffmann as "The Sound of the One Hand" (see Hoffmann (1975)) and Bodiford (1993, p. 264 note 29).
In the Rinzai-school, passing a koan and the checking questions has to be supplemented by jakugo, "capping phrases", citations of Chinese poetry to demonstrate the insight. Students can use collections of those citations, instead of composing poetry themselves.
After the initial insight further practice is necessary, to deepen the insight and learn to integrate it in daily life. In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, this further practice consists of further pondering of the same Hua Tou. In Rinzai-Zen, this further practice is undertaken by further koan-study, for which elaborate curricula exist. In Sōtō-Zen, Shikantaza is the main practice for deepening insight.
After completing the koan-training, Gogo no shugyo is necessary:
[I]t would take 10 years to solve all the kōans [...] in the sōdō. After the student has solved all koans, he can leave the sōdō and live on his own, but he is still not considered a roshi. For this he has to complete another ten years of training, called "go-go-no-shugyō" in Japanese. Literally, this means "practice after satori/enlightenment", but Fukushima preferred the translation "special practice". Fukushima would explain that the student builds up a "religious personality" during this decade. It is a kind of period that functions to test if the student is actually able to live in regular society and apply his koan understanding to daily life, after he has lived in an environment that can be quite surreal and detached from the lives of the rest of humanity. Usually, the student lives in small parish temple during this decade, not in a formal training monastery.
Completing the koan-curriculum in the Rinzai-schools traditionally also led to a mastery of Chinese poetry and literary skills:
[D]isciples today are expected to spend a dozen or more years with a master to complete a full course of training in koan commentary. Only when a master is satisfied that a disciple can comment appropriately on a wide range of old cases will he recognize the latter as a dharma heir and give him formal "proof of transmission" (J. inka shomei). Thus, in reality, a lot more than satori is required for one to be recognized as a master (J. shike, roshi) in the Rinzai school of Zen at present. The accepted proof of satori is a set of literary and rhetorical skills that takes many years to acquire.
Hakuin Ekaku, the 17th century revitalizer of the Rinzai school, taught several practices which serve to correct physical and mental imbalances arising from, among other things, incorrect or excessive koan practice. The "soft-butter" method (nanso no ho) and "introspection method" (naikan no ho) involve cultivation of ki centered on the tanden (Chinese:dantian). These practices are described in Hakuin's works Orategama and Yasen Kanna, and are still taught in some Rinzai lineages today.
Few Sōtō Zen practitioners concentrate on kōans during meditation, but the Sōtō sect has a strong historical connection with kōans, since many kōan collections were compiled by Sōtō priests. During the 13th century, Dōgen, founder of the Sōtō sect in Japan, quoted 580 kōans in his teachings. He compiled some 300 kōans in the volumes known as the Greater Shōbōgenzō. Dōgen wrote of Genjokōan, which points out that everyday life experience is the fundamental kōan.
Other kōan collections compiled and annotated by Sōtō priests include:
In Japanese Sōtō Zen the use of koans has been abandoned since the late eighteenth and nineteenth century:
...kōan practice was largely expunged from the Sōtō school through the efforts of Gentō Sokuchū (1729–1807), the eleventh abbot of Entsuji, who in 1795 was nominated abbot of Eiheiji.
The Sanbo Kyodan school of the former Sōtō-priest Hakuun Yasutani, and the White Plum Asanga of Taizan Maezumi and the many groups that derive from him, incorporate koan-study. The Sanbo kyodan places great emphasis on kensho, initial insight into one's true nature, as a start of real practice. It follows the so-called Harada-Yasutani koan-curriculum, which is derived from Hakuin's student Takuju. It is a shortened koan-curriculum, in which the so-called "capping phrases" are removed. The curriculum takes considerably less time to study than the Takuju-curriculum of Rinzai.
To attain kensho, most students are assigned the mu-koan. After breaking through, the student first studies twenty-two "in-house" koans, which are "unpublished and not for the general public", but are nevertheless published and commented upon. There-after, the students goes through the Gateless Gate (Mumonkan), the Blue Cliff Record, the Book of Equanimity, and the Record of Transmitting the Light. The koan-curriculum is completed by the Five ranks of Tozan and the precepts.
A monk asked Zhàozhōu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature, or does he not have Buddha-nature?"
Zhaozhou said, "Wú".
"Zhaozhou" is rendered as "Chao-chou" in Wade-Giles, and pronounced "Joshu" in Japanese. "Wu" appears as "mu" in Japanese, meaning "no", "not", "nonbeing", or "without" in English. This is a fragment of Case No. 1 of the Wúménguān. However, another koan presents a longer version, in which Zhaozhou answered "yes" in response to the same question asked by a different monk: see Case No. 18 of the Book of Serenity.
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand? (隻手声あり、その声を聞け)
Victor Hori comments:
... in the beginning a monk first thinks a kōan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the kōan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the kōan. The kōan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a kōan, the self sees the self not directly but under the guise of the kōan ... When one realizes ("makes real") this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the kōan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand.
Yet, Hakuin himself introduced this question with a reference to Kanzeon (Guanyin), bodhisattva of great compassion, who hears the sounds of the suffering ones in the world, and is awakened by hearing these sounds and responding to them. To hear the sound of one hand is to still the sounds of the world, that is, to put an end to all suffering.
Huìnéng asked Hui Ming, "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born."
This is a fragment of case No. 23 of the Wumenguan.
If you meet the Buddha, kill him. (逢佛殺佛)
A student asked Master Yun-Men (949 AD) "Not even a thought has arisen; is there still a sin or not?"
Master replied, "Mount Sumeru!"
A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, "What is Buddha?"
Dongshan said, "Three pounds of flax."
This is a fragment of case No. 18 of the Wumenguan as well as case No. 12 of the Blue Cliff Record.
A monk asked Ummon, "What is the teaching that transcends the Buddha and patriarchs?"
Ummon said, "A sesame bun."
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "What is the meaning of the ancestral teacher's (i.e., Bodhidharma's) coming from the west?"
Zhaozhou said, "The cypress tree in front of the hall."
This is a fragment of case No. 37 of the Wumenguan as well as case No. 47 of the Book of Serenity.
Gentō Sokuchū, the 18th century abbot of Dogen's Eihei-ji, aggressively sought to reform Sōtō from all things 'foreign' and associated with Rinzai, including kōans. The unorthodox Zen monk Ikkyū contemplated kōans for years while creating dolls for a merchant in Kyoto, specifically penetrating the case no. 15 from The Gateless Gate and thereafter earning his dharma name Ikkyū.
Facing criticism by Buddhists such as Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki for misunderstanding Zen, Alan Watts claimed that a kōan supported his lack of zazen practice. On the topic, Suzuki claimed: "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story."
Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid discusses Zen kōans in relation to paradoxical questions and perceiving reality outside of one's experience. Inspired by Zen teachings (including kōans), Frank Herbert wrote on the subject of the paradoxical elements of his Dune series:
What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fugue like relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape. As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. ... It's like a kōan, a Zen mind breaker.
The 1989 South Korean film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? bases much of its narrative on kōans, with its title deriving from a particular kōan about the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma.
After becoming smitten with Zen (even offering to turn his own house into a zendo), filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky meditated and studied koans with the traveling monk Ejo Takata (1928–1997). After the release of The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky gave a talk at the University of Mexico on the subject of kōans. After this talk, Takata gifted Jodorowsky his keisaku, believing that the filmmaker had mastered the ability to understand kōans.
In the 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac paraphrases the Yunmen shit-stick kōan as: "The Buddha is a dried piece of turd". The second volume of the manga Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima is titled 'The Gateless Barrier' and revolves around a Linji kōan ("If you meet a Buddha, kill him") as the protagonist is tasked to kill a troublesome "living Buddha".
In hacker culture, funny short stories concerning computer science developed, named hacker koans. The book Jargon File contains many kōans, including the AI Koans. The Codeless Code is another book about software engineers at big businesses instead of unix hackers, deriving its title from the Gateless Gate.
The song "False Prophet" by Bob Dylan includes the line: "I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet", a reference to a Gateless Gate kōan ("You must climb a mountain of swords with bare feet"). British musical artist Brian Eno collaborated with Intermorphic on developing a generative music software system named Koan. In 2009, American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey released his second album, Koan.
The 1997 novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan (and its 1998 film adaptation of the same name) derives its title from a kōan by Hakuin Ekaku. The episode of the 2014 first season of Fargo entitled "Eating the Blame" derives its episode title from a koan of the same name from the Shasekishū. Cyriaque Lamar of io9 stated that the approach to technology in Tron: Legacy was reminiscent of kōans.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "A kōan (/ˈkoʊæn, -ɑːn/ KOH-a(h)n; Japanese: 公案; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn [kʊ́ŋ ân]; Korean: 화두, romanized: hwadu; Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement from the Chinese Chan-lore, supplemented with commentaries, that is used in Zen practice to provoke the \"great doubt\" and initial insight of Zen-students. Prolonged koan-study shatters small-minded pride of, and identification with, this initial insight, and spurs further development of insight and compassion, and integration thereof in daily life and character.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Japanese term kōan is the Sino-Japanese reading of the Chinese word gong'an (Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Wade–Giles: kung-an; lit. 'public case'). The term is a compound word, consisting of the characters 公 \"public; official; governmental; common; collective; fair; equitable\" and 案 \"table; desk; (law) case; record; file; plan; proposal.\"",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "According to the Yuan dynasty Zen master Zhongfeng Mingben (中峰明本 1263–1323), gōng'àn originated as an abbreviation of gōngfǔ zhī àndú (公府之案牘, Japanese kōfu no antoku—literally the àndú \"official correspondence; documents; files\" of a gōngfǔ \"government post\"), which referred to a \"public record\" or the \"case records of a public law court\" in Tang dynasty China. Kōan/gong'an thus serves as a metaphor for principles of reality beyond the private opinion of one person, and a teacher may test the student's ability to recognize and understand that principle.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Commentaries in kōan collections bear some similarity to judicial decisions that cite and sometimes modify precedents. An article by T. Griffith Foulk claims",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "...Its literal meaning is the 'table' or 'bench' an of a 'magistrate' or 'judge' kung.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Gong'an was itself originally a metonym—an article of furniture involved in setting legal precedents came to stand for such precedents. For example, Di Gong'an (狄公案) is the original title of Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, the famous Chinese detective novel based on a historical Tang dynasty judge. Similarly, Zen kōan collections are public records of the notable sayings and actions of Zen masters and disciples attempting to pass on their teachings.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The popular western understanding sees kōan as referring to an unanswerable question or a meaningless or absurd statement. However, in Zen practice, a kōan is not meaningless, and not a riddle or a puzzle. Teachers do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a kōan. According to Hori, a central theme of many koans is the 'identity of opposites':",
"title": "Doctrinal background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "[K]oan after koan explores the theme of nonduality. Hakuin's well-known koan, \"Two hands clap and there is a sound, what is the sound of one hand?\" is clearly about two and one. The koan asks, you know what duality is, now what is nonduality? In \"What is your original face before your mother and father were born?\" the phrase \"father and mother\" alludes to duality. This is obvious to someone versed in the Chinese tradition, where so much philosophical thought is presented in the imagery of paired opposites. The phrase \"your original face\" alludes to the original nonduality.",
"title": "Doctrinal background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Comparable statements are: \"Look at the flower and the flower also looks\"; \"Guest and host interchange\". Koans are also understood as pointers to an unmediated \"Pure Consciousness\", devoid of cognitive activity. Victor Hori criticizes this understanding:",
"title": "Doctrinal background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "[A] pure consciousness without concepts, if there could be such a thing, would be a booming, buzzing confusion, a sensory field of flashes of light, unidentifiable sounds, ambiguous shapes, color patches without significance. This is not the consciousness of the enlightened Zen master.",
"title": "Doctrinal background"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Gong'an developed during the Tang dynasty (618–907) from the recorded sayings collections of Chán masters, which quoted many stories of \"a famous past Chán figure's encounter with disciples or other interlocutors and then offering his own comment on it\". Those stories and the accompanying comments were used to educate students, and broaden their insight into the Buddhist teachings.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Those stories came to be known as gong'an, \"public cases\". Such a story was only considered a gongan when it was commented upon by another Chán master. This practice of commenting on the words and deeds of past masters confirmed the master's position as an awakened master in a lineage of awakened masters of the past.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kōan practice developed from a literary practice, styling snippets of encounter-dialogue into well-edited stories. It arose in interaction with \"educated literati\". There were dangers involved in such a literary approach, such as ascribing specific meanings to the cases. Dahui Zonggao is even said to have burned the woodblocks of the Blue Cliff Record, for the hindrance it had become to study of Chán by his students. Kōan literature was also influenced by the pre-Zen Chinese tradition of the \"literary game\"—a competition involving improvised poetry.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The style of writing of Zen texts has been influenced by \"a variety of east Asian literary games\":",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During the Song dynasty (960–1297) the use of gong'an took a decisive turn. Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) introduced the use of kanhua, \"observing the phrase\". In this practice, students were to observe (kan) or concentrate on a single word or phrase (huatou), such as the famous mu of the mu-kōan.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the 11th century, this practice had become common. A new literary genre developed from this tradition as well. Collections of such commented cases were compiled, which consisted of the case itself, accompanied by verse or prose commentary.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Dahui's invention was aimed at balancing the insight developed by reflection on the teachings with developing samatha, calmness of mind. Ironically, this development became in effect silent illumination, a \"[re-absorbing] of kōan-study into the \"silence\" of meditation (ch'an)\". It led to a rejection of Buddhist learning:",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Some extent of Buddhist learning could easily have been recognized as a precondition for sudden awakening in Chán. Sung masters, however, tended to take the rejection literally and nondialectically. In effect, what they instituted was a form of Zen fundamentalism: the tradition came to be increasingly anti-intellectual in orientation and, in the process, reduced its complex heritage to simple formulae for which literal interpretations were thought adequate.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "This development left Chinese Chán vulnerable to criticisms by neo-Confucianism, which developed after the Sung Dynasty. Its anti-intellectual rhetoric was no match for the intellectual discourse of the neo-Confucianists.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The recorded encounter dialogues, and the kōan collections which derived from this genre, mark a shift from solitary practice to interaction between master and student:",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The essence of enlightenment came to be identified with the interaction between masters and students. Whatever insight dhyana might bring, its verification was always interpersonal. In effect, enlightenment came to be understood not so much as an insight, but as a way of acting in the world with other people",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "This mutual enquiry of the meaning of the encounters of masters and students of the past gave students a role model:",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "One looked at the enlightened activities of one's lineal forebears in order to understand one's own identity [...] taking the role of the participants and engaging in their dialogues instead",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kōan training requires a qualified teacher who has the ability to judge a disciple's handling of the tradition. In the Rinzai Zen school, which uses kōans extensively, the teacher certification process includes an appraisal of proficiency in using that school's extensive kōan curriculum.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "According to Barbara O'Brien, \"sanzen is the real point of the whole exercise,\" where one has to prove one's understanding.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Some of the earliest texts in which Kōans occur are the Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall (Chinese Zǔtángjí), mid-10th century, and the hagiographical collection The Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, also rendered into English as The Record of Transmitting the Light (Chinese Jǐngdé Chuándēnglù), early 11th century.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Blue Cliff Record (Chinese: 碧巖錄 Bìyán Lù; Japanese: Hekiganroku) is a collection of 100 kōans compiled in 1125 by Yuanwu Keqin (圜悟克勤 1063–1135).",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Book of Equanimity or Book of Serenity (Chinese: 從容録 Cóngróng lù; Japanese: 従容録 Shōyōroku) is a collection of 100 Kōans by Hongzhi Zhengjue (Chinese: 宏智正覺; Japanese: Wanshi Shōgaku) (1091–1157), compiled with commentaries by Wansong Xingxiu (1166–1246). The full title is The Record of the Temple of Equanimity With the Classic Odes of Venerable Tiantong Jue and the Responsive Commentary of Old Man Wansong 萬松老評唱天童覺和尚 頌古從容庵錄 (Wansong Laoren Pingchang Tiantong Jue Heshang Songgu Congrong An Lu) (Taisho Tripitaka Vol. 48, No. 2004)",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Gateless Gate (Chinese: 無門關 Wumenguan; Japanese: Mumonkan) is a collection of 48 kōans and commentaries published in 1228 by Chinese monk Wumen (無門) (1183–1260). The title may be more accurately rendered as Gateless Barrier or Gateless Checkpoint).",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Five kōans in the collection derive from the sayings and doings of Zhaozhou Congshen, (transliterated as Chao-chou in Wade-Giles and pronounced Jōshū in Japanese).",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Dahui Zonggao (大慧宗杲) (1089–1163) the Zhengfayan zang (正法眼藏), \"Treasury of the true dharma eye\" (W-G.: Cheng-fa yen-tsang, (J.: Shōbōgenzō) a collection of koans and dialogues compiled between 1147 and 1150 by Dahui Zonggao . Dahui's 'Treasury' is composed of three scrolls prefaced by three short introductory pieces. The Zongmen liandeng huiyao 宗門聯燈會要 was compiled in 1183 by Huiweng Wuming 晦翁悟明 (n.d.), three generations after Dahui in the same line; the sermon is found in zh 20 (x 79: 173a).",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the officially recognized monasteries belonging to the Gozan (Five Mountain System) the Chinese system was fully continued. Senior monks were supposed to compose Chinese verse in a complex style of matched counterpoints known as bienli wen. It took a lot of literary and intellectual skills for a monk to succeed in this system.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Rinka monasteries, the provincial temples with less control of the state, laid less stress on the correct command of the Chinese cultural idiom. These monasteries developed \"more accessible methods of kōan instruction\". It had three features:",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "By standardizing the kōan curriculum every generation of students proceeded to the same series of kōans. Students had to memorize a set number of stereotyped sayings, agyō, \"appended words\". The proper series of responses for each kōan were taught by the master in private instruction sessions to selected individual students who would inherit the dharma lineage.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Zhongfeng Mingben (1263–1323), a Chinese Chán-master who lived at the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, revitalized the Rinzai-tradition, and put a strong emphasis on the use of koans. He saw the kung-ans as \"work of literature [that] should be used as objective, universal standards to test the insight of monks who aspired to be recognized as Ch'an masters\":",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The koans do not represent the private opinion of a single man, but rather the hundreds and thousands of bodhisattvas of the three realms and ten directions. This principle accords with the spiritual source, tallies with the mysterious meaning, destroys birth-and-death, and transcends the passions. It cannot be understood by logic; it cannot be transmitted in words; it cannot be explained in writing; it cannot be measured by reason. It is like the poisoned drum that kills all who hear it, or like a great fire that consumes all who come near it. What is called \"the special transmission of the Vulture Peak\" was the transmission of this; what is called the \"direct pointing of Bodhidharma at Shao-lin-ssu\" is this.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "When the Chán tradition was established in Japan in the 12th century, both Rinzai and Sōtō, took over the use of kōan study and commenting. In Sōtō-Zen, kōan commentary was not linked to seated meditation. Japanese monks had to master the Chinese language and specific expressions used in the kōan training. The desired \"spontaneity\" expressed by enlightened masters required a thorough study of Chinese language and poetry. Japanese Zen imitated the Chinese \"syntax and stereotyped norms\".",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Accoridng to Eshin Nishimura, Japanese Rinzai-masters like En’ni-ben’nen (圓爾辨圓) (1202-1280) and Nampo-jyoumain (南浦紹明) (1235-1308) already divided the Chinese koans into three groups, comform the function they assigned to them, namely richi(\"ultimate truth\"), kikan(\"skillful method\") and koujyon (\"non-attachment\").",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Musō Soseki (1275–1351) relativized the use of koans. Despite belonging to the Rinzai-school, Musō Soseki also made extensive use of richi (teaching), explaining the sutras, instead of kikan (koan). According to Musō Soseki, both are upaya, \"skillful means\" meant to educate students. Musō Soseki called both shōkogyu, \"little jewels\", tools to help the student to attain satori.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the 18th century, the Rinzai school became dominated by the legacy of Hakuin, who laid a strong emphasis on kōan study as a means to gain kensho, but also not to get stuck in this initial insight and develop a compassionate, selfless attitude. After Hakuin, koan-study was systematized in a standard sequence and classification of koans. There are two curricula used in Rinzai, derived from two dharma-heirs of Gasan: the Takuju curriculum, and the Inzan curriculum. Both curricula have standardized answers.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "During the late 18th and 19th century, the tradition of kōan commentary became suppressed in the Sōtō school, due to a reform movement that sought to standardise the procedures for dharma transmission. One reason for suppressing the kōan tradition in the Sōtō school may have been to highlight the differences with the Rinzai school, and create a clear identity. This movement also started to venerate Dogen as the founding teacher of the Sōtō school. His teachings became the standard for the Sōtō teachings, neglecting the fact that Dogen himself made extensive use of kōan commentary.",
"title": "Origins and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, the emphasis is on Hua Tou, \"observing the phrase,\" contemplating one koan throughout one's lifetime, though Seung Sahn used the Rinzai-style of kōan practice in his Kwan Um School of Zen.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, the primary form of Koan-study is kanhua, \"reflection on the koan\", also called Hua Tou, \"word head\". In this practice, a fragment of the koan, such as \"mu\", or a \"what is\"-question is used by focusing on this fragment and repeating it over and over again:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Who is it who now repeats the Buddha's name?",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Who is dragging this corpse about? What is this? What is it? What was the original face before my father and mother were born?",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Who am I?",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The student is assigned only one hua-tou for a lifetime. In contrast to the similar-sounding \"who am I?\" question of Ramana Maharshi, hua-tou involves raising \"great doubt\":",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "This koan becomes a touchstone of our practice: it is a place to put our doubt, to cultivate great doubt, to allow the revelation of great faith, and to focus our great energy.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Chinese Chán and Korean Seon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Kōan practice is particularly important among Japanese practitioners of the Rinzai sect. The Japanese Rinzai-school uses extensive koan-curricula, checking questions, and jakogo (\"capping phrases\", quotations from Chinese poetry) in its use of koans,",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Koan practice starts with the shokan, or \"first barrier\", usually the mu-koan or the question \"What is the sound of one hand?\" After having attained kensho, students continue their practice investigating subsequent koans. In the Takuju-school, after breakthrough students work through the Gateless Gate (Mumonkan), the Blue Cliff Record (Hekigan-roku), the Entangling Vines (Shumon Kattoshu), and the Collection of Wings of the Blackbird (鴆羽集, Chin'u shū). The Inzan-school uses its own internally generated list of koans.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In Rinzai a gradual succession of koans is studied. There are two general branches of curricula used within Rinzai, the Takuju curriculum, and the Inzan curriculum. However, there are a number of sub-branches of these, and additional variations of curriculum often exist between individual teaching lines which can reflect the recorded experiences of a particular lineage's members. Koan curricula are, in fact, subject to continued accretion and evolution over time, and thus are best considered living traditions of practice rather than set programs of study.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "While Hakuin only refers to break-through koans, and \"difficult to pass\" koans to sharpen and refine the initial insight and foster compassion, Hakuin's descendants developed a fivefold classification system:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "According to Akizuki there was an older classification-system, in which the fifth category was Kojo, \"Directed upwards\". This category too was meant to rid the monk of any \"stink of Zen\". The very advanced practitioner may also receive the Matsugo no rokan, \"The last barrier, and Saigo no ikketsu, \"The final confirmation\". \"The last barrier\" is given when one left the training hall, for example \"Sum up all of the records of Rinzai in one word!\" It is not meant to be solved immediately, but to be carried around in order to keep practising. \"The final confirmation\" may be another word for the same kind of koan. Shin'ichi Hisamatsu gave \"If nothing what you do will do, then what will you do?\" as 'unanswerable' question, which keeps nagging on premature certainty.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In the Rinzai-school, the Sanbo Kyodan, and the White Plum Asanga, koan practice starts with the assignment of a hosshi or \"break-through koan\", usually the mu-koan or \"the sound of one hand\". Students are instructed to concentrate on the \"word-head\", like the phrase \"mu\". In the Wumenguan (Mumonkan), public case No. 1 (\"Zhaozhou's Dog\"), Wumen (Mumon) wrote:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "... concentrate yourself into this 'Wú' ... making your whole body one great inquiry. Day and night work intently at it. Do not attempt nihilistic or dualistic interpretations.\"",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Arousing this great inquiry or \"Great Doubt\" is an essential element of kōan practice. It builds up \"strong internal pressure (gidan), never stopping knocking from within at the door of [the] mind, demanding to be resolved\". To illustrate the enormous concentration required in kōan meditation, Zen Master Wumen commented,",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "It is like swallowing a red-hot iron ball. You try to vomit it out, but you can't.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Analysing the koan for its literal meaning won't lead to insight, though understanding the context from which koans emerged can make them more intelligible. For example, when a monk asked Zhaozhou (Joshu) \"does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?\", the monk was referring to the understanding of the teachings on Buddha-nature, which were understood in the Chinese context of absolute and relative reality.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The continuous pondering of the break-through koan (shokan) or Hua Tou, \"word head\", leads to kensho, an initial insight into \"seeing the (Buddha-)nature.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The aim of the break-through koan is to see the \"nonduality of subject and object\":",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The monk himself in his seeking is the koan. Realization of this is the insight; the response to the koan [...] Subject and object – this is two hands clapping. When the monk realizes that the koan is not merely an object of consciousness but is also he himself as the activity of seeking an answer to the koan, then subject and object are no longer separate and distinct [...] This is one hand clapping (sic).",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Various accounts can be found which describe \"becoming one\" with the koan and the resulting breakthrough:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "I was dead tired. That evening when I tried to settle down to sleep, the instant I laid my head on the pillow, I saw: \"Ah, this outbreath is Mu!\" Then: the in-breath too is Mu!\" Next breath, too: Mu! Next breath: Mu, Mu! \"Mu, a whole sequence of Mu! Croak, croak; meow, meow – these too are Mu! The bedding, the wall, the column, the sliding-door – these too are Mu! This, that and everything is Mu! Ha ha! Ha ha ha ha Ha! that roshi is a rascal! He's always tricking people with his 'Mu, Mu, Mu'!...",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "But the use of the mu-koan has also been criticised. According to Ama Samy, the main aim is merely to \"'become one' with the koan\". Showing to have 'become one' with the first koan is enough to pass the first koan. According to Samy, this is not equal to prajna:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The one-pointed, non-intellectual concentration on the hua-t'ou (or Mu) is a pressure-cooker tactic, a reduction to a technique which can produce some psychic experiences. These methods and techniques are forced efforts which can even run on auto-pilot. They can produce experiences but not prajna wisdom. Some speak of 'investigating' the hua-t’ou, but it is rather a matter of concentration, which sometimes can provide insights, yet no more than that.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Teachers may probe students about their kōan practice using sassho, \"checking questions\" to validate their satori (understanding) or kensho (seeing the nature). For the mu-koan and the clapping hand-koan there are twenty to a hundred checking questions, depending on the teaching lineage. The checking questions serve to deepen the insight or kyōgai of the student, but also to test his or her understanding.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Those checking questions, and their answers, are part of a standardised set of questions and answers. Ama Samy states that the \"koans and their standard answers are fixed.\" Isshu Muira Roshi also states, in The Zen Koan: \"In the Inzan and Takuju lines, the answers to the koans were more or less standardized for each line respectively.\" Missanroku and missanchō, \"Records of secret instruction\" have been preserved for various Rinzai lineages. They contain both the kōan curricula and the standardized answers.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In Sōtō-Zen they are called monsan, an abbreviation of monto hissan, \"secret instructions of the lineage\". The monsan follow a standard question-and-answer format. A series of questions is given, to be asked by the master. The answers are also given by the master, to be memorized by the student.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "According to critics, students are learning a \"ritual performance\", learning how to behave and respond in specific ways, learning \"clever repartees, ritualized language and gestures and be submissive to the master's diktat and arbitration.\"",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In 1916 Tominaga Shūho, using the pseudonym \"Hau Hōō\", published a critique of the Rinzai kōan system, Gendai sōjizen no hyōron, which also contained a translation of a missanroku. The missanroku part has been translated by Yoel Hoffmann as \"The Sound of the One Hand\" (see Hoffmann (1975)) and Bodiford (1993, p. 264 note 29).",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In the Rinzai-school, passing a koan and the checking questions has to be supplemented by jakugo, \"capping phrases\", citations of Chinese poetry to demonstrate the insight. Students can use collections of those citations, instead of composing poetry themselves.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "After the initial insight further practice is necessary, to deepen the insight and learn to integrate it in daily life. In Chinese Chán and Korean Seon, this further practice consists of further pondering of the same Hua Tou. In Rinzai-Zen, this further practice is undertaken by further koan-study, for which elaborate curricula exist. In Sōtō-Zen, Shikantaza is the main practice for deepening insight.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "After completing the koan-training, Gogo no shugyo is necessary:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "[I]t would take 10 years to solve all the kōans [...] in the sōdō. After the student has solved all koans, he can leave the sōdō and live on his own, but he is still not considered a roshi. For this he has to complete another ten years of training, called \"go-go-no-shugyō\" in Japanese. Literally, this means \"practice after satori/enlightenment\", but Fukushima preferred the translation \"special practice\". Fukushima would explain that the student builds up a \"religious personality\" during this decade. It is a kind of period that functions to test if the student is actually able to live in regular society and apply his koan understanding to daily life, after he has lived in an environment that can be quite surreal and detached from the lives of the rest of humanity. Usually, the student lives in small parish temple during this decade, not in a formal training monastery.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Completing the koan-curriculum in the Rinzai-schools traditionally also led to a mastery of Chinese poetry and literary skills:",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "[D]isciples today are expected to spend a dozen or more years with a master to complete a full course of training in koan commentary. Only when a master is satisfied that a disciple can comment appropriately on a wide range of old cases will he recognize the latter as a dharma heir and give him formal \"proof of transmission\" (J. inka shomei). Thus, in reality, a lot more than satori is required for one to be recognized as a master (J. shike, roshi) in the Rinzai school of Zen at present. The accepted proof of satori is a set of literary and rhetorical skills that takes many years to acquire.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Hakuin Ekaku, the 17th century revitalizer of the Rinzai school, taught several practices which serve to correct physical and mental imbalances arising from, among other things, incorrect or excessive koan practice. The \"soft-butter\" method (nanso no ho) and \"introspection method\" (naikan no ho) involve cultivation of ki centered on the tanden (Chinese:dantian). These practices are described in Hakuin's works Orategama and Yasen Kanna, and are still taught in some Rinzai lineages today.",
"title": "Koan-practice in Japanese Rinzai"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Few Sōtō Zen practitioners concentrate on kōans during meditation, but the Sōtō sect has a strong historical connection with kōans, since many kōan collections were compiled by Sōtō priests. During the 13th century, Dōgen, founder of the Sōtō sect in Japan, quoted 580 kōans in his teachings. He compiled some 300 kōans in the volumes known as the Greater Shōbōgenzō. Dōgen wrote of Genjokōan, which points out that everyday life experience is the fundamental kōan.",
"title": "Japanese Sōtō"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Other kōan collections compiled and annotated by Sōtō priests include:",
"title": "Japanese Sōtō"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In Japanese Sōtō Zen the use of koans has been abandoned since the late eighteenth and nineteenth century:",
"title": "Japanese Sōtō"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "...kōan practice was largely expunged from the Sōtō school through the efforts of Gentō Sokuchū (1729–1807), the eleventh abbot of Entsuji, who in 1795 was nominated abbot of Eiheiji.",
"title": "Japanese Sōtō"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The Sanbo Kyodan school of the former Sōtō-priest Hakuun Yasutani, and the White Plum Asanga of Taizan Maezumi and the many groups that derive from him, incorporate koan-study. The Sanbo kyodan places great emphasis on kensho, initial insight into one's true nature, as a start of real practice. It follows the so-called Harada-Yasutani koan-curriculum, which is derived from Hakuin's student Takuju. It is a shortened koan-curriculum, in which the so-called \"capping phrases\" are removed. The curriculum takes considerably less time to study than the Takuju-curriculum of Rinzai.",
"title": "Sanbo Kyodan and White Plum Asanga"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "To attain kensho, most students are assigned the mu-koan. After breaking through, the student first studies twenty-two \"in-house\" koans, which are \"unpublished and not for the general public\", but are nevertheless published and commented upon. There-after, the students goes through the Gateless Gate (Mumonkan), the Blue Cliff Record, the Book of Equanimity, and the Record of Transmitting the Light. The koan-curriculum is completed by the Five ranks of Tozan and the precepts.",
"title": "Sanbo Kyodan and White Plum Asanga"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "A monk asked Zhàozhōu, \"Does a dog have Buddha nature, or does he not have Buddha-nature?\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Zhaozhou said, \"Wú\".",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "\"Zhaozhou\" is rendered as \"Chao-chou\" in Wade-Giles, and pronounced \"Joshu\" in Japanese. \"Wu\" appears as \"mu\" in Japanese, meaning \"no\", \"not\", \"nonbeing\", or \"without\" in English. This is a fragment of Case No. 1 of the Wúménguān. However, another koan presents a longer version, in which Zhaozhou answered \"yes\" in response to the same question asked by a different monk: see Case No. 18 of the Book of Serenity.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand? (隻手声あり、その声を聞け)",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Victor Hori comments:",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "... in the beginning a monk first thinks a kōan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the kōan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the kōan. The kōan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a kōan, the self sees the self not directly but under the guise of the kōan ... When one realizes (\"makes real\") this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the kōan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Yet, Hakuin himself introduced this question with a reference to Kanzeon (Guanyin), bodhisattva of great compassion, who hears the sounds of the suffering ones in the world, and is awakened by hearing these sounds and responding to them. To hear the sound of one hand is to still the sounds of the world, that is, to put an end to all suffering.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Huìnéng asked Hui Ming, \"Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "This is a fragment of case No. 23 of the Wumenguan.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "If you meet the Buddha, kill him. (逢佛殺佛)",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "A student asked Master Yun-Men (949 AD) \"Not even a thought has arisen; is there still a sin or not?\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Master replied, \"Mount Sumeru!\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "A monk asked Dongshan Shouchu, \"What is Buddha?\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "Dongshan said, \"Three pounds of flax.\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "This is a fragment of case No. 18 of the Wumenguan as well as case No. 12 of the Blue Cliff Record.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "A monk asked Ummon, \"What is the teaching that transcends the Buddha and patriarchs?\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Ummon said, \"A sesame bun.\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "A monk asked Zhaozhou, \"What is the meaning of the ancestral teacher's (i.e., Bodhidharma's) coming from the west?\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Zhaozhou said, \"The cypress tree in front of the hall.\"",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "This is a fragment of case No. 37 of the Wumenguan as well as case No. 47 of the Book of Serenity.",
"title": "Examples of traditional kōans"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Gentō Sokuchū, the 18th century abbot of Dogen's Eihei-ji, aggressively sought to reform Sōtō from all things 'foreign' and associated with Rinzai, including kōans. The unorthodox Zen monk Ikkyū contemplated kōans for years while creating dolls for a merchant in Kyoto, specifically penetrating the case no. 15 from The Gateless Gate and thereafter earning his dharma name Ikkyū.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Facing criticism by Buddhists such as Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki for misunderstanding Zen, Alan Watts claimed that a kōan supported his lack of zazen practice. On the topic, Suzuki claimed: \"I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story.\"",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid discusses Zen kōans in relation to paradoxical questions and perceiving reality outside of one's experience. Inspired by Zen teachings (including kōans), Frank Herbert wrote on the subject of the paradoxical elements of his Dune series:",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fugue like relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape. As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. ... It's like a kōan, a Zen mind breaker.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "The 1989 South Korean film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? bases much of its narrative on kōans, with its title deriving from a particular kōan about the founder of Zen, Bodhidharma.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "After becoming smitten with Zen (even offering to turn his own house into a zendo), filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky meditated and studied koans with the traveling monk Ejo Takata (1928–1997). After the release of The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky gave a talk at the University of Mexico on the subject of kōans. After this talk, Takata gifted Jodorowsky his keisaku, believing that the filmmaker had mastered the ability to understand kōans.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "In the 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac paraphrases the Yunmen shit-stick kōan as: \"The Buddha is a dried piece of turd\". The second volume of the manga Lone Wolf and Cub by Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima is titled 'The Gateless Barrier' and revolves around a Linji kōan (\"If you meet a Buddha, kill him\") as the protagonist is tasked to kill a troublesome \"living Buddha\".",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "In hacker culture, funny short stories concerning computer science developed, named hacker koans. The book Jargon File contains many kōans, including the AI Koans. The Codeless Code is another book about software engineers at big businesses instead of unix hackers, deriving its title from the Gateless Gate.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The song \"False Prophet\" by Bob Dylan includes the line: \"I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet\", a reference to a Gateless Gate kōan (\"You must climb a mountain of swords with bare feet\"). British musical artist Brian Eno collaborated with Intermorphic on developing a generative music software system named Koan. In 2009, American composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey released his second album, Koan.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The 1997 novel The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Richard Flanagan (and its 1998 film adaptation of the same name) derives its title from a kōan by Hakuin Ekaku. The episode of the 2014 first season of Fargo entitled \"Eating the Blame\" derives its episode title from a koan of the same name from the Shasekishū. Cyriaque Lamar of io9 stated that the approach to technology in Tron: Legacy was reminiscent of kōans.",
"title": "Cultural legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Buddhism",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "\"Christianity'",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Other",
"title": "See also"
}
] |
A kōan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement from the Chinese Chan-lore, supplemented with commentaries, that is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and initial insight of Zen-students. Prolonged koan-study shatters small-minded pride of, and identification with, this initial insight, and spurs further development of insight and compassion, and integration thereof in daily life and character.
|
2001-10-20T21:07:06Z
|
2023-12-14T01:42:38Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan
|
16,864 |
Karma
|
Karma (/ˈkɑːrmə/, from Sanskrit: कर्म, IPA: [ˈkɐɾmɐ] ; Pali: kamma) is a concept of action, work, or deed, and its effect or consequences. In Indian religions, the term more specifically refers to a principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein individual's intent and actions (cause) influence their future (effect): Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths. In some scripture, however, there is no link between rebirths and karma. Karma is often misunderstood as fate, destiny, or predetermination.
The concept of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in many schools of Indian religions (particularly in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism), as well as Taoism. In these schools, karma in the present affects one's future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives—one's saṃsāra. This concept has also been adopted in Western popular culture, in which the events that happen after a person's actions may be considered natural consequences of those actions.
The term karma (Sanskrit: कर्म; Pali: kamma) refers to both the executed 'deed, work, action, act' and the 'object, intent'.
Wilhelm Halbfass (2000) explains karma (karman) by contrasting it with the Sanskrit word kriya: whereas kriya is the activity along with the steps and effort in action, karma is (1) the executed action as a consequence of that activity, as well as (2) the intention of the actor behind an executed action or a planned action (described by some scholars as metaphysical residue left in the actor). A good action creates good karma, as does good intent. A bad action creates bad karma, as does bad intent.
Difficulty in arriving at a definition of karma arises because of the diversity of views among the schools of Hinduism; some, for example, consider karma and rebirth linked and simultaneously essential, some consider karma but not rebirth to be essential, and a few discuss and conclude karma and rebirth to be flawed fiction. Buddhism and Jainism have their own karma precepts. Thus, karma has not one, but multiple definitions and different meanings. It is a concept whose meaning, importance, and scope varies between the various traditions that originated in India, and various schools in each of these traditions. Wendy O'Flaherty claims that, furthermore, there is an ongoing debate regarding whether karma is a theory, a model, a paradigm, a metaphor, or a metaphysical stance.
Karma also refers to a conceptual principle that originated in India, often descriptively called the principle of karma, and sometimes the karma-theory or the law of karma.
In the context of theory, karma is complex and difficult to define. Different schools of Indology derive different definitions for the concept from ancient Indian texts; their definition is some combination of (1) causality that may be ethical or non-ethical; (2) ethicization, i.e., good or bad actions have consequences; and (3) rebirth. Other Indologists include in the definition that which explains the present circumstances of an individual with reference to his or her actions in the past. These actions may be those in a person's current life, or, in some schools of Indian traditions, possibly actions in their past lives; furthermore, the consequences may result in the current life, or a person's future lives. The law of karma operates independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment.
A common theme to theories of karma is its principle of causality. This relationship between karma and causality is a central motif in all schools of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. One of the earliest association of karma to causality occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad verses 4.4.5–6:
Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be; a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad; he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds; And here they say that a person consists of desires, and as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
The theory of karma as causation holds that: (1) executed actions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives, and (2) the intentions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives. Disinterested actions, or unintentional actions do not have the same positive or negative karmic effect, as interested and intentional actions. In Buddhism, for example, actions that are performed, or arise, or originate without any bad intent, such as covetousness, are considered non-existent in karmic impact or neutral in influence to the individual.
Another causality characteristic, shared by karmic theories, is that like deeds lead to like effects. Thus, good karma produces good effect on the actor, while bad karma produces bad effect. This effect may be material, moral, or emotional – that is, one's karma affects both one's happiness and unhappiness. The effect of karma need not be immediate; the effect of karma can be later in one's current life, and in some schools it extends to future lives.
The consequence or effects of one's karma can be described in two forms: phala and samskara. A phala (lit. 'fruit' or 'result') is the visible or invisible effect that is typically immediate or within the current life. In contrast, a samskara (Sanskrit: संस्कार) is an invisible effect, produced inside the actor because of the karma, transforming the agent and affecting his or her ability to be happy or unhappy in their current and future lives. The theory of karma is often presented in the context of samskaras.
Karl Potter and Harold Coward suggest that karmic principle can also be understood as a principle of psychology and habit. Karma seeds habits (vāsanā), and habits create the nature of man. Karma also seeds self perception, and perception influences how one experiences life-events. Both habits and self perception affect the course of one's life. Breaking bad habits is not easy: it requires conscious karmic effort. Thus, psyche and habit, according to Potter and Coward, link karma to causality in ancient Indian literature. The idea of karma may be compared to the notion of a person's 'character', as both are an assessment of the person and determined by that person's habitual thinking and acting.
The second theme common to karma theories is ethicization. This begins with the premise that every action has a consequence, which will come to fruition in either this life or a future life; thus, morally good acts will have positive consequences, whereas bad acts will produce negative results. An individual's present situation is thereby explained by reference to actions in his present or in previous lifetimes. Karma is not itself 'reward and punishment', but the law that produces consequence. Wilhelm Halbfass notes that good karma is considered as dharma and leads to punya ('merit'), while bad karma is considered adharma and leads to pāp ('demerit, sin').
Reichenbach (1988) suggests that the theories of karma are an ethical theory. This is so because the ancient scholars of India linked intent and actual action to the merit, reward, demerit, and punishment. A theory without ethical premise would be a pure causal relation; the merit or reward or demerit or punishment would be same regardless of the actor's intention. In ethics, one's intentions, attitudes, and desires matter in the evaluation of one's action. Where the outcome is unintended, the moral responsibility for it is less on the actor, even though causal responsibility may be the same regardless. A karma theory considers not only the action, but also the actor's intentions, attitude, and desires before and during the action. The karma concept thus encourages each person to seek and live a moral life, as well as avoid an immoral life. The meaning and significance of karma is thus as a building-block of an ethical theory.
The third common theme of karma theories is the concept of reincarnation or the cycle of rebirths (saṃsāra). Rebirth is a fundamental concept of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Rebirth, or saṃsāra, is the concept that all life forms go through a cycle of reincarnation, that is, a series of births and rebirths. The rebirths and consequent life may be in different realm, condition, or form. The karma theories suggest that the realm, condition, and form depends on the quality and quantity of karma. In schools that believe in rebirth, every living being's soul transmigrates (recycles) after death, carrying the seeds of Karmic impulses from life just completed, into another life and lifetime of karmas. This cycle continues indefinitely, except for those who consciously break this cycle by reaching moksha. Those who break the cycle reach the realm of gods, those who do not continue in the cycle.
The concept has been intensely debated in ancient literature of India; with different schools of Indian religions considering the relevance of rebirth as either essential, or secondary, or unnecessary fiction. Hiriyanna (1949) suggests rebirth to be a necessary corollary of karma; Yamunacharya (1966) asserts that karma is a fact, while reincarnation is a hypothesis; and Creel (1986) suggests that karma is a basic concept, rebirth is a derivative concept.
The theory of 'karma and rebirth' raises numerous questions – such as how, when, and why did the cycle start in the first place, what is the relative Karmic merit of one karma versus another and why, and what evidence is there that rebirth actually happens, among others. Various schools of Hinduism realized these difficulties, debated their own formulations – some reaching what they considered as internally consistent theories – while other schools modified and de-emphasized it; a few schools in Hinduism such as Charvakas (or Lokayata) abandoned the theory of 'karma and rebirth' altogether. Schools of Buddhism consider karma-rebirth cycle as integral to their theories of soteriology.
The Vedic Sanskrit word kárman- (nominative kárma) means 'work' or 'deed', often used in the context of Srauta rituals. In the Rigveda, the word occurs some 40 times. In Satapatha Brahmana 1.7.1.5, sacrifice is declared as the "greatest" of works; Satapatha Brahmana 10.1.4.1 associates the potential of becoming immortal (amara) with the karma of the agnicayana sacrifice.
In the early Vedic literature, the concept of karma is also present beyond the realm of rituals or sacrifices. The Vedic language includes terms for sins and vices such as āgas, agha, enas, pāpa/pāpman, duṣkṛta, as well as for virtues and merit like sukṛta and puṇya, along with the neutral term karman.
Whatever good deed man does that is inside the Vedi; and whatever evil he does that is outside the Vedi.
The verse refers to the evaluation of virtuous and sinful actions in the afterlife. Regardless of their application in rituals (whether within or outside the Vedi), the concepts of good and evil here broadly represent merits and sins.
What evil is done here by man, that it (i.e. speech = Brahman) makes manifest. Although he thinks that he does it secretly, as it were, still it makes it manifest. Verily, therefore one should not commit evil.
This is the eternal greatness of the Brahmin. He does not increase by kárman, nor does he become less. His ātman knows the path. Knowing him (the ātman) one is not polluted by evil karman.
The Vedic words for "action" and "merit" in pre-Upaniṣadic texts carry moral significance and are not solely linked to ritual practices. The word karman simply means "action," which can be either positive or negative, and is not always associated with religious ceremonies; its predominant association with ritual in the Brāhmaṇa texts is likely a reflection of their ritualistic nature. In the same vein, sukṛta (and subsequently, puṇya) denotes any form of "merit," whether it be ethical or ritualistic. In contrast, terms such as pāpa and duṣkṛta consistently represent morally wrong actions.
The earliest clear discussion of the karma doctrine is in the Upanishads. The doctrine occurs here in the context of a discussion of the fate of the individual after death. For example, causality and ethicization is stated in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.2.13:
Truly, one becomes good through good deeds, and evil through evil deeds.
Some authors state that the samsara (transmigration) and karma doctrine may be non-Vedic, and the ideas may have developed in the "shramana" traditions that preceded Buddhism and Jainism. Others state that some of the complex ideas of the ancient emerging theory of karma flowed from Vedic thinkers to Buddhist and Jain thinkers. The mutual influences between the traditions is unclear, and likely co-developed.
Many philosophical debates surrounding the concept are shared by the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions, and the early developments in each tradition incorporated different novel ideas. For example, Buddhists allowed karma transfer from one person to another and sraddha rites, but had difficulty defending the rationale. In contrast, Hindu schools and Jainism would not allow the possibility of karma transfer.
The concept of karma in Hinduism developed and evolved over centuries. The earliest Upanishads began with the questions about how and why man is born, and what happens after death. As answers to the latter, the early theories in these ancient Sanskrit documents include pancagni vidya (the five fire doctrine), pitryana (the cyclic path of fathers), and devayana (the cycle-transcending, path of the gods). Those who do superficial rituals and seek material gain, claimed these ancient scholars, travel the way of their fathers and recycle back into another life; those who renounce these, go into the forest and pursue spiritual knowledge, were claimed to climb into the higher path of the gods. It is these who break the cycle and are not reborn. With the composition of the Epics – the common man's introduction to dharma in Hinduism – the ideas of causality and essential elements of the theory of karma were being recited in folk stories. For example:
As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps; no man inherits the good or evil act of another man. The fruit is of the same quality as the action.
The 6th chapter of the Anushasana Parva (the Teaching Book), the 13th book of the Mahabharata, opens with Yudhishthira asking Bhishma: "Is the course of a person's life already destined, or can human effort shape one's life?" The future, replies Bhishma, is both a function of current human effort derived from free will and past human actions that set the circumstances. Over and over again, the chapters of Mahabharata recite the key postulates of karma theory. That is: intent and action (karma) has consequences; karma lingers and doesn't disappear; and, all positive or negative experiences in life require effort and intent. For example:
Happiness comes due to good actions, suffering results from evil actions, by actions, all things are obtained, by inaction, nothing whatsoever is enjoyed. If one's action bore no fruit, then everything would be of no avail, if the world worked from fate alone, it would be neutralized.
Over time, various schools of Hinduism developed many different definitions of karma, some making karma appear quite deterministic, while others make room for free will and moral agency. Among the six most studied schools of Hinduism, the theory of karma evolved in different ways, as their respective scholars reasoned and attempted to address the internal inconsistencies, implications and issues of the karma doctrine. According to Professor Wilhelm Halbfass,
The above schools illustrate the diversity of views, but are not exhaustive. Each school has sub-schools in Hinduism, such as that of non-dualism and dualism under Vedanta. Furthermore, there are other schools of Indian philosophy such as Charvaka (or Lokayata; the materialists) who denied the theory of karma-rebirth as well as the existence of God; to this non-Vedic school, the properties of things come from the nature of things. Causality emerges from the interaction, actions and nature of things and people, determinative principles such as karma or God are unnecessary.
Karma and karmaphala are fundamental concepts in Buddhism, which explain how our intentional actions keep us tied to rebirth in samsara, whereas the Buddhist path, as exemplified in the Noble Eightfold Path, shows us the way out of samsara.
The cycle of rebirth is determined by karma, literally 'action'. Karmaphala (wherein phala means 'fruit, result') refers to the 'effect' or 'result' of karma. The similar term karmavipaka (wherein vipāka means 'ripening') refers to the 'maturation, ripening' of karma.
In the Buddhist tradition, karma refers to actions driven by intention (cetanā), a deed done deliberately through body, speech or mind, which leads to future consequences. The Nibbedhika Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya 6.63:
Intention (cetana) I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.
How these intentional actions lead to rebirth, and how the idea of rebirth is to be reconciled with the doctrines of impermanence and no-self, is a matter of philosophical inquiry in the Buddhist traditions, for which several solutions have been proposed. In early Buddhism no explicit theory of rebirth and karma is worked out, and "the karma doctrine may have been incidental to early Buddhist soteriology." In early Buddhism, rebirth is ascribed to craving or ignorance. Unlike that of Jains, Buddha's teaching of karma is not strictly deterministic, but incorporated circumstantial factors such as other Niyamas. It is not a rigid and mechanical process, but a flexible, fluid and dynamic process. There is no set linear relationship between a particular action and its results. The karmic effect of a deed is not determined solely by the deed itself, but also by the nature of the person who commits the deed, and by the circumstances in which it is committed. Karmaphala is not a "judgement" enforced by a God, Deity or other supernatural being that controls the affairs of the Cosmos. Rather, karmaphala is the outcome of a natural process of cause and effect. Within Buddhism, the real importance of the doctrine of karma and its fruits lies in the recognition of the urgency to put a stop to the whole process. The Acintita Sutta warns that "the results of kamma" is one of the four incomprehensible subjects (or acinteyya), subjects that are beyond all conceptualization, and cannot be understood with logical thought or reason.
Nichiren Buddhism teaches that transformation and change through faith and practice changes adverse karma—negative causes made in the past that result in negative results in the present and future—to positive causes for benefits in the future.
In Jainism, karma conveys a totally different meaning from that commonly understood in Hindu philosophy and western civilization. Jain philosophy is one of the oldest Indian philosophy that completely separates body (matter) from the soul (pure consciousness). In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle particles of matter that pervade the entire universe. Karmas are attracted to the karmic field of a soul due to vibrations created by activities of mind, speech, and body as well as various mental dispositions. Hence the karmas are the subtle matter surrounding the consciousness of a soul. When these two components (consciousness and karma) interact, we experience the life we know at present. Jain texts expound that seven tattvas (truths or fundamentals) constitute reality. These are:
According to Padmanabh Jaini,
This emphasis on reaping the fruits only of one's own karma was not restricted to the Jainas; both Hindus and Buddhist writers have produced doctrinal materials stressing the same point. Each of the latter traditions, however, developed practices in basic contradiction to such belief. In addition to shrardha (the ritual Hindu offerings by the son of deceased), we find among Hindus widespread adherence to the notion of divine intervention in ones fate, while Buddhists eventually came to propound such theories like boon-granting bodhisattvas, transfer of merit and like. Only Jainas have been absolutely unwilling to allow such ideas to penetrate their community, despite the fact that there must have been tremendous amount of social pressure on them to do so.
The relationship between the soul and karma, states Padmanabh Jaini, can be explained with the analogy of gold. Like gold is always found mixed with impurities in its original state, Jainism holds that the soul is not pure at its origin but is always impure and defiled like natural gold. One can exert effort and purify gold, similarly, Jainism states that the defiled soul can be purified by proper refining methodology. Karma either defiles the soul further, or refines it to a cleaner state, and this affects future rebirths. Karma is thus an efficient cause (nimitta) in Jain philosophy, but not the material cause (upadana). The soul is believed to be the material cause.
The key points where the theory of karma in Jainism can be stated as follows:
There are eight types of Karma which attach a soul to Samsar (the cycle of birth and death):
In Sikhism, all living beings are described as being under the influence of the three qualities of maya. Always present together in varying mix and degrees, these three qualities of maya bind the soul to the body and to the earth plane. Above these three qualities is the eternal time. Due to the influence of three modes of maya's nature, jivas (individual beings) perform activities under the control and purview of the eternal time. These activities are called karma, wherein the underlying principle is that karma is the law that brings back the results of actions to the person performing them.
This life is likened to a field in which our karma is the seed. We harvest exactly what we sow; no less, no more. This infallible law of karma holds everyone responsible for what the person is or is going to be. Based on the total sum of past karma, some feel close to the Pure Being in this life and others feel separated. This is the law of karma in Gurbani (Sri Guru Granth Sahib). Like other Indian and oriental schools of thought, the Gurbani also accepts the doctrines of karma and reincarnation as the facts of nature.
David Ownby, a scholar of Chinese history at the University of Montreal, asserts that Falun Gong differs from Buddhism in its definition of the term "karma" in that it is taken not as a process of award and punishment, but as an exclusively negative term. The Chinese term de, or 'virtue', is reserved for what might otherwise be termed 'good karma' in Buddhism. Karma is understood as the source of all suffering – what Buddhism might refer to as 'bad karma'. According to Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong: "A person has done bad things over his many lifetimes, and for people this results in misfortune, or for cultivators its karmic obstacles, so there's birth, aging, sickness, and death. This is ordinary karma."
Falun Gong teaches that the spirit is locked in the cycle of rebirth, also known as samsara, due to the accumulation of karma. This is a negative, black substance that accumulates in other dimensions lifetime after lifetime, by doing bad deeds and thinking bad thoughts. Falun Gong states that karma is the reason for suffering, and what ultimately blocks people from the truth of the universe and attaining enlightenment. At the same time, karma is also the cause of one's continued rebirth and suffering. Li says that due to accumulation of karma the human spirit upon death will reincarnate over and over again, until the karma is paid off or eliminated through cultivation, or the person is destroyed due to the bad deeds he has done.
Ownby regards the concept of karma as a cornerstone to individual moral behaviour in Falun Gong, and also readily traceable to the Christian doctrine of "one reaps what one sows". Others say Matthew 5:44 means no unbeliever will not fully reap what they sow until they are judged by God after death in Hell. Ownby says Falun Gong is differentiated by a "system of transmigration", although, "in which each organism is the reincarnation of a previous life form, its current form having been determined by karmic calculation of the moral qualities of the previous lives lived." Ownby says the seeming unfairness of manifest inequities can then be explained, at the same time allowing a space for moral behaviour in spite of them. In the same vein of Li's monism, matter and spirit are one, karma is identified as a black substance which must be purged in the process of cultivation.
According to Li,
Human beings all fell here from the many dimensions of the universe. They no longer met the requirements of the Fa at their given levels in the universe, and thus had to drop down. Just as we have said before, the heavier one's mortal attachments, the further down one drops, with the descent continuing until one arrives at the state of ordinary human beings.
He says that, in the eyes of higher beings, the purpose of human life is not merely to be human, but to awaken quickly on Earth, a "setting of delusion," and return. "That is what they really have in mind; they are opening a door for you. Those who fail to return will have no choice but to reincarnate, with this continuing until they amass a huge amount of karma and are destroyed."
Ownby regards this as the basis for Falun Gong's apparent "opposition to practitioners' taking medicine when ill; they are missing an opportunity to work off karma by allowing an illness to run its course (suffering depletes karma) or to fight the illness through cultivation." Benjamin Penny shares this interpretation. Since Li believes that "karma is the primary factor that causes sickness in people," Penny asks: "if disease comes from karma and karma can be eradicated through cultivation of xinxing, then what good will medicine do?" Li himself states that he is not forbidding practitioners from taking medicine, maintaining that "What I'm doing is telling people the relationship between practicing cultivation and medicine-taking." Li also states that "An everyday person needs to take medicine when he gets sick." Danny Schechter (2001) quotes a Falun Gong student who says "It is always an individual choice whether one should take medicine or not."
Karma is an important concept in Taoism. Every deed is tracked by deities and spirits. Appropriate rewards or retribution follow karma, just like a shadow follows a person.
The karma doctrine of Taoism developed in three stages. In the first stage, causality between actions and consequences was adopted, with supernatural beings keeping track of everyone's karma and assigning fate (ming). In the second phase, transferability of karma ideas from Chinese Buddhism were expanded, and a transfer or inheritance of Karmic fate from ancestors to one's current life was introduced. In the third stage of karma doctrine development, ideas of rebirth based on karma were added. One could be reborn either as another human being or another animal, according to this belief. In the third stage, additional ideas were introduced; for example, rituals, repentance and offerings at Taoist temples were encouraged as it could alleviate Karmic burden.
Interpreted as musubi, a view of karma is recognized in Shinto as a means of enriching, empowering and life affirming. It is the spirit of birth and becoming. Birth, accomplishment, combination. The creating and harmonizing powers. The working of musubi has fundamental significance in Shinto, because creative development forms the basis of the Shinto world view
Many deities are connected to musubi and have it in their names
One of the significant controversies with the karma doctrine is whether it always implies destiny, and its implications on free will. This controversy is also referred to as the moral agency problem; the controversy is not unique to karma doctrine, but also found in some form in monotheistic religions.
The free will controversy can be outlined in three parts:
The explanations and replies to the above free will problem vary by the specific school of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The schools of Hinduism, such as Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, that have emphasized current life over the dynamics of karma residue moving across past lives, allow free will. Their argument, as well of other schools, are threefold:
Other schools of Hinduism, as well as Buddhism and Jainism that do consider cycle of rebirths central to their beliefs and that karma from past lives affects one's present, believe that both free will (cetanā) and karma can co-exist; however, their answers have not persuaded all scholars.
Another issue with the theory of karma is that it is psychologically indeterminate, suggests Obeyesekere (1968). That is, if no one can know what their karma was in previous lives, and if the karma from past lives can determine one's future, then the individual is psychologically unclear what if anything he or she can do now to shape the future, be more happy, or reduce suffering. If something goes wrong, such as sickness or failure at work, the individual is unclear if karma from past lives was the cause, or the sickness was caused by curable infection and the failure was caused by something correctable.
This psychological indeterminacy problem is also not unique to the theory of karma; it is found in every religion adopting the premise that God has a plan, or in some way influences human events. As with the karma-and-free-will problem above, schools that insist on primacy of rebirths face the most controversy. Their answers to the psychological indeterminacy issue are the same as those for addressing the free will problem.
Some schools of Asian religions, particularly popular Buddhism, allow transfer of karma merit and demerit from one person to another. This transfer is an exchange of non-physical quality just like an exchange of physical goods between two human beings. The practice of karma transfer, or even its possibility, is controversial. Karma transfer raises questions similar to those with substitutionary atonement and vicarious punishment. It defeats the ethical foundations, and dissociates the causality and ethicization in the theory of karma from the moral agent. Proponents of some Buddhist schools suggest that the concept of karma merit transfer encourages religious giving, and such transfers are not a mechanism to transfer bad karma (i.e., demerit) from one person to another.
In Hinduism, Sraddha rites during funerals have been labelled as karma merit transfer ceremonies by a few scholars, a claim disputed by others. Other schools in Hinduism, such as the Yoga and Advaita Vedantic philosophies, and Jainism hold that karma can not be transferred.
There has been an ongoing debate about karma theory and how it answers the problem of evil and related problem of theodicy. The problem of evil is a significant question debated in monotheistic religions with two beliefs:
The problem of evil is then stated in formulations such as, "why does the omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God allow any evil and suffering to exist in the world?" Sociologist Max Weber extended the problem of evil to Eastern traditions.
The problem of evil, in the context of karma, has been long discussed in Eastern traditions, both in theistic and non-theistic schools; for example, in Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sutras Book 2 Chapter 1; the 8th century arguments by Adi Sankara in Brahma Sutra bhasya where he posits that God cannot reasonably be the cause of the world because there exists moral evil, inequality, cruelty and suffering in the world; and the 11th century theodicy discussion by Ramanuja in Sri Bhasya. Epics such as the Mahabharata, for example, suggests three prevailing theories in ancient India as to why good and evil exists – one being that everything is ordained by God, another being karma, and a third citing chance events (yadrccha, यदृच्छा). The Mahabharata, which includes Hindu deity Vishnu in the form of Krishna as one of the central characters in the Epic, debates the nature and existence of suffering from these three perspectives, and includes a theory of suffering as arising from an interplay of chance events (such as floods and other events of nature), circumstances created by past human actions, and the current desires, volitions, dharma, adharma and current actions (purusakara) of people. However, while karma theory in the Mahabharata presents alternative perspectives on the problem of evil and suffering, it offers no conclusive answer.
Other scholars suggest that nontheistic Indian religious traditions do not assume an omnibenevolent creator, and some theistic schools do not define or characterize their God(s) as monotheistic Western religions do and the deities have colorful, complex personalities; the Indian deities are personal and cosmic facilitators, and in some schools conceptualized like Plato's Demiurge. Therefore, the problem of theodicy in many schools of major Indian religions is not significant, or at least is of a different nature than in Western religions. Many Indian religions place greater emphasis on developing the karma principle for first cause and innate justice with Man as focus, rather than developing religious principles with the nature and powers of God and divine judgment as focus. Some scholars, particularly of the Nyaya school of Hinduism and Sankara in Brahma Sutra bhasya, have posited that karma doctrine implies existence of god, who administers and affects the person's environment given that person's karma, but then acknowledge that it makes karma as violable, contingent and unable to address the problem of evil. Arthur Herman states that karma-transmigration theory solves all three historical formulations to the problem of evil while acknowledging the theodicy insights of Sankara and Ramanuja.
Some theistic Indian religions, such as Sikhism, suggest evil and suffering are a human phenomenon and arises from the karma of individuals. In other theistic schools such as those in Hinduism, particularly its Nyaya school, karma is combined with dharma and evil is explained as arising from human actions and intent that is in conflict with dharma. In nontheistic religions such as Buddhism, Jainism and the Mimamsa school of Hinduism, karma theory is used to explain the cause of evil as well as to offer distinct ways to avoid or be unaffected by evil in the world.
Those schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism that rely on karma-rebirth theory have been critiqued for their theological explanation of suffering in children by birth, as the result of his or her sins in a past life. Others disagree, and consider the critique as flawed and a misunderstanding of the karma theory.
Western culture, influenced by Christianity, holds a notion similar to karma, as demonstrated in the phrase "what goes around comes around".
Mary Jo Meadow suggests karma is akin to "Christian notions of sin and its effects." She states that the Christian teaching on a Last Judgment according to one's charity is a teaching on karma. Christianity also teaches morals such as one reaps what one sows (Galatians 6:7) and live by the sword, die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). Most scholars, however, consider the concept of Last Judgment as different from karma, with karma as an ongoing process that occurs every day in one's life, while Last Judgment, by contrast, is a one-time review at the end of life.
There is a concept in Judaism called in Hebrew midah k'neged midah, which is often translated as "measure for measure". The concept is used not so much in matters of law, but rather in matters of divine retribution for a person's actions. David Wolpe compared midah k'neged midah to karma.
Carl Jung once opined on unresolved emotions and the synchronicity of karma;
When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.
Popular methods for negating cognitive dissonance include meditation, metacognition, counselling, psychoanalysis, etc., whose aim is to enhance emotional self-awareness and thus avoid negative karma. This results in better emotional hygiene and reduced karmic impacts. Permanent neuronal changes within the amygdala and left prefrontal cortex of the human brain attributed to long-term meditation and metacognition techniques have been proven scientifically. This process of emotional maturation aspires to a goal of Individuation or self-actualisation. Such peak experiences are hypothetically devoid of any karma (nirvana or moksha).
The idea of karma was popularized in the Western world through the work of the Theosophical Society. In this conception, karma was a precursor to the Neopagan law of return or Threefold Law, the idea that the beneficial or harmful effects one has on the world will return to oneself. Colloquially this may be summed up as 'what goes around comes around.'
Theosophist I. K. Taimni wrote, "Karma is nothing but the Law of Cause and Effect operating in the realm of human life and bringing about adjustments between an individual and other individuals whom he has affected by his thoughts, emotions and actions." Theosophy also teaches that when humans reincarnate they come back as humans only, not as animals or other organisms.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Karma (/ˈkɑːrmə/, from Sanskrit: कर्म, IPA: [ˈkɐɾmɐ] ; Pali: kamma) is a concept of action, work, or deed, and its effect or consequences. In Indian religions, the term more specifically refers to a principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein individual's intent and actions (cause) influence their future (effect): Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths. In some scripture, however, there is no link between rebirths and karma. Karma is often misunderstood as fate, destiny, or predetermination.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The concept of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in many schools of Indian religions (particularly in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism), as well as Taoism. In these schools, karma in the present affects one's future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives—one's saṃsāra. This concept has also been adopted in Western popular culture, in which the events that happen after a person's actions may be considered natural consequences of those actions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The term karma (Sanskrit: कर्म; Pali: kamma) refers to both the executed 'deed, work, action, act' and the 'object, intent'.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Wilhelm Halbfass (2000) explains karma (karman) by contrasting it with the Sanskrit word kriya: whereas kriya is the activity along with the steps and effort in action, karma is (1) the executed action as a consequence of that activity, as well as (2) the intention of the actor behind an executed action or a planned action (described by some scholars as metaphysical residue left in the actor). A good action creates good karma, as does good intent. A bad action creates bad karma, as does bad intent.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Difficulty in arriving at a definition of karma arises because of the diversity of views among the schools of Hinduism; some, for example, consider karma and rebirth linked and simultaneously essential, some consider karma but not rebirth to be essential, and a few discuss and conclude karma and rebirth to be flawed fiction. Buddhism and Jainism have their own karma precepts. Thus, karma has not one, but multiple definitions and different meanings. It is a concept whose meaning, importance, and scope varies between the various traditions that originated in India, and various schools in each of these traditions. Wendy O'Flaherty claims that, furthermore, there is an ongoing debate regarding whether karma is a theory, a model, a paradigm, a metaphor, or a metaphysical stance.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Karma also refers to a conceptual principle that originated in India, often descriptively called the principle of karma, and sometimes the karma-theory or the law of karma.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the context of theory, karma is complex and difficult to define. Different schools of Indology derive different definitions for the concept from ancient Indian texts; their definition is some combination of (1) causality that may be ethical or non-ethical; (2) ethicization, i.e., good or bad actions have consequences; and (3) rebirth. Other Indologists include in the definition that which explains the present circumstances of an individual with reference to his or her actions in the past. These actions may be those in a person's current life, or, in some schools of Indian traditions, possibly actions in their past lives; furthermore, the consequences may result in the current life, or a person's future lives. The law of karma operates independent of any deity or any process of divine judgment.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A common theme to theories of karma is its principle of causality. This relationship between karma and causality is a central motif in all schools of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. One of the earliest association of karma to causality occurs in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad verses 4.4.5–6:",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be; a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad; he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds; And here they say that a person consists of desires, and as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The theory of karma as causation holds that: (1) executed actions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives, and (2) the intentions of an individual affects the individual and the life he or she lives. Disinterested actions, or unintentional actions do not have the same positive or negative karmic effect, as interested and intentional actions. In Buddhism, for example, actions that are performed, or arise, or originate without any bad intent, such as covetousness, are considered non-existent in karmic impact or neutral in influence to the individual.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Another causality characteristic, shared by karmic theories, is that like deeds lead to like effects. Thus, good karma produces good effect on the actor, while bad karma produces bad effect. This effect may be material, moral, or emotional – that is, one's karma affects both one's happiness and unhappiness. The effect of karma need not be immediate; the effect of karma can be later in one's current life, and in some schools it extends to future lives.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The consequence or effects of one's karma can be described in two forms: phala and samskara. A phala (lit. 'fruit' or 'result') is the visible or invisible effect that is typically immediate or within the current life. In contrast, a samskara (Sanskrit: संस्कार) is an invisible effect, produced inside the actor because of the karma, transforming the agent and affecting his or her ability to be happy or unhappy in their current and future lives. The theory of karma is often presented in the context of samskaras.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Karl Potter and Harold Coward suggest that karmic principle can also be understood as a principle of psychology and habit. Karma seeds habits (vāsanā), and habits create the nature of man. Karma also seeds self perception, and perception influences how one experiences life-events. Both habits and self perception affect the course of one's life. Breaking bad habits is not easy: it requires conscious karmic effort. Thus, psyche and habit, according to Potter and Coward, link karma to causality in ancient Indian literature. The idea of karma may be compared to the notion of a person's 'character', as both are an assessment of the person and determined by that person's habitual thinking and acting.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The second theme common to karma theories is ethicization. This begins with the premise that every action has a consequence, which will come to fruition in either this life or a future life; thus, morally good acts will have positive consequences, whereas bad acts will produce negative results. An individual's present situation is thereby explained by reference to actions in his present or in previous lifetimes. Karma is not itself 'reward and punishment', but the law that produces consequence. Wilhelm Halbfass notes that good karma is considered as dharma and leads to punya ('merit'), while bad karma is considered adharma and leads to pāp ('demerit, sin').",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Reichenbach (1988) suggests that the theories of karma are an ethical theory. This is so because the ancient scholars of India linked intent and actual action to the merit, reward, demerit, and punishment. A theory without ethical premise would be a pure causal relation; the merit or reward or demerit or punishment would be same regardless of the actor's intention. In ethics, one's intentions, attitudes, and desires matter in the evaluation of one's action. Where the outcome is unintended, the moral responsibility for it is less on the actor, even though causal responsibility may be the same regardless. A karma theory considers not only the action, but also the actor's intentions, attitude, and desires before and during the action. The karma concept thus encourages each person to seek and live a moral life, as well as avoid an immoral life. The meaning and significance of karma is thus as a building-block of an ethical theory.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The third common theme of karma theories is the concept of reincarnation or the cycle of rebirths (saṃsāra). Rebirth is a fundamental concept of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. Rebirth, or saṃsāra, is the concept that all life forms go through a cycle of reincarnation, that is, a series of births and rebirths. The rebirths and consequent life may be in different realm, condition, or form. The karma theories suggest that the realm, condition, and form depends on the quality and quantity of karma. In schools that believe in rebirth, every living being's soul transmigrates (recycles) after death, carrying the seeds of Karmic impulses from life just completed, into another life and lifetime of karmas. This cycle continues indefinitely, except for those who consciously break this cycle by reaching moksha. Those who break the cycle reach the realm of gods, those who do not continue in the cycle.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The concept has been intensely debated in ancient literature of India; with different schools of Indian religions considering the relevance of rebirth as either essential, or secondary, or unnecessary fiction. Hiriyanna (1949) suggests rebirth to be a necessary corollary of karma; Yamunacharya (1966) asserts that karma is a fact, while reincarnation is a hypothesis; and Creel (1986) suggests that karma is a basic concept, rebirth is a derivative concept.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The theory of 'karma and rebirth' raises numerous questions – such as how, when, and why did the cycle start in the first place, what is the relative Karmic merit of one karma versus another and why, and what evidence is there that rebirth actually happens, among others. Various schools of Hinduism realized these difficulties, debated their own formulations – some reaching what they considered as internally consistent theories – while other schools modified and de-emphasized it; a few schools in Hinduism such as Charvakas (or Lokayata) abandoned the theory of 'karma and rebirth' altogether. Schools of Buddhism consider karma-rebirth cycle as integral to their theories of soteriology.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Vedic Sanskrit word kárman- (nominative kárma) means 'work' or 'deed', often used in the context of Srauta rituals. In the Rigveda, the word occurs some 40 times. In Satapatha Brahmana 1.7.1.5, sacrifice is declared as the \"greatest\" of works; Satapatha Brahmana 10.1.4.1 associates the potential of becoming immortal (amara) with the karma of the agnicayana sacrifice.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In the early Vedic literature, the concept of karma is also present beyond the realm of rituals or sacrifices. The Vedic language includes terms for sins and vices such as āgas, agha, enas, pāpa/pāpman, duṣkṛta, as well as for virtues and merit like sukṛta and puṇya, along with the neutral term karman.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Whatever good deed man does that is inside the Vedi; and whatever evil he does that is outside the Vedi.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The verse refers to the evaluation of virtuous and sinful actions in the afterlife. Regardless of their application in rituals (whether within or outside the Vedi), the concepts of good and evil here broadly represent merits and sins.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "What evil is done here by man, that it (i.e. speech = Brahman) makes manifest. Although he thinks that he does it secretly, as it were, still it makes it manifest. Verily, therefore one should not commit evil.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "This is the eternal greatness of the Brahmin. He does not increase by kárman, nor does he become less. His ātman knows the path. Knowing him (the ātman) one is not polluted by evil karman.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Vedic words for \"action\" and \"merit\" in pre-Upaniṣadic texts carry moral significance and are not solely linked to ritual practices. The word karman simply means \"action,\" which can be either positive or negative, and is not always associated with religious ceremonies; its predominant association with ritual in the Brāhmaṇa texts is likely a reflection of their ritualistic nature. In the same vein, sukṛta (and subsequently, puṇya) denotes any form of \"merit,\" whether it be ethical or ritualistic. In contrast, terms such as pāpa and duṣkṛta consistently represent morally wrong actions.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The earliest clear discussion of the karma doctrine is in the Upanishads. The doctrine occurs here in the context of a discussion of the fate of the individual after death. For example, causality and ethicization is stated in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 3.2.13:",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Truly, one becomes good through good deeds, and evil through evil deeds.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Some authors state that the samsara (transmigration) and karma doctrine may be non-Vedic, and the ideas may have developed in the \"shramana\" traditions that preceded Buddhism and Jainism. Others state that some of the complex ideas of the ancient emerging theory of karma flowed from Vedic thinkers to Buddhist and Jain thinkers. The mutual influences between the traditions is unclear, and likely co-developed.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Many philosophical debates surrounding the concept are shared by the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions, and the early developments in each tradition incorporated different novel ideas. For example, Buddhists allowed karma transfer from one person to another and sraddha rites, but had difficulty defending the rationale. In contrast, Hindu schools and Jainism would not allow the possibility of karma transfer.",
"title": "Early development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The concept of karma in Hinduism developed and evolved over centuries. The earliest Upanishads began with the questions about how and why man is born, and what happens after death. As answers to the latter, the early theories in these ancient Sanskrit documents include pancagni vidya (the five fire doctrine), pitryana (the cyclic path of fathers), and devayana (the cycle-transcending, path of the gods). Those who do superficial rituals and seek material gain, claimed these ancient scholars, travel the way of their fathers and recycle back into another life; those who renounce these, go into the forest and pursue spiritual knowledge, were claimed to climb into the higher path of the gods. It is these who break the cycle and are not reborn. With the composition of the Epics – the common man's introduction to dharma in Hinduism – the ideas of causality and essential elements of the theory of karma were being recited in folk stories. For example:",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As a man himself sows, so he himself reaps; no man inherits the good or evil act of another man. The fruit is of the same quality as the action.",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The 6th chapter of the Anushasana Parva (the Teaching Book), the 13th book of the Mahabharata, opens with Yudhishthira asking Bhishma: \"Is the course of a person's life already destined, or can human effort shape one's life?\" The future, replies Bhishma, is both a function of current human effort derived from free will and past human actions that set the circumstances. Over and over again, the chapters of Mahabharata recite the key postulates of karma theory. That is: intent and action (karma) has consequences; karma lingers and doesn't disappear; and, all positive or negative experiences in life require effort and intent. For example:",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Happiness comes due to good actions, suffering results from evil actions, by actions, all things are obtained, by inaction, nothing whatsoever is enjoyed. If one's action bore no fruit, then everything would be of no avail, if the world worked from fate alone, it would be neutralized.",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Over time, various schools of Hinduism developed many different definitions of karma, some making karma appear quite deterministic, while others make room for free will and moral agency. Among the six most studied schools of Hinduism, the theory of karma evolved in different ways, as their respective scholars reasoned and attempted to address the internal inconsistencies, implications and issues of the karma doctrine. According to Professor Wilhelm Halbfass,",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The above schools illustrate the diversity of views, but are not exhaustive. Each school has sub-schools in Hinduism, such as that of non-dualism and dualism under Vedanta. Furthermore, there are other schools of Indian philosophy such as Charvaka (or Lokayata; the materialists) who denied the theory of karma-rebirth as well as the existence of God; to this non-Vedic school, the properties of things come from the nature of things. Causality emerges from the interaction, actions and nature of things and people, determinative principles such as karma or God are unnecessary.",
"title": "In Hinduism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Karma and karmaphala are fundamental concepts in Buddhism, which explain how our intentional actions keep us tied to rebirth in samsara, whereas the Buddhist path, as exemplified in the Noble Eightfold Path, shows us the way out of samsara.",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The cycle of rebirth is determined by karma, literally 'action'. Karmaphala (wherein phala means 'fruit, result') refers to the 'effect' or 'result' of karma. The similar term karmavipaka (wherein vipāka means 'ripening') refers to the 'maturation, ripening' of karma.",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In the Buddhist tradition, karma refers to actions driven by intention (cetanā), a deed done deliberately through body, speech or mind, which leads to future consequences. The Nibbedhika Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya 6.63:",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Intention (cetana) I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "How these intentional actions lead to rebirth, and how the idea of rebirth is to be reconciled with the doctrines of impermanence and no-self, is a matter of philosophical inquiry in the Buddhist traditions, for which several solutions have been proposed. In early Buddhism no explicit theory of rebirth and karma is worked out, and \"the karma doctrine may have been incidental to early Buddhist soteriology.\" In early Buddhism, rebirth is ascribed to craving or ignorance. Unlike that of Jains, Buddha's teaching of karma is not strictly deterministic, but incorporated circumstantial factors such as other Niyamas. It is not a rigid and mechanical process, but a flexible, fluid and dynamic process. There is no set linear relationship between a particular action and its results. The karmic effect of a deed is not determined solely by the deed itself, but also by the nature of the person who commits the deed, and by the circumstances in which it is committed. Karmaphala is not a \"judgement\" enforced by a God, Deity or other supernatural being that controls the affairs of the Cosmos. Rather, karmaphala is the outcome of a natural process of cause and effect. Within Buddhism, the real importance of the doctrine of karma and its fruits lies in the recognition of the urgency to put a stop to the whole process. The Acintita Sutta warns that \"the results of kamma\" is one of the four incomprehensible subjects (or acinteyya), subjects that are beyond all conceptualization, and cannot be understood with logical thought or reason.",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Nichiren Buddhism teaches that transformation and change through faith and practice changes adverse karma—negative causes made in the past that result in negative results in the present and future—to positive causes for benefits in the future.",
"title": "In Buddhism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In Jainism, karma conveys a totally different meaning from that commonly understood in Hindu philosophy and western civilization. Jain philosophy is one of the oldest Indian philosophy that completely separates body (matter) from the soul (pure consciousness). In Jainism, karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle particles of matter that pervade the entire universe. Karmas are attracted to the karmic field of a soul due to vibrations created by activities of mind, speech, and body as well as various mental dispositions. Hence the karmas are the subtle matter surrounding the consciousness of a soul. When these two components (consciousness and karma) interact, we experience the life we know at present. Jain texts expound that seven tattvas (truths or fundamentals) constitute reality. These are:",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "According to Padmanabh Jaini,",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "This emphasis on reaping the fruits only of one's own karma was not restricted to the Jainas; both Hindus and Buddhist writers have produced doctrinal materials stressing the same point. Each of the latter traditions, however, developed practices in basic contradiction to such belief. In addition to shrardha (the ritual Hindu offerings by the son of deceased), we find among Hindus widespread adherence to the notion of divine intervention in ones fate, while Buddhists eventually came to propound such theories like boon-granting bodhisattvas, transfer of merit and like. Only Jainas have been absolutely unwilling to allow such ideas to penetrate their community, despite the fact that there must have been tremendous amount of social pressure on them to do so.",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The relationship between the soul and karma, states Padmanabh Jaini, can be explained with the analogy of gold. Like gold is always found mixed with impurities in its original state, Jainism holds that the soul is not pure at its origin but is always impure and defiled like natural gold. One can exert effort and purify gold, similarly, Jainism states that the defiled soul can be purified by proper refining methodology. Karma either defiles the soul further, or refines it to a cleaner state, and this affects future rebirths. Karma is thus an efficient cause (nimitta) in Jain philosophy, but not the material cause (upadana). The soul is believed to be the material cause.",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The key points where the theory of karma in Jainism can be stated as follows:",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "There are eight types of Karma which attach a soul to Samsar (the cycle of birth and death):",
"title": "In Jainism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In Sikhism, all living beings are described as being under the influence of the three qualities of maya. Always present together in varying mix and degrees, these three qualities of maya bind the soul to the body and to the earth plane. Above these three qualities is the eternal time. Due to the influence of three modes of maya's nature, jivas (individual beings) perform activities under the control and purview of the eternal time. These activities are called karma, wherein the underlying principle is that karma is the law that brings back the results of actions to the person performing them.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "This life is likened to a field in which our karma is the seed. We harvest exactly what we sow; no less, no more. This infallible law of karma holds everyone responsible for what the person is or is going to be. Based on the total sum of past karma, some feel close to the Pure Being in this life and others feel separated. This is the law of karma in Gurbani (Sri Guru Granth Sahib). Like other Indian and oriental schools of thought, the Gurbani also accepts the doctrines of karma and reincarnation as the facts of nature.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "David Ownby, a scholar of Chinese history at the University of Montreal, asserts that Falun Gong differs from Buddhism in its definition of the term \"karma\" in that it is taken not as a process of award and punishment, but as an exclusively negative term. The Chinese term de, or 'virtue', is reserved for what might otherwise be termed 'good karma' in Buddhism. Karma is understood as the source of all suffering – what Buddhism might refer to as 'bad karma'. According to Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong: \"A person has done bad things over his many lifetimes, and for people this results in misfortune, or for cultivators its karmic obstacles, so there's birth, aging, sickness, and death. This is ordinary karma.\"",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Falun Gong teaches that the spirit is locked in the cycle of rebirth, also known as samsara, due to the accumulation of karma. This is a negative, black substance that accumulates in other dimensions lifetime after lifetime, by doing bad deeds and thinking bad thoughts. Falun Gong states that karma is the reason for suffering, and what ultimately blocks people from the truth of the universe and attaining enlightenment. At the same time, karma is also the cause of one's continued rebirth and suffering. Li says that due to accumulation of karma the human spirit upon death will reincarnate over and over again, until the karma is paid off or eliminated through cultivation, or the person is destroyed due to the bad deeds he has done.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Ownby regards the concept of karma as a cornerstone to individual moral behaviour in Falun Gong, and also readily traceable to the Christian doctrine of \"one reaps what one sows\". Others say Matthew 5:44 means no unbeliever will not fully reap what they sow until they are judged by God after death in Hell. Ownby says Falun Gong is differentiated by a \"system of transmigration\", although, \"in which each organism is the reincarnation of a previous life form, its current form having been determined by karmic calculation of the moral qualities of the previous lives lived.\" Ownby says the seeming unfairness of manifest inequities can then be explained, at the same time allowing a space for moral behaviour in spite of them. In the same vein of Li's monism, matter and spirit are one, karma is identified as a black substance which must be purged in the process of cultivation.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "According to Li,",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Human beings all fell here from the many dimensions of the universe. They no longer met the requirements of the Fa at their given levels in the universe, and thus had to drop down. Just as we have said before, the heavier one's mortal attachments, the further down one drops, with the descent continuing until one arrives at the state of ordinary human beings.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "He says that, in the eyes of higher beings, the purpose of human life is not merely to be human, but to awaken quickly on Earth, a \"setting of delusion,\" and return. \"That is what they really have in mind; they are opening a door for you. Those who fail to return will have no choice but to reincarnate, with this continuing until they amass a huge amount of karma and are destroyed.\"",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Ownby regards this as the basis for Falun Gong's apparent \"opposition to practitioners' taking medicine when ill; they are missing an opportunity to work off karma by allowing an illness to run its course (suffering depletes karma) or to fight the illness through cultivation.\" Benjamin Penny shares this interpretation. Since Li believes that \"karma is the primary factor that causes sickness in people,\" Penny asks: \"if disease comes from karma and karma can be eradicated through cultivation of xinxing, then what good will medicine do?\" Li himself states that he is not forbidding practitioners from taking medicine, maintaining that \"What I'm doing is telling people the relationship between practicing cultivation and medicine-taking.\" Li also states that \"An everyday person needs to take medicine when he gets sick.\" Danny Schechter (2001) quotes a Falun Gong student who says \"It is always an individual choice whether one should take medicine or not.\"",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Karma is an important concept in Taoism. Every deed is tracked by deities and spirits. Appropriate rewards or retribution follow karma, just like a shadow follows a person.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The karma doctrine of Taoism developed in three stages. In the first stage, causality between actions and consequences was adopted, with supernatural beings keeping track of everyone's karma and assigning fate (ming). In the second phase, transferability of karma ideas from Chinese Buddhism were expanded, and a transfer or inheritance of Karmic fate from ancestors to one's current life was introduced. In the third stage of karma doctrine development, ideas of rebirth based on karma were added. One could be reborn either as another human being or another animal, according to this belief. In the third stage, additional ideas were introduced; for example, rituals, repentance and offerings at Taoist temples were encouraged as it could alleviate Karmic burden.",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Interpreted as musubi, a view of karma is recognized in Shinto as a means of enriching, empowering and life affirming. It is the spirit of birth and becoming. Birth, accomplishment, combination. The creating and harmonizing powers. The working of musubi has fundamental significance in Shinto, because creative development forms the basis of the Shinto world view",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Many deities are connected to musubi and have it in their names",
"title": "Reception in other traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "One of the significant controversies with the karma doctrine is whether it always implies destiny, and its implications on free will. This controversy is also referred to as the moral agency problem; the controversy is not unique to karma doctrine, but also found in some form in monotheistic religions.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "The free will controversy can be outlined in three parts:",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The explanations and replies to the above free will problem vary by the specific school of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The schools of Hinduism, such as Yoga and Advaita Vedanta, that have emphasized current life over the dynamics of karma residue moving across past lives, allow free will. Their argument, as well of other schools, are threefold:",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Other schools of Hinduism, as well as Buddhism and Jainism that do consider cycle of rebirths central to their beliefs and that karma from past lives affects one's present, believe that both free will (cetanā) and karma can co-exist; however, their answers have not persuaded all scholars.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Another issue with the theory of karma is that it is psychologically indeterminate, suggests Obeyesekere (1968). That is, if no one can know what their karma was in previous lives, and if the karma from past lives can determine one's future, then the individual is psychologically unclear what if anything he or she can do now to shape the future, be more happy, or reduce suffering. If something goes wrong, such as sickness or failure at work, the individual is unclear if karma from past lives was the cause, or the sickness was caused by curable infection and the failure was caused by something correctable.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "This psychological indeterminacy problem is also not unique to the theory of karma; it is found in every religion adopting the premise that God has a plan, or in some way influences human events. As with the karma-and-free-will problem above, schools that insist on primacy of rebirths face the most controversy. Their answers to the psychological indeterminacy issue are the same as those for addressing the free will problem.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Some schools of Asian religions, particularly popular Buddhism, allow transfer of karma merit and demerit from one person to another. This transfer is an exchange of non-physical quality just like an exchange of physical goods between two human beings. The practice of karma transfer, or even its possibility, is controversial. Karma transfer raises questions similar to those with substitutionary atonement and vicarious punishment. It defeats the ethical foundations, and dissociates the causality and ethicization in the theory of karma from the moral agent. Proponents of some Buddhist schools suggest that the concept of karma merit transfer encourages religious giving, and such transfers are not a mechanism to transfer bad karma (i.e., demerit) from one person to another.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "In Hinduism, Sraddha rites during funerals have been labelled as karma merit transfer ceremonies by a few scholars, a claim disputed by others. Other schools in Hinduism, such as the Yoga and Advaita Vedantic philosophies, and Jainism hold that karma can not be transferred.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "There has been an ongoing debate about karma theory and how it answers the problem of evil and related problem of theodicy. The problem of evil is a significant question debated in monotheistic religions with two beliefs:",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The problem of evil is then stated in formulations such as, \"why does the omnibenevolent, omniscient and omnipotent God allow any evil and suffering to exist in the world?\" Sociologist Max Weber extended the problem of evil to Eastern traditions.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The problem of evil, in the context of karma, has been long discussed in Eastern traditions, both in theistic and non-theistic schools; for example, in Uttara Mīmāṃsā Sutras Book 2 Chapter 1; the 8th century arguments by Adi Sankara in Brahma Sutra bhasya where he posits that God cannot reasonably be the cause of the world because there exists moral evil, inequality, cruelty and suffering in the world; and the 11th century theodicy discussion by Ramanuja in Sri Bhasya. Epics such as the Mahabharata, for example, suggests three prevailing theories in ancient India as to why good and evil exists – one being that everything is ordained by God, another being karma, and a third citing chance events (yadrccha, यदृच्छा). The Mahabharata, which includes Hindu deity Vishnu in the form of Krishna as one of the central characters in the Epic, debates the nature and existence of suffering from these three perspectives, and includes a theory of suffering as arising from an interplay of chance events (such as floods and other events of nature), circumstances created by past human actions, and the current desires, volitions, dharma, adharma and current actions (purusakara) of people. However, while karma theory in the Mahabharata presents alternative perspectives on the problem of evil and suffering, it offers no conclusive answer.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Other scholars suggest that nontheistic Indian religious traditions do not assume an omnibenevolent creator, and some theistic schools do not define or characterize their God(s) as monotheistic Western religions do and the deities have colorful, complex personalities; the Indian deities are personal and cosmic facilitators, and in some schools conceptualized like Plato's Demiurge. Therefore, the problem of theodicy in many schools of major Indian religions is not significant, or at least is of a different nature than in Western religions. Many Indian religions place greater emphasis on developing the karma principle for first cause and innate justice with Man as focus, rather than developing religious principles with the nature and powers of God and divine judgment as focus. Some scholars, particularly of the Nyaya school of Hinduism and Sankara in Brahma Sutra bhasya, have posited that karma doctrine implies existence of god, who administers and affects the person's environment given that person's karma, but then acknowledge that it makes karma as violable, contingent and unable to address the problem of evil. Arthur Herman states that karma-transmigration theory solves all three historical formulations to the problem of evil while acknowledging the theodicy insights of Sankara and Ramanuja.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Some theistic Indian religions, such as Sikhism, suggest evil and suffering are a human phenomenon and arises from the karma of individuals. In other theistic schools such as those in Hinduism, particularly its Nyaya school, karma is combined with dharma and evil is explained as arising from human actions and intent that is in conflict with dharma. In nontheistic religions such as Buddhism, Jainism and the Mimamsa school of Hinduism, karma theory is used to explain the cause of evil as well as to offer distinct ways to avoid or be unaffected by evil in the world.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Those schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism that rely on karma-rebirth theory have been critiqued for their theological explanation of suffering in children by birth, as the result of his or her sins in a past life. Others disagree, and consider the critique as flawed and a misunderstanding of the karma theory.",
"title": "Discussion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Western culture, influenced by Christianity, holds a notion similar to karma, as demonstrated in the phrase \"what goes around comes around\".",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Mary Jo Meadow suggests karma is akin to \"Christian notions of sin and its effects.\" She states that the Christian teaching on a Last Judgment according to one's charity is a teaching on karma. Christianity also teaches morals such as one reaps what one sows (Galatians 6:7) and live by the sword, die by the sword (Matthew 26:52). Most scholars, however, consider the concept of Last Judgment as different from karma, with karma as an ongoing process that occurs every day in one's life, while Last Judgment, by contrast, is a one-time review at the end of life.",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "There is a concept in Judaism called in Hebrew midah k'neged midah, which is often translated as \"measure for measure\". The concept is used not so much in matters of law, but rather in matters of divine retribution for a person's actions. David Wolpe compared midah k'neged midah to karma.",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Carl Jung once opined on unresolved emotions and the synchronicity of karma;",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Popular methods for negating cognitive dissonance include meditation, metacognition, counselling, psychoanalysis, etc., whose aim is to enhance emotional self-awareness and thus avoid negative karma. This results in better emotional hygiene and reduced karmic impacts. Permanent neuronal changes within the amygdala and left prefrontal cortex of the human brain attributed to long-term meditation and metacognition techniques have been proven scientifically. This process of emotional maturation aspires to a goal of Individuation or self-actualisation. Such peak experiences are hypothetically devoid of any karma (nirvana or moksha).",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The idea of karma was popularized in the Western world through the work of the Theosophical Society. In this conception, karma was a precursor to the Neopagan law of return or Threefold Law, the idea that the beneficial or harmful effects one has on the world will return to oneself. Colloquially this may be summed up as 'what goes around comes around.'",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Theosophist I. K. Taimni wrote, \"Karma is nothing but the Law of Cause and Effect operating in the realm of human life and bringing about adjustments between an individual and other individuals whom he has affected by his thoughts, emotions and actions.\" Theosophy also teaches that when humans reincarnate they come back as humans only, not as animals or other organisms.",
"title": "Comparable concepts"
}
] |
Karma is a concept of action, work, or deed, and its effect or consequences. In Indian religions, the term more specifically refers to a principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called the principle of karma, wherein individual's intent and actions (cause) influence their future (effect): Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and happier rebirths, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and bad rebirths. In some scripture, however, there is no link between rebirths and karma. Karma is often misunderstood as fate, destiny, or predetermination. The concept of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in many schools of Indian religions, as well as Taoism. In these schools, karma in the present affects one's future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives—one's saṃsāra. This concept has also been adopted in Western popular culture, in which the events that happen after a person's actions may be considered natural consequences of those actions.
|
2001-10-21T00:14:28Z
|
2023-12-31T12:54:19Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma
|
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Knights Templar
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The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, mainly known as the Knights Templar, was a military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded c. 1119, headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.
Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church by such decrees as the papal bull Omne datum optimum of Pope Innocent II, the Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. The Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. They were prominent in Christian finance; non-combatant members of the order, who made up as much as 90% of their members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building a network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming one of the world's earliest multinational corporations.
The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades. As they became unable to secure their holdings in the Holy Land, support for the order faded. Rumours about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement V to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the medieval European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the "Templar" name alive into the present day.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici) are also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple, and mainly the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars.
The Temple Mount where they had their headquarters had a mystique because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple, and from this location, the new order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or "Templar" knights.
After the Franks in the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate in 1099 AD, many Christians made pilgrimages to various sacred sites in the Holy Land. Although the city of Jerusalem was relatively secure under Christian control, the rest of Outremer was not. Bandits and marauding highwaymen preyed upon these Christian pilgrims, who were routinely slaughtered, sometimes by the hundreds, as they attempted to make the journey from the coastline at Jaffa through to the interior of the Holy Land.
In 1119, the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a Catholic monastic religious order for the protection of these pilgrims. King Baldwin and Patriarch Warmund agreed to the request, probably at the Council of Nablus in January 1120, and the king granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The order, with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the order's poverty.
The impoverished status of the Templars did not last long. They had a powerful advocate in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a leading Church figure, the French abbot primarily responsible for the founding of the Cistercian Order of monks and a nephew of André de Montbard, one of the founding knights. Bernard put his weight behind them and wrote persuasively on their behalf in the letter "In Praise of the New Knighthood", and in 1129, at the Council of Troyes, he led a group of leading churchmen to officially approve and endorse the order on behalf of the church. With this formal blessing, the Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom, receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. At the Council of Pisa in 1135, Pope Innocent II initiated the first papal monetary donation to the Order. Another major benefit came in 1139, when Innocent II's papal bull Omne Datum Optimum exempted the order from obedience to local laws. This ruling meant that the Templars could pass freely through all borders, were not required to pay any taxes and were exempt from all authority except that of the pope.
With its clear mission and ample resources, the order grew rapidly. Templars were often the advance shock troops in key battles of the Crusades, as the heavily armoured knights on their warhorses would set out to charge at the enemy, ahead of the main army bodies, in an attempt to break opposition lines. One of their most famous victories was in 1177 during the Battle of Montgisard, where some 500 Templar knights helped several thousand infantry to defeat Saladin's army of more than 26,000 soldiers.
"A Templar Knight is truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith, just as his body is protected by the armour of steel. He is thus doubly armed, and need fear neither demons nor men."
Although the primary mission of the order was militaristic, relatively few members were combatants. The majority acted in support positions to assist the knights and manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers.
Based on this mix of donations and business dealing, the Templars established financial networks across the whole of Christendom. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.
From the mid-12th century on, the Templars were forced (jointly with the Knights Hospitaller) to actively involve themselves in anti-Muslim military activities in the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to this time, human resources were exclusively dedicated towards the extraction of resources to send to the Latin East. In the kingdoms of Castile and León, they obtained some major strongholds (such as Calatrava la Vieja or Coria), but the fragility of their positions along the border was exposed upon Almohad offensive. In Aragon, the Templars seized the possessions of the Order of Mountjoy in the late 12th century, becoming an important vanguard force in the border, while in Portugal they were charged with operating some castles along the Tagus line. One of these was Tomar, which was unsuccessfully sieged by the Almohad Caliphate in 1190.
Due to the economic drain caused by sending a third of their revenues to the East, Templar and Hospitaller activities in the Iberian Peninsula were nonetheless at a disadvantage with respect to the Hispanic military orders, which were able to entirely devote their resources to the region.
In the mid-12th century, the tide began to turn in the Crusades. The Islamic world had become more united under effective leaders such as Saladin, and the reborn Sunni regime in Egypt. Dissension arose among Christian factions in and concerning the Holy Land. The Knights Templar were occasionally at odds with the two other Christian military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, and decades of internecine feuds weakened Christian positions, both politically and militarily. After the Templars were involved in several unsuccessful campaigns, including the pivotal Battle of Hattin, Jerusalem was recaptured by Muslim forces under Saladin in 1187. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II reclaimed the city for Christians in the Sixth Crusade of 1229, without Templar aid, but only held it for a little more than a decade. In 1244, the Ayyubid dynasty together with Khwarezmi mercenaries recaptured Jerusalem, and the city did not return to Western control until 1917 when, during World War I, the British captured it from the Ottoman Empire.
The Templars were forced to relocate their headquarters to other cities in the north, such as the seaport of Acre, which they held for the next century. It was lost in 1291, followed by their last mainland strongholds, Tortosa (Tartus in present-day Syria) and Atlit (in present-day Israel). Their headquarters then moved to Limassol on the island of Cyprus, and they also attempted to maintain a garrison on tiny Arwad Island, just off the coast from Tortosa. In 1300, there was some attempt to engage in coordinated military efforts with the Mongols via a new invasion force at Arwad. In 1302 or 1303, however, the Templars lost the island to the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate in the siege of Arwad. With the island gone, the Crusaders lost their last foothold in the Holy Land.
With the order's military mission now less important, support for the organization began to dwindle. The situation was complex, however, since during the two hundred years of their existence, the Templars had become a part of daily life throughout Christendom. The organisation's Templar Houses, hundreds of which were dotted throughout Europe and the Near East, gave them a widespread presence at the local level. The Templars still managed many businesses, and many Europeans had daily contact with the Templar network, such as by working at a Templar farm or vineyard, or using the order as a bank in which to store personal valuables. The order was still not subject to local government, making it everywhere a "state within a state" – its standing army, although it no longer had a well-defined mission, could pass freely through all borders. This situation heightened tensions with some European nobility, especially as the Templars were indicating an interest in founding their own monastic state, just as the Teutonic Knights had done in Prussia and the Baltic and the Knights Hospitaller were doing in Rhodes.
In 1305, the new Pope Clement V, based in Avignon, France, sent letters to both the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Hospitaller Grand Master Fulk de Villaret to discuss the possibility of merging the two orders. Neither was amenable to the idea, but Pope Clement persisted, and in 1306 he invited both Grand Masters to France to discuss the matter. De Molay arrived first in early 1307, but de Villaret was delayed for several months. While waiting, De Molay and Clement discussed criminal charges that had been made two years earlier by an ousted Templar and were being discussed by King Philip IV of France and his ministers. It was generally agreed that the charges were false, but Clement sent King Philip a written request for assistance in the investigation. According to some historians, Philip, who was already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war against England, decided to seize upon the rumours for his own purposes. He began pressuring the church to take action against the order, as a way of freeing himself from his debts.
At dawn on Friday, 13 October 1307 – a date, that helped influence the superstition, but not necessarily the origin, of the popular stories about Friday the 13th – King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the words: "Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume" ("God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom").
Claims were made that during Templar admissions ceremonies, recruits were forced to spit on the Cross, deny Christ, and engage in indecent kissing; brethren were also accused of worshipping idols, and the order was said to have encouraged homosexual practices. Many of these allegations contain tropes that bear similarities to accusations made against other persecuted groups such as Jews, heretics, and accused witches. These allegations, though, were highly politicised without any real evidence. Still, the Templars were charged with numerous other offences such as financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture (even though the Templars denied being tortured in their written confessions), and their confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. The prisoners were coerced to confess that they had spat on the Cross. One said: "Moi, Raymond de La Fère, 21 ans, reconnais que [j'ai] craché trois fois sur la Croix, mais de bouche et pas de cœur" ("I, Raymond de La Fère, 21 years old, admit that I have spat three times on the Cross, but only from my mouth and not from my heart"). The Templars were accused of idolatry and were charged with worshipping either a figure known as Baphomet or a mummified severed head they recovered, amongst other artefacts, at their original headquarters on the Temple Mount. Some have theorized that this head might have been believed to be that of John the Baptist, among other things.
Relenting to King Phillip's demands, Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae on 22 November 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars' guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors' torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310, having appointed the archbishop of Sens, Philippe de Marigny, to lead the investigation, Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris.
With Philip threatening military action unless the pope complied with his wishes, Clement finally agreed to disband the order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers.
As for the leaders of the order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession. Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, also retracted his confession and insisted on his innocence. Both men, under pressure from the king, were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics and sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. His actual words were recorded on the parchment as follows: "Dieu sait qui a tort et a péché. Il va bientôt arriver malheur à ceux qui nous ont condamnés à mort" ("God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death"). Clement died only a month later, and Philip died while hunting within the same year.
The remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other Catholic military orders, or pensioned off and allowed to live out their days peacefully. By papal decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller except in the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. Portugal was the first country in Europe where they had settled, occurring only two or three years after the order's foundation in Jerusalem and even having a presence during Portugal's conception.
The Portuguese king, Denis I, refused to pursue and persecute the former knights, as had occurred in some other states under the influence of Philip & the crown. Under his protection, Templar organizations simply changed their name, from "Knights Templar" to the reconstituted Order of Christ and also a parallel Supreme Order of Christ of the Holy See; both are considered successors to the Knights Templar.
In September 2001, a document known as the Chinon Parchment dated 17–20 August 1308 was discovered in the Vatican Archives by Barbara Frale, apparently after having been filed in the wrong place in 1628. It is a record of the trial of the Templars and shows that Clement absolved the Templars of all heresies in 1308 before formally disbanding the order in 1312, as did another Chinon Parchment dated 20 August 1308 addressed to Philip IV of France, also mentioning that all Templars that had confessed to heresy were "restored to the Sacraments and to the unity of the Church". This other Chinon Parchment has been well known to historians, having been published by Étienne Baluze in 1693 and by Pierre Dupuy in 1751.
The current position of the Roman Catholic Church is that the medieval persecution of the Knights Templar was unjust, that nothing was inherently wrong with the order or its rule, and that Pope Clement was pressed into his actions by the magnitude of the public scandal and by the dominating influence of King Philip IV, who was Clement's relative.
The Templars were organized as a monastic order similar to Bernard's Cistercian Order, which was considered the first effective international organization in Europe. The organizational structure had a strong chain of authority. Each country with a major Templar presence (France, Poitou, Anjou, Jerusalem, England, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Tripoli, Antioch, Hungary, and Croatia) had a Master of the Order for the Templars in that region.
All of them were subject to the Grand Master, appointed for life, who oversaw both the order's military efforts in the East and their financial holdings in the West. The Grand Master exercised his authority via the visitors-general of the order, who were knights specially appointed by the Grand Master and convent of Jerusalem to visit the different provinces, correct malpractices, introduce new regulations, and resolve important disputes. The visitors-general had the power to remove knights from office and to suspend the Master of the province concerned.
No precise numbers exist, but it is estimated that at the order's peak, there were between 15,000 and 20,000 Templars, of whom about a tenth were actual knights.
There was a threefold division of the ranks of the Templars: the noble knights, the non-noble sergeants, and the chaplains. The Templars did not perform knighting ceremonies, so any knight wishing to become a Knight Templar had to be a knight already. They were the most visible branch of the order, and wore the famous white mantles to symbolize their purity and chastity. They were equipped as heavy cavalry, with three or four horses and one or two squires. Squires were generally not members of the order but were instead outsiders who were hired for a set period of time. Beneath the knights in the order and drawn from non-noble families were the sergeants. They brought vital skills and trades from blacksmiths and builders, including administration of many of the order's European properties. In the Crusader States, they fought alongside the knights as light cavalry with a single horse. Several of the order's most senior positions were reserved for sergeants, including the post of Commander of the Vault of Acre, who was the de facto Admiral of the Templar fleet. The sergeants wore black or brown. From 1139, chaplains constituted a third Templar class. They were ordained priests who cared for the Templars' spiritual needs. All three classes of brothers wore the order's red cross.
Starting with founder Hugues de Payens, the order's highest office was that of Grand Master, a position which was held for life, though considering the martial nature of the order, this could mean a very short tenure. All but two of the Grand Masters died in office, and several died during military campaigns. For example, during the Siege of Ascalon in 1153, Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay led a group of 40 Templars through a breach in the city walls. When the rest of the Crusader army did not follow, the Templars, including their Grand Master, were surrounded and beheaded. Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort was beheaded by Saladin in 1189 at the Siege of Acre.
The Grand Master oversaw all of the operations of the order, including both the military operations in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe and the Templars' financial and business dealings in Western Europe. Some Grand Masters also served as battlefield commanders, though this was not always wise: several blunders in de Ridefort's combat leadership contributed to the devastating defeat at the Battle of Hattin. The last Grand Master was Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 by order of King Philip IV.
Bernard de Clairvaux and founder Hugues de Payens devised a specific code of conduct for the Templar Order, known to modern historians as the Latin Rule. Its 72 clauses laid down the details of the knights' way of life, including the types of garments they were to wear and how many horses they could have. Knights were to take their meals in silence, eat meat no more than three times per week, and not have physical contact of any kind with women, even members of their own family. A Master of the Order was assigned "4 horses, and one chaplain-brother and one clerk with three horses, and one sergeant brother with two horses, and one gentleman valet to carry his shield and lance, with one horse". As the order grew, more guidelines were added, and the original list of 72 clauses was expanded to several hundred in its final form.
The knights wore a white surcoat with a red cross, and a white mantle also with a red cross; the sergeants wore a black tunic with a red cross on the front and a black or brown mantle. The white mantle was assigned to the Templars at the Council of Troyes in 1129, and the cross was most probably added to their robes at the launch of the Second Crusade in 1147, when Pope Eugenius III, King Louis VII of France, and many other notables attended a meeting of the French Templars at their headquarters near Paris. Under the Rule, the knights were to wear the white mantle at all times: they were even forbidden to eat or drink unless wearing it.
The red cross that the Templars wore on their robes was a symbol of martyrdom, and to die in combat was considered a great honour that assured a place in heaven. There was a cardinal rule that the warriors of the order should never surrender unless the Templar flag had fallen, and even then they were first to try to regroup with another of the Christian orders, such as that of the Hospitallers. Only after all flags had fallen were they allowed to leave the battlefield. This uncompromising principle, along with their reputation for courage, excellent training, and heavy armament, made the Templars one of the most feared combat forces in medieval times.
Although not prescribed by the Templar Rule, it later became customary for members of the order to wear long and prominent beards. In about 1240, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines described the Templars as an "order of bearded brethren"; while during the interrogations by the papal commissioners in Paris in 1310–1311, out of nearly 230 knights and brothers questioned, 76 are described as wearing a beard, in some cases specified as being "in the style of the Templars", and 133 are said to have shaved off their beards, either in renunciation of the order or because they had hoped to escape detection.
Initiation, known as Reception (receptio) into the order, was a profound commitment and involved a solemn ceremony. Outsiders were discouraged from attending the ceremony, which aroused the suspicions of medieval inquisitors during the later trials. New members had to willingly sign over all of their wealth and goods to the order and take vows of poverty, chastity, piety, and obedience. Most brothers joined for life, although some were allowed to join for a set period. Sometimes a married man was allowed to join if he had his wife's permission, but he was not allowed to wear the white mantle.
With their military mission and extensive financial resources, the Knights Templar funded a large number of building projects around Europe and the Holy Land. Many of these structures are still standing. Many sites also maintain the name "Temple" because of centuries-old association with the Templars. For example, some of the Templars' lands in London were later rented to lawyers, which led to the names of the Temple Bar gateway and the Temple Underground station. Two of the four Inns of Court which may call members to act as barristers are the Inner Temple and Middle Temple – the entire area known as Temple, London.
Distinctive architectural elements of Templar buildings include the use of the image of "two knights on a single horse", representing the Knights' poverty, and round buildings designed to resemble the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The Knights Templar were dismantled in the Rolls of the Catholic Church in 1309. Following the suppression of the Order, a number of Knights Templar joined the newly established Order of Christ, which effectively reabsorbed the Knights Templar and its properties in AD 1319, especially in Portugal. The story of the persecution and sudden dissolution of the secretive yet powerful medieval Templars has drawn many other groups to use alleged connections with them as a way of enhancing their own image and mystery. Apart from the Order of Christ, there is no clear historical connection between the Knights Templar and any other modern organization, the earliest of which emerged publicly in the 18th century.
Following the dissolution of the Knights Templar, the Order of Christ was erected in 1319 and absorbed many of the Knights Templar into its ranks, along with Knights Templar properties in Portugal. Its headquarters became a castle in Tomar, a former Knights Templar castle.
The Military Order of Christ consider themselves the successors of the former Knights Templar. After the Templars were abolished on 22 March 1312, the Order of Christ was founded in 1319 under the protection of the Portuguese king Denis, who refused to persecute the former knights. Denis revived the Templars of Tomar as the Order of Christ, grateful for their aid during the Reconquista and in the reconstruction of Portugal after the wars. Denis negotiated with Clement's successor John XXII for recognition of the new order and its right to inherit Templar assets and property. This was granted in the papal bull Ad ea ex quibus of 14 March 1319.
Many temperance organizations named themselves after the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, citing the belief that the original Knights Templar "drank sour milk, and also because they were fighting 'a great crusade' against 'this terrible vice' of alcohol". The largest of these, the International Order of Good Templars (IOGT), grew throughout the world after being started in the 19th century and continues to advocate for the abstinence from alcohol and other drugs; other Orders in this tradition include those of the Templars of Honor and Temperance (Tempel Riddare Orden), which has a large presence in Scandinavia.
The Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (French: Ordre Souverain et Militaire du Temple de Jérusalem, OSMTJ; Latin: Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani, OSMTH) is a self-styled order which was publicly disclosed in 1804 and "accredited as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) by the UN in 2001". It is ecumenical in that it admits Christians of many denominations in its ranks. Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, a Johannite, who refused to acknowledge the authority of the Catholic Church, created the OSMTJ (modern-day schisms has led to SMOTJ). Fabré-Palaprat made himself the Grand Master of the Templars and Sovereign Pontiff of his own church. He produced the Larmenius Charter in 1804 with a claim of succession to the original Templar Order, however, there are doubts to this claim.
On the other hand Templari Cattolici d'Italia traces their roots back to the Italian Templars that separated from the French Templars that followed Fabré-Palaprat. The Italian Templars continued their allegiance to Catholicism. On March 1, 1815, the Grand Priory of Italy proclaimed its independence from Fabré-Palaprat and his French Templars under the claims of the French Priory's deviation from Templar tradition. From 1816 to 1866, the Italian Temple found itself under the struggles for Italian independence in the war between the Piedmonts and the Austrians in 1848-49. In 1867, after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian Temple, taking into account a new era, established its tradition amid a different world. However, there were internal qualms within the Italian Temple, as certain figures like Gastone Ventura, left the Catholic Church, and converted to Martinism.
Freemasonry has incorporated the symbols and rituals of several medieval military orders in a number of Masonic bodies since at least the 18th century. This can be seen in the "Red Cross of Constantine," inspired by the Military Constantinian Order; the "Order of Malta," inspired by the Knights Hospitaller; and the "Order of the Temple", inspired by the Knights Templar. The Orders of Malta and the Temple feature prominently in the York Rite. One theory on the origin of Freemasonry claims direct descent from the historical Knights Templar through its final fourteenth-century members who were thought to have taken refuge in Scotland and aided Robert the Bruce in his victory at Bannockburn. This theory is usually rejected both by Masonic authorities and historians due to lack of evidence in regards to the connections.
The Knights Templar have been associated with legends circulated even during their time. Masonic writers added their own speculations in the 18th century, and further fictional embellishments have been added in popular novels such as Ivanhoe, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Da Vinci Code; modern movies such as National Treasure, The Last Templar, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; the television series Knightfall; as well as video games such as Broken Sword, Deus Ex, Assassin's Creed and Dante's Inferno.
There have been speculative popular publications surrounding the order's early occupation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as well as speculation about what relics the Templars may have found there. The association of the Holy Grail with the Templars has precedents even in 12th-century fiction; Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival calls the knights guarding the Grail Kingdom templeisen, apparently a conscious fictionalisation of the templarii.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, mainly known as the Knights Templar, was a military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded c. 1119, headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church by such decrees as the papal bull Omne datum optimum of Pope Innocent II, the Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. The Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. They were prominent in Christian finance; non-combatant members of the order, who made up as much as 90% of their members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building a network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming one of the world's earliest multinational corporations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades. As they became unable to secure their holdings in the Holy Land, support for the order faded. Rumours about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement V to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the medieval European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the \"Templar\" name alive into the present day.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici) are also known as the Order of Solomon's Temple, and mainly the Knights Templar, or simply the Templars.",
"title": "Names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Temple Mount where they had their headquarters had a mystique because it was above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The Crusaders therefore referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon's Temple, and from this location, the new order took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or \"Templar\" knights.",
"title": "Names"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "After the Franks in the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate in 1099 AD, many Christians made pilgrimages to various sacred sites in the Holy Land. Although the city of Jerusalem was relatively secure under Christian control, the rest of Outremer was not. Bandits and marauding highwaymen preyed upon these Christian pilgrims, who were routinely slaughtered, sometimes by the hundreds, as they attempted to make the journey from the coastline at Jaffa through to the interior of the Holy Land.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1119, the French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and proposed creating a Catholic monastic religious order for the protection of these pilgrims. King Baldwin and Patriarch Warmund agreed to the request, probably at the Council of Nablus in January 1120, and the king granted the Templars a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The order, with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard, had few financial resources and relied on donations to survive. Their emblem was of two knights riding on a single horse, emphasizing the order's poverty.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The impoverished status of the Templars did not last long. They had a powerful advocate in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a leading Church figure, the French abbot primarily responsible for the founding of the Cistercian Order of monks and a nephew of André de Montbard, one of the founding knights. Bernard put his weight behind them and wrote persuasively on their behalf in the letter \"In Praise of the New Knighthood\", and in 1129, at the Council of Troyes, he led a group of leading churchmen to officially approve and endorse the order on behalf of the church. With this formal blessing, the Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom, receiving money, land, businesses, and noble-born sons from families who were eager to help with the fight in the Holy Land. At the Council of Pisa in 1135, Pope Innocent II initiated the first papal monetary donation to the Order. Another major benefit came in 1139, when Innocent II's papal bull Omne Datum Optimum exempted the order from obedience to local laws. This ruling meant that the Templars could pass freely through all borders, were not required to pay any taxes and were exempt from all authority except that of the pope.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "With its clear mission and ample resources, the order grew rapidly. Templars were often the advance shock troops in key battles of the Crusades, as the heavily armoured knights on their warhorses would set out to charge at the enemy, ahead of the main army bodies, in an attempt to break opposition lines. One of their most famous victories was in 1177 during the Battle of Montgisard, where some 500 Templar knights helped several thousand infantry to defeat Saladin's army of more than 26,000 soldiers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "\"A Templar Knight is truly a fearless knight, and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armour of faith, just as his body is protected by the armour of steel. He is thus doubly armed, and need fear neither demons nor men.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Although the primary mission of the order was militaristic, relatively few members were combatants. The majority acted in support positions to assist the knights and manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Based on this mix of donations and business dealing, the Templars established financial networks across the whole of Christendom. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "From the mid-12th century on, the Templars were forced (jointly with the Knights Hospitaller) to actively involve themselves in anti-Muslim military activities in the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to this time, human resources were exclusively dedicated towards the extraction of resources to send to the Latin East. In the kingdoms of Castile and León, they obtained some major strongholds (such as Calatrava la Vieja or Coria), but the fragility of their positions along the border was exposed upon Almohad offensive. In Aragon, the Templars seized the possessions of the Order of Mountjoy in the late 12th century, becoming an important vanguard force in the border, while in Portugal they were charged with operating some castles along the Tagus line. One of these was Tomar, which was unsuccessfully sieged by the Almohad Caliphate in 1190.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Due to the economic drain caused by sending a third of their revenues to the East, Templar and Hospitaller activities in the Iberian Peninsula were nonetheless at a disadvantage with respect to the Hispanic military orders, which were able to entirely devote their resources to the region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the mid-12th century, the tide began to turn in the Crusades. The Islamic world had become more united under effective leaders such as Saladin, and the reborn Sunni regime in Egypt. Dissension arose among Christian factions in and concerning the Holy Land. The Knights Templar were occasionally at odds with the two other Christian military orders, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, and decades of internecine feuds weakened Christian positions, both politically and militarily. After the Templars were involved in several unsuccessful campaigns, including the pivotal Battle of Hattin, Jerusalem was recaptured by Muslim forces under Saladin in 1187. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II reclaimed the city for Christians in the Sixth Crusade of 1229, without Templar aid, but only held it for a little more than a decade. In 1244, the Ayyubid dynasty together with Khwarezmi mercenaries recaptured Jerusalem, and the city did not return to Western control until 1917 when, during World War I, the British captured it from the Ottoman Empire.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The Templars were forced to relocate their headquarters to other cities in the north, such as the seaport of Acre, which they held for the next century. It was lost in 1291, followed by their last mainland strongholds, Tortosa (Tartus in present-day Syria) and Atlit (in present-day Israel). Their headquarters then moved to Limassol on the island of Cyprus, and they also attempted to maintain a garrison on tiny Arwad Island, just off the coast from Tortosa. In 1300, there was some attempt to engage in coordinated military efforts with the Mongols via a new invasion force at Arwad. In 1302 or 1303, however, the Templars lost the island to the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate in the siege of Arwad. With the island gone, the Crusaders lost their last foothold in the Holy Land.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "With the order's military mission now less important, support for the organization began to dwindle. The situation was complex, however, since during the two hundred years of their existence, the Templars had become a part of daily life throughout Christendom. The organisation's Templar Houses, hundreds of which were dotted throughout Europe and the Near East, gave them a widespread presence at the local level. The Templars still managed many businesses, and many Europeans had daily contact with the Templar network, such as by working at a Templar farm or vineyard, or using the order as a bank in which to store personal valuables. The order was still not subject to local government, making it everywhere a \"state within a state\" – its standing army, although it no longer had a well-defined mission, could pass freely through all borders. This situation heightened tensions with some European nobility, especially as the Templars were indicating an interest in founding their own monastic state, just as the Teutonic Knights had done in Prussia and the Baltic and the Knights Hospitaller were doing in Rhodes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 1305, the new Pope Clement V, based in Avignon, France, sent letters to both the Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and the Hospitaller Grand Master Fulk de Villaret to discuss the possibility of merging the two orders. Neither was amenable to the idea, but Pope Clement persisted, and in 1306 he invited both Grand Masters to France to discuss the matter. De Molay arrived first in early 1307, but de Villaret was delayed for several months. While waiting, De Molay and Clement discussed criminal charges that had been made two years earlier by an ousted Templar and were being discussed by King Philip IV of France and his ministers. It was generally agreed that the charges were false, but Clement sent King Philip a written request for assistance in the investigation. According to some historians, Philip, who was already deeply in debt to the Templars from his war against England, decided to seize upon the rumours for his own purposes. He began pressuring the church to take action against the order, as a way of freeing himself from his debts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "At dawn on Friday, 13 October 1307 – a date, that helped influence the superstition, but not necessarily the origin, of the popular stories about Friday the 13th – King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the words: \"Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume\" (\"God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Claims were made that during Templar admissions ceremonies, recruits were forced to spit on the Cross, deny Christ, and engage in indecent kissing; brethren were also accused of worshipping idols, and the order was said to have encouraged homosexual practices. Many of these allegations contain tropes that bear similarities to accusations made against other persecuted groups such as Jews, heretics, and accused witches. These allegations, though, were highly politicised without any real evidence. Still, the Templars were charged with numerous other offences such as financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture (even though the Templars denied being tortured in their written confessions), and their confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. The prisoners were coerced to confess that they had spat on the Cross. One said: \"Moi, Raymond de La Fère, 21 ans, reconnais que [j'ai] craché trois fois sur la Croix, mais de bouche et pas de cœur\" (\"I, Raymond de La Fère, 21 years old, admit that I have spat three times on the Cross, but only from my mouth and not from my heart\"). The Templars were accused of idolatry and were charged with worshipping either a figure known as Baphomet or a mummified severed head they recovered, amongst other artefacts, at their original headquarters on the Temple Mount. Some have theorized that this head might have been believed to be that of John the Baptist, among other things.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Relenting to King Phillip's demands, Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae on 22 November 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets. Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars' guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors' torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310, having appointed the archbishop of Sens, Philippe de Marigny, to lead the investigation, Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "With Philip threatening military action unless the pope complied with his wishes, Clement finally agreed to disband the order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "As for the leaders of the order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his confession. Geoffroi de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, also retracted his confession and insisted on his innocence. Both men, under pressure from the king, were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics and sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on 18 March 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer. According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. His actual words were recorded on the parchment as follows: \"Dieu sait qui a tort et a péché. Il va bientôt arriver malheur à ceux qui nous ont condamnés à mort\" (\"God knows who is wrong and has sinned. Soon a calamity will occur to those who have condemned us to death\"). Clement died only a month later, and Philip died while hunting within the same year.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other Catholic military orders, or pensioned off and allowed to live out their days peacefully. By papal decree, the property of the Templars was transferred to the Knights Hospitaller except in the Kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal. Portugal was the first country in Europe where they had settled, occurring only two or three years after the order's foundation in Jerusalem and even having a presence during Portugal's conception.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Portuguese king, Denis I, refused to pursue and persecute the former knights, as had occurred in some other states under the influence of Philip & the crown. Under his protection, Templar organizations simply changed their name, from \"Knights Templar\" to the reconstituted Order of Christ and also a parallel Supreme Order of Christ of the Holy See; both are considered successors to the Knights Templar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In September 2001, a document known as the Chinon Parchment dated 17–20 August 1308 was discovered in the Vatican Archives by Barbara Frale, apparently after having been filed in the wrong place in 1628. It is a record of the trial of the Templars and shows that Clement absolved the Templars of all heresies in 1308 before formally disbanding the order in 1312, as did another Chinon Parchment dated 20 August 1308 addressed to Philip IV of France, also mentioning that all Templars that had confessed to heresy were \"restored to the Sacraments and to the unity of the Church\". This other Chinon Parchment has been well known to historians, having been published by Étienne Baluze in 1693 and by Pierre Dupuy in 1751.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The current position of the Roman Catholic Church is that the medieval persecution of the Knights Templar was unjust, that nothing was inherently wrong with the order or its rule, and that Pope Clement was pressed into his actions by the magnitude of the public scandal and by the dominating influence of King Philip IV, who was Clement's relative.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Templars were organized as a monastic order similar to Bernard's Cistercian Order, which was considered the first effective international organization in Europe. The organizational structure had a strong chain of authority. Each country with a major Templar presence (France, Poitou, Anjou, Jerusalem, England, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Tripoli, Antioch, Hungary, and Croatia) had a Master of the Order for the Templars in that region.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "All of them were subject to the Grand Master, appointed for life, who oversaw both the order's military efforts in the East and their financial holdings in the West. The Grand Master exercised his authority via the visitors-general of the order, who were knights specially appointed by the Grand Master and convent of Jerusalem to visit the different provinces, correct malpractices, introduce new regulations, and resolve important disputes. The visitors-general had the power to remove knights from office and to suspend the Master of the province concerned.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "No precise numbers exist, but it is estimated that at the order's peak, there were between 15,000 and 20,000 Templars, of whom about a tenth were actual knights.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "There was a threefold division of the ranks of the Templars: the noble knights, the non-noble sergeants, and the chaplains. The Templars did not perform knighting ceremonies, so any knight wishing to become a Knight Templar had to be a knight already. They were the most visible branch of the order, and wore the famous white mantles to symbolize their purity and chastity. They were equipped as heavy cavalry, with three or four horses and one or two squires. Squires were generally not members of the order but were instead outsiders who were hired for a set period of time. Beneath the knights in the order and drawn from non-noble families were the sergeants. They brought vital skills and trades from blacksmiths and builders, including administration of many of the order's European properties. In the Crusader States, they fought alongside the knights as light cavalry with a single horse. Several of the order's most senior positions were reserved for sergeants, including the post of Commander of the Vault of Acre, who was the de facto Admiral of the Templar fleet. The sergeants wore black or brown. From 1139, chaplains constituted a third Templar class. They were ordained priests who cared for the Templars' spiritual needs. All three classes of brothers wore the order's red cross.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Starting with founder Hugues de Payens, the order's highest office was that of Grand Master, a position which was held for life, though considering the martial nature of the order, this could mean a very short tenure. All but two of the Grand Masters died in office, and several died during military campaigns. For example, during the Siege of Ascalon in 1153, Grand Master Bernard de Tremelay led a group of 40 Templars through a breach in the city walls. When the rest of the Crusader army did not follow, the Templars, including their Grand Master, were surrounded and beheaded. Grand Master Gérard de Ridefort was beheaded by Saladin in 1189 at the Siege of Acre.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Grand Master oversaw all of the operations of the order, including both the military operations in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe and the Templars' financial and business dealings in Western Europe. Some Grand Masters also served as battlefield commanders, though this was not always wise: several blunders in de Ridefort's combat leadership contributed to the devastating defeat at the Battle of Hattin. The last Grand Master was Jacques de Molay, burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 by order of King Philip IV.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Bernard de Clairvaux and founder Hugues de Payens devised a specific code of conduct for the Templar Order, known to modern historians as the Latin Rule. Its 72 clauses laid down the details of the knights' way of life, including the types of garments they were to wear and how many horses they could have. Knights were to take their meals in silence, eat meat no more than three times per week, and not have physical contact of any kind with women, even members of their own family. A Master of the Order was assigned \"4 horses, and one chaplain-brother and one clerk with three horses, and one sergeant brother with two horses, and one gentleman valet to carry his shield and lance, with one horse\". As the order grew, more guidelines were added, and the original list of 72 clauses was expanded to several hundred in its final form.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The knights wore a white surcoat with a red cross, and a white mantle also with a red cross; the sergeants wore a black tunic with a red cross on the front and a black or brown mantle. The white mantle was assigned to the Templars at the Council of Troyes in 1129, and the cross was most probably added to their robes at the launch of the Second Crusade in 1147, when Pope Eugenius III, King Louis VII of France, and many other notables attended a meeting of the French Templars at their headquarters near Paris. Under the Rule, the knights were to wear the white mantle at all times: they were even forbidden to eat or drink unless wearing it.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The red cross that the Templars wore on their robes was a symbol of martyrdom, and to die in combat was considered a great honour that assured a place in heaven. There was a cardinal rule that the warriors of the order should never surrender unless the Templar flag had fallen, and even then they were first to try to regroup with another of the Christian orders, such as that of the Hospitallers. Only after all flags had fallen were they allowed to leave the battlefield. This uncompromising principle, along with their reputation for courage, excellent training, and heavy armament, made the Templars one of the most feared combat forces in medieval times.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Although not prescribed by the Templar Rule, it later became customary for members of the order to wear long and prominent beards. In about 1240, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines described the Templars as an \"order of bearded brethren\"; while during the interrogations by the papal commissioners in Paris in 1310–1311, out of nearly 230 knights and brothers questioned, 76 are described as wearing a beard, in some cases specified as being \"in the style of the Templars\", and 133 are said to have shaved off their beards, either in renunciation of the order or because they had hoped to escape detection.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Initiation, known as Reception (receptio) into the order, was a profound commitment and involved a solemn ceremony. Outsiders were discouraged from attending the ceremony, which aroused the suspicions of medieval inquisitors during the later trials. New members had to willingly sign over all of their wealth and goods to the order and take vows of poverty, chastity, piety, and obedience. Most brothers joined for life, although some were allowed to join for a set period. Sometimes a married man was allowed to join if he had his wife's permission, but he was not allowed to wear the white mantle.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "With their military mission and extensive financial resources, the Knights Templar funded a large number of building projects around Europe and the Holy Land. Many of these structures are still standing. Many sites also maintain the name \"Temple\" because of centuries-old association with the Templars. For example, some of the Templars' lands in London were later rented to lawyers, which led to the names of the Temple Bar gateway and the Temple Underground station. Two of the four Inns of Court which may call members to act as barristers are the Inner Temple and Middle Temple – the entire area known as Temple, London.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Distinctive architectural elements of Templar buildings include the use of the image of \"two knights on a single horse\", representing the Knights' poverty, and round buildings designed to resemble the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The Knights Templar were dismantled in the Rolls of the Catholic Church in 1309. Following the suppression of the Order, a number of Knights Templar joined the newly established Order of Christ, which effectively reabsorbed the Knights Templar and its properties in AD 1319, especially in Portugal. The story of the persecution and sudden dissolution of the secretive yet powerful medieval Templars has drawn many other groups to use alleged connections with them as a way of enhancing their own image and mystery. Apart from the Order of Christ, there is no clear historical connection between the Knights Templar and any other modern organization, the earliest of which emerged publicly in the 18th century.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Following the dissolution of the Knights Templar, the Order of Christ was erected in 1319 and absorbed many of the Knights Templar into its ranks, along with Knights Templar properties in Portugal. Its headquarters became a castle in Tomar, a former Knights Templar castle.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Military Order of Christ consider themselves the successors of the former Knights Templar. After the Templars were abolished on 22 March 1312, the Order of Christ was founded in 1319 under the protection of the Portuguese king Denis, who refused to persecute the former knights. Denis revived the Templars of Tomar as the Order of Christ, grateful for their aid during the Reconquista and in the reconstruction of Portugal after the wars. Denis negotiated with Clement's successor John XXII for recognition of the new order and its right to inherit Templar assets and property. This was granted in the papal bull Ad ea ex quibus of 14 March 1319.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Many temperance organizations named themselves after the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, citing the belief that the original Knights Templar \"drank sour milk, and also because they were fighting 'a great crusade' against 'this terrible vice' of alcohol\". The largest of these, the International Order of Good Templars (IOGT), grew throughout the world after being started in the 19th century and continues to advocate for the abstinence from alcohol and other drugs; other Orders in this tradition include those of the Templars of Honor and Temperance (Tempel Riddare Orden), which has a large presence in Scandinavia.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (French: Ordre Souverain et Militaire du Temple de Jérusalem, OSMTJ; Latin: Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani, OSMTH) is a self-styled order which was publicly disclosed in 1804 and \"accredited as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) by the UN in 2001\". It is ecumenical in that it admits Christians of many denominations in its ranks. Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, a Johannite, who refused to acknowledge the authority of the Catholic Church, created the OSMTJ (modern-day schisms has led to SMOTJ). Fabré-Palaprat made himself the Grand Master of the Templars and Sovereign Pontiff of his own church. He produced the Larmenius Charter in 1804 with a claim of succession to the original Templar Order, however, there are doubts to this claim.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On the other hand Templari Cattolici d'Italia traces their roots back to the Italian Templars that separated from the French Templars that followed Fabré-Palaprat. The Italian Templars continued their allegiance to Catholicism. On March 1, 1815, the Grand Priory of Italy proclaimed its independence from Fabré-Palaprat and his French Templars under the claims of the French Priory's deviation from Templar tradition. From 1816 to 1866, the Italian Temple found itself under the struggles for Italian independence in the war between the Piedmonts and the Austrians in 1848-49. In 1867, after the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy, the Italian Temple, taking into account a new era, established its tradition amid a different world. However, there were internal qualms within the Italian Temple, as certain figures like Gastone Ventura, left the Catholic Church, and converted to Martinism.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Freemasonry has incorporated the symbols and rituals of several medieval military orders in a number of Masonic bodies since at least the 18th century. This can be seen in the \"Red Cross of Constantine,\" inspired by the Military Constantinian Order; the \"Order of Malta,\" inspired by the Knights Hospitaller; and the \"Order of the Temple\", inspired by the Knights Templar. The Orders of Malta and the Temple feature prominently in the York Rite. One theory on the origin of Freemasonry claims direct descent from the historical Knights Templar through its final fourteenth-century members who were thought to have taken refuge in Scotland and aided Robert the Bruce in his victory at Bannockburn. This theory is usually rejected both by Masonic authorities and historians due to lack of evidence in regards to the connections.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Knights Templar have been associated with legends circulated even during their time. Masonic writers added their own speculations in the 18th century, and further fictional embellishments have been added in popular novels such as Ivanhoe, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Da Vinci Code; modern movies such as National Treasure, The Last Templar, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; the television series Knightfall; as well as video games such as Broken Sword, Deus Ex, Assassin's Creed and Dante's Inferno.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "There have been speculative popular publications surrounding the order's early occupation of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as well as speculation about what relics the Templars may have found there. The association of the Holy Grail with the Templars has precedents even in 12th-century fiction; Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival calls the knights guarding the Grail Kingdom templeisen, apparently a conscious fictionalisation of the templarii.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
] |
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, mainly known as the Knights Templar, was a military order of the Catholic faith, and one of the wealthiest and most popular military orders in Western Christianity. They were founded c. 1119, headquartered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and existed for nearly two centuries during the Middle Ages. Officially endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church by such decrees as the papal bull Omne datum optimum of Pope Innocent II, the Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. The Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. They were prominent in Christian finance; non-combatant members of the order, who made up as much as 90% of their members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building a network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming one of the world's earliest multinational corporations. The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades. As they became unable to secure their holdings in the Holy Land, support for the order faded. Rumours about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France, while being deeply in debt to the order, used this distrust to take advantage of the situation. In 1307, he pressured Pope Clement V to have many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and then burned at the stake. Under further pressure, Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. The abrupt disappearance of a major part of the medieval European infrastructure gave rise to speculation and legends, which have kept the "Templar" name alive into the present day.
|
2001-09-28T04:40:28Z
|
2023-12-30T17:38:14Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar
|
16,871 |
Kazaa
|
Kazaa Media Desktop (/kəˈzɑː/ ka-ZAH). (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012.
Kazaa Media Desktop was commonly used to exchange MP3 music files and other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents over the Internet. The Kazaa Media Desktop client could be downloaded free of charge; however, it was bundled with adware and for a period there were "No spyware" warnings found on Kazaa's website. During the years of Kazaa's operation, Sharman Networks and its business partners and associates were the target of copyright-related lawsuits, related to the content distributed via Kazaa Media Desktop on the FastTrack protocol.
By August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active.
Kazaa and FastTrack were originally created and developed by Estonian programmers from BlueMoon Interactive including Jaan Tallinn and sold to Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Danish programmer Janus Friis (who were later to create Skype and later still Joost and Rdio). Kazaa was introduced by the Dutch company Consumer Empowerment in March 2001, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks typified by the shutdown of Napster in July 2001. Skype itself was based on Kazaa's P2P backend, which allowed users to make a call by directly connecting them with each other.
Initially, some users of the Kazaa network were users of the Morpheus client program, formerly made available by MusicCity. Eventually, the official Kazaa client became more widespread. In February 2002, when Morpheus developers failed to pay license fees, Kazaa developers used an automatic update ability to shut out Morpheus clients by changing the protocol. Morpheus later became a client of the gnutella network.
Consumer Empowerment was sued in the Netherlands in 2001 by the Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra. The court ordered Kazaa's owners to take steps to prevent its users from violating copyrights or else pay a heavy fine. In October 2001 a lawsuit was filed against Consumer Empowerment by members of the music and motion picture industry in the USA. In response Consumer Empowerment sold the Kazaa application to Sharman Networks, headquartered in Australia and incorporated in Vanuatu. In late March 2002, a Dutch court of appeal reversed an earlier judgment and stated that Kazaa was not responsible for the actions of its users. Buma/Stemra lost its appeal before the Dutch Supreme Court in December 2003.
In 2003, Kazaa signed a deal with Altnet and Streamwaves to try to convert users to paying, legal customers. Searchers on Kazaa were offered a free 30-second sample of songs for which they were searching and directed to sign up for the full-featured Streamwaves service.
However, Kazaa's new owner, Sharman, was sued in Los Angeles by the major record labels and motion pictures studios and a class of music publishers. The other defendants in that case (Grokster and MusicCity, makers of the Morpheus file-sharing software) initially prevailed against the plaintiffs on summary judgment (Sharman joined the case too late to take advantage of that ruling). The summary judgment ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but was unanimously reversed by the US Supreme Court in a decision titled MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
Following that ruling in favor of the plaintiff labels and studios, Grokster almost immediately settled the case. Shortly thereafter, on 27 July 2006, it was announced that Sharman had also settled with the record industry and motion picture studios. As part of that settlement, the company agreed to pay $100 million in damages to the four major music companies—Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music—and an undisclosed amount to the studios. Sharman also agreed to convert Kazaa into a legal music download service. Like the creators of similar products, Kazaa's owners have been taken to court by music publishing bodies to restrict its use in the sharing of copyrighted material.
While the U.S. action was still pending, the record industry commenced proceedings against Sharman on its home turf. In February 2004, the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) announced its own legal action against Kazaa, alleging massive copyright breaches. The trial began on 29 November 2004. On 6 February 2005, the homes of two Sharman Networks executives and the offices of Sharman Networks in Australia were raided under a court order by ARIA to gather evidence for the trial.
On 5 September 2005, the Federal Court of Australia issued a landmark ruling that Sharman, though not itself guilty of copyright infringement, had "authorized" Kazaa users illegally to swap copyrighted songs. The court ruled six defendants—including Kazaa's owners Sharman Networks, Sharman's Sydney-based boss Nikki Hemming and associate Kevin Bermeister—had knowingly allowed Kazaa users illegally to swap copyrighted songs. The company was ordered to modify the software within two months (a ruling enforceable only in Australia). Sharman and the other five parties faced paying millions of dollars in damages to the record labels that instigated the legal action.
On 5 December 2005, the Federal Court of Australia ceased downloads of Kazaa in Australia after Sharman Networks failed to modify their software by the 5 December deadline. Users with an Australian IP address were greeted with the message "Important Notice: The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted" when visiting the Kazaa website. Sharman planned to appeal against the Australian decision, but ultimately settled the case as part of its global settlement with the record labels and studios in the United States.
In yet another set of related cases, in September 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed suit in civil court against several private individuals who had shared large numbers of files with Kazaa; most of these suits were settled with monetary payments averaging $3,000. Sharman Networks responded with a lawsuit against the RIAA, alleging that the terms of use of the network were violated and that unauthorized client software (such as Kazaa Lite) was used in the investigation to track down the individual file sharers. An effort to throw out this suit was denied in January 2004. However, that suit was also settled in 2006 (see above).
Most recently, in Duluth, Minnesota, the recording industry sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 30-year-old single mother. On 5 October 2007, Thomas was ordered to pay the six record companies (Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.) $9,250 for each of the 24 songs they had focused on in this case. She was accused of sharing a total of 1,702 songs through her Kazaa account. Along with attorney fees, this would have cost Thomas half a million dollars. Thomas testified that she does not have a Kazaa account, but her testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the alleged downloading took place, and later than she originally said in a pre-trial deposition. Thomas-Rasset appealed the verdict and was given a new trial. In June 2009 that jury awarded the recording industry plaintiffs a judgment of $80,000 per song, or $1.92 million. This is less than half of the $150,000 amount authorized by statute. The federal court found the award "monstrous and shocking" and reduced it to $54,000. The recording industry offered to accept a settlement of $25,000, with the money going to charities that support musicians. Apparently undaunted, Thomas-Rasset was able to obtain a third trial on the issue of damages. In November 2010 she was again ordered to pay for her violation, this time $62,500 per song, for a total of $1.5 million. Her attorneys raised a challenge to the constitutional validity of massive statutory damages, where actual damages would have been $24. But this challenge was rejected by the supreme court in 2013. The final judgement against Thomas-Rasset was $222,000.
In 2006 StopBadware.org identified Kazaa as a spyware application. They identified the following components:
In response, "clean" third-party clients such as Kazaa Lite (which also provided slightly extended functionality) gained popularity with Kazaa users. First released in April 2002, by mid-2005 Kazaa Lite was almost as widely used as the official Kazaa client itself. As it connected to the same FastTrack network, it could exchange files with all Kazaa users.
Kazaa's legal issues ended after a settlement of $100 million in reparations to the recording industry. Without further recourse, and until the lawsuit was settled, the RIAA actively sued thousands of people and college campuses across the U.S. for sharing copyrighted music over the network. Particularly, students were targeted and most were threatened with a penalty of $750 per song. Although the lawsuits were mainly in the U.S., other countries also began to follow suit. Beginning in 2008, however, RIAA announced an end to individual lawsuits.
While Napster lasted just three years, Kazaa survived much longer. However, the lawsuits (and a failed venture into a legal, monthly music subscription service similar to Napster) eventually ended the company.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kazaa Media Desktop (/kəˈzɑː/ ka-ZAH). (once stylized as \"KaZaA\", but later usually written \"Kazaa\") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kazaa Media Desktop was commonly used to exchange MP3 music files and other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents over the Internet. The Kazaa Media Desktop client could be downloaded free of charge; however, it was bundled with adware and for a period there were \"No spyware\" warnings found on Kazaa's website. During the years of Kazaa's operation, Sharman Networks and its business partners and associates were the target of copyright-related lawsuits, related to the content distributed via Kazaa Media Desktop on the FastTrack protocol.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "By August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kazaa and FastTrack were originally created and developed by Estonian programmers from BlueMoon Interactive including Jaan Tallinn and sold to Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Danish programmer Janus Friis (who were later to create Skype and later still Joost and Rdio). Kazaa was introduced by the Dutch company Consumer Empowerment in March 2001, near the end of the first generation of P2P networks typified by the shutdown of Napster in July 2001. Skype itself was based on Kazaa's P2P backend, which allowed users to make a call by directly connecting them with each other.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Initially, some users of the Kazaa network were users of the Morpheus client program, formerly made available by MusicCity. Eventually, the official Kazaa client became more widespread. In February 2002, when Morpheus developers failed to pay license fees, Kazaa developers used an automatic update ability to shut out Morpheus clients by changing the protocol. Morpheus later became a client of the gnutella network.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Consumer Empowerment was sued in the Netherlands in 2001 by the Dutch music publishing body, Buma/Stemra. The court ordered Kazaa's owners to take steps to prevent its users from violating copyrights or else pay a heavy fine. In October 2001 a lawsuit was filed against Consumer Empowerment by members of the music and motion picture industry in the USA. In response Consumer Empowerment sold the Kazaa application to Sharman Networks, headquartered in Australia and incorporated in Vanuatu. In late March 2002, a Dutch court of appeal reversed an earlier judgment and stated that Kazaa was not responsible for the actions of its users. Buma/Stemra lost its appeal before the Dutch Supreme Court in December 2003.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2003, Kazaa signed a deal with Altnet and Streamwaves to try to convert users to paying, legal customers. Searchers on Kazaa were offered a free 30-second sample of songs for which they were searching and directed to sign up for the full-featured Streamwaves service.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "However, Kazaa's new owner, Sharman, was sued in Los Angeles by the major record labels and motion pictures studios and a class of music publishers. The other defendants in that case (Grokster and MusicCity, makers of the Morpheus file-sharing software) initially prevailed against the plaintiffs on summary judgment (Sharman joined the case too late to take advantage of that ruling). The summary judgment ruling was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but was unanimously reversed by the US Supreme Court in a decision titled MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Following that ruling in favor of the plaintiff labels and studios, Grokster almost immediately settled the case. Shortly thereafter, on 27 July 2006, it was announced that Sharman had also settled with the record industry and motion picture studios. As part of that settlement, the company agreed to pay $100 million in damages to the four major music companies—Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music—and an undisclosed amount to the studios. Sharman also agreed to convert Kazaa into a legal music download service. Like the creators of similar products, Kazaa's owners have been taken to court by music publishing bodies to restrict its use in the sharing of copyrighted material.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "While the U.S. action was still pending, the record industry commenced proceedings against Sharman on its home turf. In February 2004, the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) announced its own legal action against Kazaa, alleging massive copyright breaches. The trial began on 29 November 2004. On 6 February 2005, the homes of two Sharman Networks executives and the offices of Sharman Networks in Australia were raided under a court order by ARIA to gather evidence for the trial.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 5 September 2005, the Federal Court of Australia issued a landmark ruling that Sharman, though not itself guilty of copyright infringement, had \"authorized\" Kazaa users illegally to swap copyrighted songs. The court ruled six defendants—including Kazaa's owners Sharman Networks, Sharman's Sydney-based boss Nikki Hemming and associate Kevin Bermeister—had knowingly allowed Kazaa users illegally to swap copyrighted songs. The company was ordered to modify the software within two months (a ruling enforceable only in Australia). Sharman and the other five parties faced paying millions of dollars in damages to the record labels that instigated the legal action.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "On 5 December 2005, the Federal Court of Australia ceased downloads of Kazaa in Australia after Sharman Networks failed to modify their software by the 5 December deadline. Users with an Australian IP address were greeted with the message \"Important Notice: The download of the Kazaa Media Desktop by users in Australia is not permitted\" when visiting the Kazaa website. Sharman planned to appeal against the Australian decision, but ultimately settled the case as part of its global settlement with the record labels and studios in the United States.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In yet another set of related cases, in September 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed suit in civil court against several private individuals who had shared large numbers of files with Kazaa; most of these suits were settled with monetary payments averaging $3,000. Sharman Networks responded with a lawsuit against the RIAA, alleging that the terms of use of the network were violated and that unauthorized client software (such as Kazaa Lite) was used in the investigation to track down the individual file sharers. An effort to throw out this suit was denied in January 2004. However, that suit was also settled in 2006 (see above).",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Most recently, in Duluth, Minnesota, the recording industry sued Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a 30-year-old single mother. On 5 October 2007, Thomas was ordered to pay the six record companies (Sony BMG, Arista Records LLC, Interscope Records, UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and Warner Bros. Records Inc.) $9,250 for each of the 24 songs they had focused on in this case. She was accused of sharing a total of 1,702 songs through her Kazaa account. Along with attorney fees, this would have cost Thomas half a million dollars. Thomas testified that she does not have a Kazaa account, but her testimony was complicated by the fact that she had replaced her computer's hard drive after the alleged downloading took place, and later than she originally said in a pre-trial deposition. Thomas-Rasset appealed the verdict and was given a new trial. In June 2009 that jury awarded the recording industry plaintiffs a judgment of $80,000 per song, or $1.92 million. This is less than half of the $150,000 amount authorized by statute. The federal court found the award \"monstrous and shocking\" and reduced it to $54,000. The recording industry offered to accept a settlement of $25,000, with the money going to charities that support musicians. Apparently undaunted, Thomas-Rasset was able to obtain a third trial on the issue of damages. In November 2010 she was again ordered to pay for her violation, this time $62,500 per song, for a total of $1.5 million. Her attorneys raised a challenge to the constitutional validity of massive statutory damages, where actual damages would have been $24. But this challenge was rejected by the supreme court in 2013. The final judgement against Thomas-Rasset was $222,000.",
"title": "Lawsuits"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 2006 StopBadware.org identified Kazaa as a spyware application. They identified the following components:",
"title": "Bundled malware"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In response, \"clean\" third-party clients such as Kazaa Lite (which also provided slightly extended functionality) gained popularity with Kazaa users. First released in April 2002, by mid-2005 Kazaa Lite was almost as widely used as the official Kazaa client itself. As it connected to the same FastTrack network, it could exchange files with all Kazaa users.",
"title": "Bundled malware"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Kazaa's legal issues ended after a settlement of $100 million in reparations to the recording industry. Without further recourse, and until the lawsuit was settled, the RIAA actively sued thousands of people and college campuses across the U.S. for sharing copyrighted music over the network. Particularly, students were targeted and most were threatened with a penalty of $750 per song. Although the lawsuits were mainly in the U.S., other countries also began to follow suit. Beginning in 2008, however, RIAA announced an end to individual lawsuits.",
"title": "Transitional period"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "While Napster lasted just three years, Kazaa survived much longer. However, the lawsuits (and a failed venture into a legal, monthly music subscription service similar to Napster) eventually ended the company.",
"title": "Transitional period"
}
] |
Kazaa Media Desktop. was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequently under license as a legal music subscription service by Atrinsic, Inc., which lasted until August 2012. Kazaa Media Desktop was commonly used to exchange MP3 music files and other file types, such as videos, applications, and documents over the Internet. The Kazaa Media Desktop client could be downloaded free of charge; however, it was bundled with adware and for a period there were "No spyware" warnings found on Kazaa's website. During the years of Kazaa's operation, Sharman Networks and its business partners and associates were the target of copyright-related lawsuits, related to the content distributed via Kazaa Media Desktop on the FastTrack protocol. By August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active.
|
2001-09-28T15:57:59Z
|
2023-12-15T19:06:35Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazaa
|
16,873 |
Kimono
|
The kimono (きもの/着物, lit. 'thing to wear') is a traditional Japanese garment and the national dress of Japan. The kimono is a wrapped-front garment with square sleeves and a rectangular body, and is worn left side wrapped over right, unless the wearer is deceased. The kimono is traditionally worn with a broad sash, called an obi, and is commonly worn with accessories such as zōri sandals and tabi socks.
Kimono have a set method of construction and are typically made from a long, narrow bolt of cloth known as a tanmono, though Western-style fabric bolts are also sometimes used. There are different types of kimono for men, women, and children, varying based on the occasion, the season, the wearer's age, and – less commonly in the modern day – the wearer's marital status. Despite the kimono's reputation as a formal and difficult-to-wear garment, there are types of kimono suitable for both formal and informal occasions. The way a person wears their kimono is known as kitsuke (着付け, lit. 'dressing').
The history of the kimono can be tracked back to the Heian period (794-1185), when Japan's nobility embraced a distinctive style of clothing. Though previously the most common Japanese garment, the kimono in the present day has fallen out of favor and is rarely worn as everyday dress. Kimonos are now most frequently seen at summer festivals, where people frequently wear the yukata, the most informal type of kimono; however, more formal types of kimonos are also worn to funerals, weddings, graduations, and other formal events. Other people who commonly wear kimonos include geisha and maiko, who are required to wear it as part of their profession, and rikishi, or sumo wrestlers, who must wear kimonos at all times in public.
Despite the low number of people who wear kimonos regularly and the garment's reputation as a complicated article of clothing, the kimono has experienced a number of revivals in previous decades, and is still worn today as fashionable clothing in Japan.
The first instances of kimono-like garments in Japan were traditional Chinese clothing introduced to Japan via Chinese envoys in the Kofun period (300–538 CE; the first part of the Yamato period), through immigration between the two countries and envoys to the Tang dynasty court leading to Chinese styles of dress, appearance, and culture becoming extremely popular in Japanese court society. The Imperial Japanese court quickly adopted Chinese styles of dress and clothing, with evidence of the oldest samples of shibori tie-dyed fabric stored at the Shōsōin Temple being of Chinese origin, due to the limitations of Japan's ability to produce the fabrics at the time. As early as the 4th century CE, images of priestess-queens and tribal chiefs in Japan depicted figures wearing clothing similar that of Han dynasty China.
In 718 CE, the Yoro clothing code was instituted, which stipulated that all robes had to be overlapped at the front with a left-to-right closure, following typical Chinese fashions. This convention of wear is still followed today, with a right-to-left closure worn only by the deceased.
Clothing used by the upper classes was significantly simpler to don and wear than dress from the following Heian period. Sleeves, while narrow, were long enough to cover the fingers, since status was associated with covering more of the body.
During the Heian period (794–1193 CE), Japan stopped sending envoys to the Chinese dynastic courts. This prevented Chinese-imported goods—including clothing—from entering the Imperial Palace. This also prevented dissemination to the upper classes, who were the main arbiters of traditional Japanese culture at the time, and the only people allowed to wear such clothing. The ensuing cultural vacuum facilitated the development of a Japanese culture independent from Chinese fashions. Elements previously lifted from the Tang Dynastic courts developed independently into what is known literally as "national culture" or "kokufū culture" (国風文化, kokufū-bunka). The term is used to refer to Heian-period Japanese culture, particularly that of the upper classes.
Women's clothing in the imperial palace became increasingly stylized in the formal jūnihitoe, with some elements being abandoned by both male and female courtiers, such as the round-necked and tube-sleeved chun ju jacket worn by both genders in the early 7th century. Others, such as the wrapped front robes also worn by men and women, were kept. Some elements, such as the mo skirt worn by women, continued to in a reduced capacity, worn only to formal occasions; the mо̄ [ja] (裳) grew too narrow to wrap all the way around and became a trapezoidal pleated train. Hakama (trousers) became longer than the legs and also trailed behind the wearer.
During the later Heian period, various clothing edicts reduced the number of layers a woman could wear, leading to the kosode (lit. 'small sleeve') garment—previously considered underwear—becoming outerwear by the time of the Muromachi period (1336–1573 CE). Originally worn with hakama, the kosode began to be held closed with a small belt known as an obi instead. The kosode resembled a modern kimono, though at this time the sleeves were sewn shut at the back and were smaller in width (shoulder seam to cuff) than the body of the garment. During the Sengoku period (1467–1615) and the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568–1600), the decoration of the kosode developed further, with bolder designs and flashy colours becoming popular. By this time, separate lower-body garments, such as the mō and hakama, were almost never worn, allowing full-length patterns to be seen.
During the Edo period (1603–1867 CE), both Japan's culture and economy developed significantly. A particular factor in the development of the Edo period was the early Genroku period (1688–1704 CE), wherein "Genroku culture" – luxurious displays of wealth and increased patronage of the arts – led to the further development of many art forms, including those of clothing. Genroku culture was led by the growing and increasingly-powerful merchant classes (chōnin), whose clothing was representative of their increasing economic power and rivaled the aristocracy and samurai classes, shown by their brightly-coloured kimono that utilised expensive production techniques, such as hand-painted dyework. Rinzu, a damask fabric, also became the preferred material for kimono at this time, replacing the previously-popular nerinuki plain-weave silk, which had been used to create tsujigahana.
In response to the increasing material wealth of the merchant classes, the Tokugawa shogunate issued a number of sumptuary laws on kimono for the lower classes, prohibiting the use of purple or red fabric, gold embroidery, and the use of intricately dyed shibori patterns. As a result, a school of aesthetic thought known as Iki developed. They valued and prioritised the display of wealth through almost mundande appearance, and the concept of kimono design and wear continues to this day as a major influence.
From this point onwards, the basic shape of both men's and women's kimono remained largely unchanged. The sleeves of the kosode began to grow in length, especially amongst unmarried women, and the obi became much longer and wider, with various styles of knots coming into fashion, alongside stiffer weaves of material to support them.
In the Edo period, the kimono market was divided into craftspeople, who made the tanmono and accessories, tonya, or wholesalers, and retailers.
In 1869, the social class system was abolished, and with them, class-specific sumptuary laws. Kimono with formerly-restricted elements, like red and purple colours, became popular, particularly with the advent of synthetic dyestuffs such as mauvine.
Following the opening of Japan's borders in the early Meiji period to Western trade, a number of materials and techniques – such as wool and the use of synthetic dyestuffs – became popular, with casual wool kimono being relatively common in pre-1960s Japan; the use of safflower dye (beni) for silk linings fabrics (known as momi; literally, "red silk") was also common in pre-1960s Japan, making kimono from this era easily identifiable.
During the Meiji period, the opening of Japan to Western trade after the enclosure of the Edo period led to a drive towards Western dress as a sign of "modernity". After an edict by Emperor Meiji, policemen, railroad workers and teachers moved to wearing Western clothing within their job roles, with the adoption of Western clothing by men in Japan happening at a much greater pace than by women. Initiatives such as the Tokyo Women's & Children's Wear Manufacturers' Association (東京婦人子供服組合) promoted Western dress as everyday clothing.
Western clothing quickly became standard issue as army uniform for men and school uniform for boys, and between 1920 and 1930, the fuku sailor outfit replaced the kimono and undivided hakama as school uniform for girls. However, kimono still remained popular as an item of everyday fashion; following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, cheap, informal and ready-to-wear meisen kimono, woven from raw and waste silk threads unsuitable for other uses, became highly popular, following the loss of many people's possessions. By 1930, ready-to-wear meisen kimono had become highly popular for their bright, seasonally changing designs, many of which took inspiration from the Art Deco movement. Meisen kimono were usually dyed using the ikat (kasuri) technique of dyeing, where either warp or both warp and weft threads (known as heiyō-gasuri) were dyed using a stencil pattern before weaving.
It was during the Taishō period that the modern formalisation of kimono and kimono types began to emerge. The Meiji period had seen the slow introduction of kimono types that mediated between the informal and the most formal, a trend that continued throughout the Taishō period, as social occasions and opportunities for leisure increased under the abolition of class distinctions. As Western clothing increased in popularity for men as everyday clothing, the kimono industry further established its own traditions of formal and informal dress for women; this saw the invention of the hōmongi, divisions of tomesode (short-sleeved) kimono for women, and montsuki hakama. The bridal kimono trousseau (oyomeiri dōgu), an uncommon practice of the upper classes in the Edo period, also became common throughout the middle classes; traditions of kimono bridalwear for marriage ceremonies were also codified in this time, which resembled the bridalwear of samurai-class women. Standards of kitsuke at this time began to slowly graduate to a more formalised, neatened appearance, with a flat, uniform ohashori and a smooth, uncreased obi, which also resembled the "proper" kitsuke of upper-class women. However, kitsuke standards were still relatively informal, and would not become formalised until after World War II.
While kimono were no longer common wear for men, they remained everyday wear for Japanese women until World War II (1940–1945). Though the Taishō period had seen a number of invented traditions, standards of kitsuke (wearing kimono) were still not as formalised in this time, with creases, uneven ohashori and crooked obi still deemed acceptable.
During the war, kimono factories shut down, and the government encouraged people to wear monpe (also romanised as mompe) – trousers constructed from old kimono – instead. Fibres such as rayon became widespread during WWII, being inexpensive to produce and cheap to buy, and typically featured printed designs. Cloth rationing persisted until 1951, so most kimono were made at home from repurposed fabrics.
In the second half of the 20th century, the Japanese economy boomed, and silk became cheaper, making it possible for the average family to afford silk kimono. The kimono retail industry had developed an elaborate codification of rules for kimono-wearing, with types of kimono, levels of formality, and rules on seasonality, which intensified after the war; there had previously been rules about kimono-wearing, but these were not rigidly codified and varied by region and class. Formalisation sought perfection, with no creases or unevenness in the kimono, and an increasingly tubular figure was promoted as the ideal for women in kimono. The kimono-retail industry also promoted a sharp distinction between Japanese and Western clothes; for instance, wearing Western shoes with Japanese clothing (while common in the Taishō period) was codified as improper; these rules on proper dressing are often described in Japanese using the English phrase "Time, Place, and Occasion" (TPO). As neither Japanese men or women commonly wore kimono, having grown up under wartime auspices, commercial kitsuke schools were set up to teach women how to don kimono. Men in this period rarely wore kimono, and menswear thus escaped most of the formalisation.).
Kimono were promoted as essential for ceremonial occasions; for instance, the expensive furisode worn by young women for Seijinshiki was deemed a necessity. Bridal trousseaus containing tens of kimono of every possible subtype were also promoted as de rigueur, and parents felt obliged to provide kimono trousseaus that cost up to 10 million yen (~£70,000), which were displayed and inspected publicly as part of the wedding, including being transported in transparent trucks.
By the 1970s, formal kimono formed the vast majority of kimono sales. Kimono retailers, due to the pricing structure of brand new kimono, had developed a relative monopoly on not only prices but also a perception of kimono knowledge, allowing them to dictate prices and heavily promote more formal (and expensive) purchases, as selling a single formal kimono could support the seller comfortably for three months. The kimono industry peaked in 1975, with total sales of 2.8 trillion yen (~£18 billion). The sale of informal brand new kimono was largely neglected.
The economic collapse of the 1990s bankrupted much of the kimono industry and ended a number of expensive practices. The rules for how to wear kimono lost their previous hold over the entire industry, and formerly-expensive traditions such as bridal kimono trousseaus generally disappeared, and when still given, were much less extensive. It was during this time that it became acceptable and even preferred for women to wear Western dress to ceremonial occasions like weddings and funerals. Many women had dozens or even hundreds of kimono, mostly unworn, in their homes; a secondhand kimono, even if unworn, would sell for about 500 yen (less than £3.50; about US$5), a few percent of the bought-new price. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many secondhand kimono shops opened as a result of this.
In the early years of the 21st century, the cheaper and simpler yukata became popular with young people. Around 2010, men began wearing kimono again in situations other than their own wedding, and kimono were again promoted and worn as everyday dress by a small minority.
Today, the majority of people in Japan wear Western clothing as everyday attire, and are most likely to wear kimono either to formal occasions such as wedding ceremonies and funerals, or to summer events, where the standard kimono is the easy-to-wear, single-layer cotton yukata.
In 2019, the mayor of Kyoto announced that his staff were working to register "Kimono Culture" on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list.
Both kimono and obi are made from a wide variety of fibre types, including hemp, linen, silk, Japanese crêpe (known as chirimen), and figured damask weaves (rinzu). Fabrics are typically – for both obi and kimono – woven as tanmono (bolts of narrow width), save for certain types of obi (such as the maru obi), woven to double-width. Formal kimono are almost always made from silk, with thicker, heavier, stiff or matte fabrics generally being considered informal.
Modern kimono are widely available in fabrics considered easier to care for, such as polyester. Kimono linings are typically silk or imitation silk, and often match the top fabric in fibre type, though the lining of some casual silk kimono may be cotton, wool or linen.
Kimono fabrics are often decorated, sometimes by hand, before construction. Customarily, kimono with woven patterns are considered more informal, though for obi, the reverse is true, with obi featuring dyed patterns being less formal than obi with woven patterns. Though kimono fabrics with woven patterns are typically not especially heavy and can be lightweight, obi fabrics with woven patterns are often very heavy, with many formal obi being made from thickly-woven brocade. Traditionally, woven kimono are paired with obi that are decorated with dyed patterns, and vice versa. However, for all but the most formal kimono, this is more of a general suggestion than a strict rule. Formal kimono are typically decorated with dyed patterns, commonly found along the hemline. These patterns may feature embroidery in parts, couched gold and silver thread, and/or gold and silver foil. The layout of motifs can denote a kimono's age, with patterns that mirror along the vertical back seam (ryōzuma) being typical for kimono made before the 1930s.
Many kimono motifs are seasonal, and denote the season in which the kimono can be worn; however, some motifs have no season and can be worn all-year round. Others, such as the combination of pine, plum and bamboo – a grouping referred to as the Three Friends of Winter – are auspicious, and thus worn to formal occasions for the entire year. Motifs seen on yukata are commonly seasonal motifs worn out of season, either to denote the spring just passed or the desire for cooler autumn or winter temperatures. Colour also contributes to the seasonality of kimono, with some seasons – such as autumn – generally favouring warmer, darker colours over lighter, cooler ones.
A number of different guides on seasonal kimono motifs exist, with some guides – such as those for tea ceremony in particular – being especially stringent on their reflection of the seasons. Motifs typically represent the flora, fauna, landscape or culture of Japan; one such example is cherry blossoms, a famously seasonal motif worn in spring until just before the actual cherry blossoms begin to bloom, it being considered unlucky to try and 'compete' with the cherries. Motifs are typically worn a few weeks before the official 'start' of any given season, as it is considered fashionable to anticipate the coming season.
Though men's kimono historically displayed just as much decoration and variety as women's kimono, in the modern era, the principal distinction of men's kimono in terms of seasonality and occasion is the fabric. The typical men's kimono is a subdued, dark colour; black, dark blues, greens and browns are common. Fabrics are usually matte, in contrast to the occasional satin weaves of some women's kimono. Some men's kimono have a subtle pattern, and textured fabrics are more common in informal men's kimono. Informal men's kimono may also feature slightly brighter colours, such as lighter purples, greens and blues. Sumo wrestlers have occasionally been known to wear quite bright colours, such as fuchsia, in their kimono, which they are required to wear when appearing in public.
The fabrics that kimono are made from are classified in two categories within Japan. Gofuku (呉服) is the term used to indicate silk kimono fabrics, composed of the characters go (呉, meaning "Wu", a kingdom in ancient China where the technology of weaving silk developed) and fuku (服, meaning "clothing").
The term gofuku is also used to refer to kimono in general within Japan, particularly within the context of the kimono industry, as traditional kimono shops are referred to as either gofukuten (呉服店) or gofukuya (呉服屋) – with the additional character of ya (屋) meaning 'shop'.
Cotton and hemp fabrics are referred to generally as futomono (太物), meaning "thick materials", with both cotton and hemp yarns being considerably thicker than silk yarns used for weaving. Cotton kimono are specifically referred to in the context of materials as momenfuku (木綿服), "cotton clothes", whereas hemp kimono are known as asafuku (麻服), "hemp clothes", in Japanese, with the character for hemp – asa (麻) – also being used to refer widely to hemp, linen and ramie kimono fabrics.
Until the end of the Edo period, the tailoring of both gofuku and futomono fabrics was separated, with silk kimono handled at shops known as gofuku dana, and kimono of other fibres sold at shops known as futomono dana. Stores that handled all types of fabric were known as gofuku futomono dana, though after the Meiji period, stores only retailing futomono kimono became less profitable in the face of cheaper everyday Western clothing, and eventually went out of business, leaving only gofuku stores to sell kimono – leading to kimono shops becoming known only as gofukuya today.
Kimono can readily be resized, or unpicked back into tanmono (bolt) lengths.
Outside of being re-woven into new fabrics, worn-out kimono have historically been recycled in a variety of ways, depending on the type of kimono and its original use. When the cloth is worn out, it may be used as fabric for smaller items or to create boroboro (patchwork) kimono (which were also sometimes made for the sake of fashion). The fact that the pattern pieces of a kimono consist of rectangles, and not complex shapes, make reuse in garments or other items easier. Sashiko are used to hold cloth together and decorate it. The cloth used for patchwork clothing must all be of similar weight, drape, and handle.
Formal kimono, made of expensive and thin silk fabrics, would have been re-sewn into children's kimono when they became unusable for adults, as they were typically unsuitable for practical clothing; kimono were shortened, with the okumi taken off and the collar re-sewn to create haori, or were simply cut at the waist to create a side-tying jacket. After marriage or a certain age, young women would shorten the sleeves of their kimono; the excess fabric would be used as a furoshiki (wrapping cloth), could be used to lengthen the kimono at the waist, or could be used to create a patchwork undergarment known as a dōnuki. Kimono that were in better condition could be re-used as an under-kimono, or to create a false underlayer known as a hiyoku.
Children also traditionally wore kataire, kimono made of a fancier material in the okumi and upper back.
Kimono are traditionally made from a single bolt of fabric known as a tanmono, which is roughly 11.5 metres (38 ft) long and 36 centimetres (14 in) wide for women, and 12.5 metres (41 ft) long and 42 centimetres (17 in) wide for men. The entire bolt is used to make one kimono, and some men's tanmono are woven to be long enough to create a matching haori jacket and juban as well. Kimono linings are made from bolts of the same width.
Some custom bolts of fabric are produced for especially tall or heavy people, such as sumo wrestlers, who must have kimono custom-made by either joining multiple bolts, weaving custom-width fabric, or using non-standard size fabric. For children, in the early 1900s, shorter lengths were used, and sometimes the body of the kimono was made only a single cloth width wide (hitotsumi). Tucks were also used to take in the garment; an outwards-facing pleat at each shoulder (kata-nue-age) and a kolpos-like overfold at the hip (koshi-nue-age), so that the child appeared to be wearing a sleeveless vest of the same fabric over their garment. These sewn tucks were let out as the child grew, and are mostly only seen today on the kimono of apprentice geisha in Kyoto, as apprentices previously began their training at a young age, requiring tucks to be let out as they grew. In the present day, apprentices begin their training in their late teenage years, and the tucks are retained merely as an anachronism.
Though adult women also retained a 'tuck' at the hip, this was a leftover from the trailing length of most women's kimono, which had previously been either held up by hand when walking or tied up loosely with a shigoki obi; though kimono were not worn as trailing towards the end of the 19th century, the excess length of most women's kimono remained, with the hip fold formalised and neatened into the ohashori of the modern day.
Kimono have a set method of construction, which allows the entire garment to be taken apart, cleaned and resewn easily. As the seam allowance on nearly every panel features two selvedges that will not fray, the woven edges of the fabric bolt are retained when the kimono is sewn, leading to large and often uneven seam allowances; unlike Western clothing, the seam allowances are not trimmed down, allowing for a kimono to be resewn to different measurements without the fabric fraying at the seams. This was also used to prolong the life of the garment by reversing the sleeves (hiding the worn cuff hem in the shoulder seam) or the back panels (swapping the high-stress center seam and the low-stress sides), like the European custom of side-to-middling or end-to-middling bedsheets.
Historically, kimono were taken apart entirely to be washed – a process known as arai-hari. Once cleaned, the fabric would be resewn by hand; this process, though necessary in previous centuries, is uncommon in modern-day Japan, as it is relatively expensive.
Despite the expense of hand-sewing, however, some modern kimono, including silk kimono and all formal kimono, are still hand-sewn entirely; even machine-sewn kimono require some degree of hand-sewing, particularly in finishing the collar, the hem, and the lining, if present. Hand-sewn kimono are usually sewn with a single running stitch roughly 3 millimetres (0.12 in) to 4 millimetres (0.16 in) long, with stitches growing shorter around the collar area for strength. Kimono seams, instead of being pressed entirely flat, are pressed to have a 'lip' of roughly 2 millimetres (0.079 in) (known as the kise) pressed over each seam. This disguises the stitches, as hand-sewn kimono are not tightly sewn, rendering the stitches visible if pressed entirely flat.
A number of terms are used to refer to the different parts of a kimono. Kimono that are lined are known as awase kimono, whereas unlined kimono are known as hitoe kimono; partially lined kimono – with lining only at the sleeve cuff, the back of the sleeve, the lower chest portion of the dōura and the entirety of the hakkake – are known as dō-bitoe (lit. 'chest-single-layer') kimono. Some fully lined kimono do not have a separate lower and upper lining, and are instead lined with solid panels on the okumi, the maemigoro and the ushiromigoro.
These terms refer to parts of a kimono:
Though the basic shape of the kimono has not changed in centuries, proportions have, historically, varied in different eras of Japanese history. Beginning in the later Heian period, the hitoe – an unlined robe worn as underwear – became the predominant outerwear garment for both men and women, known as the kosode (lit. 'small sleeve'). Court-appropriate dress continued to resemble the previous eras.
By the beginning of the Kamakura period, the kosode was an ankle-length garment for both men and women, and had small, rounded sleeves that were sewn to the body of the garment. The obi was a relatively thin belt tied somewhat low on the waist, usually in a plain bow, and was known as a hoso-obi. During this time period, the fashion of wearing a kosode draped around the shoulders, over the head, or as the outermost garment stripped off the shoulders and held in place by the obi, led to the rise of the uchikake – a heavily decorated over-kimono, stemming from the verb uchikake-ru (lit. 'to drape upon'), worn unbelted over the top of the kosode – becoming popular as formal dress for the upper classes.
In the following centuries, the kosode mostly retained its small, narrow and round-sleeved nature, with the length of women's sleeves gradually increasing over time and eventually becoming mostly detached from the body of the garment below the shoulders. The collar on both men's and women's kosode retained its relatively long and wide proportions, and the okumi front panel kept its long, shallow angle towards the hem. During the Edo period, the kosode had developed roughly modern kimono proportions, though variety existed until roughly the mid- to later years of the era. Men's sleeves continued to be sewn shut to the body of the kimono down most of their length, with no more than a few inches unattached at the bottom, unlike the women's style of very deep sleeves mostly detached from the body of the kimono. Men's sleeves were also less deep than women's kimono sleeves so that they did not get tied under the narrow obi around the hips, whereas on a woman's kimono, the long, unattached bottom of the sleeve could hang over the wider obi without getting in the way. Sleeves for both men and women grew in proportion to be of roughly equal width to the body panels, and the collar for both men's and women's kimono became shorter and narrower.
In the present day, both men's and women's kimono retain some historical features – for instance, women's kimono trailed along the floor throughout certain eras, and when the wearer went outside, the excess length would be tucked and tied underneath the obi in a hip fold known as the ohashori. The ohashori is now used for fine length adjustments, and takes up 7–10 inches (18–25 cm) of excess length. A hand-sewn tuck across the back under the obi is used for coarse adjustments, and made deliberately weak so that the stitches will tear before the cloth does under tension. Men's kimono, on the other hand, are cut to the length of the wearer's body and tied with a narrow belt at the hips, with no extra fabric in the kimono's length for an overfold at the hip.
Formal women's kimono also retain the wider collar of previous eras (made from a full tanmono-width instead of a half width), though it is always folded in half lengthwise before wearing – a style known as hiro-eri (lit. 'wide collar', as opposed to bachi-eri, a normal width collar).
Women's kimono are still worn trailing in some situations, such as onstage, in historical dramas, and by geisha and maiko. In these instances, the kimono worn is constructed differently to a regular women's kimono: the collar is set back further into the neck, the sleeves are sewn to the body unevenly (further down the front than the back), and the body is elongated. This style of kimono is referred to as a susohiki or hikizuri. Though the length of the kimono, collar style and sleeve construction differs for this type of kimono, in all other types of women's kimono, the construction is generally the same; the collar is set back only slightly into the nape of the neck, the sleeves are attached evenly only at the shoulder (not all the way down the sleeve length) and the kimono's length from shoulder to hem is ideally the entire height of the woman wearing it, to allow for the creation of the ohashori.
The sleeve length (dropping down from the arm towards the floor when held outstretched) varies in kimono.
Both men's and women's brand-new kimono can range in expense (in 2023) from around ¥1000 (~$7 USD) to ¥150,000 (~$1050 US)
The high expense of some hand-crafted brand-new kimono reflects the traditional kimono making industry, where the most skilled artisans practice specific, expensive and time-consuming techniques, known to and mastered only by a few. These techniques, such as hand-plied bashofu fabrics and hand-tied kanoko shibori dotwork dyeing, may take over a year to finish. Kimono artisans may be made Living National Treasures in recognition of their work, with the pieces they produce being considered culturally important.
Even kimono that have not been hand-crafted will constitute a relatively high expense when bought new, as even for one outfit, a number of accessories of the right formality and appearance must be bought. Not all brand-new kimono originate from artisans, and mass-production of kimono – mainly of casual or semi-formal kimono – does exist, with mass-produced pieces being mostly cheaper than those purchased through a gofukuya (kimono shop).
Though artisan-made kimono are some of the most accomplished works of textile art on the market, many pieces are not bought solely for appreciation of the craft. Unwritten social obligations to wear kimono to certain events – weddings, funerals – often leads consumers to purchase artisan pieces for reasons other than personal choice, fashion sense or love of kimono:
[Third-generation yūzen dyer Jotaro Saito] believes we are in a strange age where people who know nothing about kimono are the ones who spend a lot of money on a genuine handcrafted kimono for a wedding that is worn once by someone who suffers wearing it, and then is never used again.
The high cost of most brand-new kimono reflects in part the pricing techniques within the industry. Most brand-new kimono are purchased through gofukuya, where kimono are sold as fabric rolls only, the price of which is often left to the shop's discretion. The shop will charge a fee separate to the cost of the fabric for it to be sewn to the customer's measurements, and fees for washing the fabric or weatherproofing it may be added as another separate cost. If the customer is unfamiliar with wearing kimono, they may hire a service to help dress them; the end cost of a new kimono, therefore, remains uncertain until the kimono itself has been finished and worn.
Gofukuya are also regarded as notorious for sales practices seen as unscrupulous and pressuring:
Many [Japanese kimono consumers] feared a tactic known as kakoikomi: being surrounded by staff and essentially pressured into purchasing an expensive kimono [...] Shops are also renowned for lying about the origins of their products and who made them [...] [My kimono dressing (kitsuke) teacher] gave me careful instructions before we entered the [gofukuya]: 'do not touch anything. And even if you don't buy a kimono today, you have to buy something, no matter how small it is.'
In contrast, kimono bought by hobbyists are likely to be less expensive, purchased from second-hand stores with no such sales practices or obligation to buy. Hobbyists may also buy cheaper synthetic kimono (marketed as 'washable') brand-new. Some enthusiasts also make their own kimono; this may be due to difficulty finding kimono of the right size, or simply for personal choice and fashion.
Second-hand items are seen as highly affordable; costs can be as little as ¥100 (about US$0.90) at thrift stores within Japan, and certain historic kimono production areas around the country – such as the Nishijin district of Kyoto – are well known for their second-hand kimono markets. Kimono themselves do not go out of fashion, making even vintage or antique pieces viable for wear, depending on condition.
However, even second-hand women's obi are likely to remain somewhat pricey; a used, well-kept and high-quality second-hand obi can cost upwards of US$300, as they are often intricately woven, or decorated with embroidery, goldwork and may be hand-painted. Men's obi, in contrast, retail much cheaper, as they are narrower, shorter, and have either very little or no decoration, though high-end men's obi can still retail at a high cost equal to that of a high-end women's obi.
Several different types of kimono exist. These varieties are primarily based on formality and gender, with more women's varieties of kimono existing than men's.
The modern kimono canon was roughly formalised after WWII, following fabric shortages, a generation unfamiliar with wearing kimono in everyday life, and the postwar revival of kimono sales by gofukuya, traditional kimono shops. In previous centuries, types of kimono were not as distinct, with factors such as age and social class playing a much larger role in determining kimono types than they do presently. Beginning in the Meiji period, and following the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of class distinctions, kimono varieties began to change as Japanese society did, with new varieties being invented for new social situations.
Kimono range in variation from extremely formal to very casual. For women, the formality is determined mostly by pattern placement, decoration style, fabric choice and colour. For men, whose kimono are generally monochromatic, formality is determined typically by fabric choice and colour. For both men and women, the accessories and obi worn with the kimono also determine formality.
The formality levels of different types of kimono are a relatively modern invention, having been developed between late Meiji- to post-war Japan, following the abolition of Edo-period sumptuary clothing laws in 1868. These laws changed constantly, as did the strictness with which they were enforced, and were designed to keep the nouveau riche merchant classes from dressing above their station, and appearing better-dressed than monetarily-poor but status-rich samurai class.
Under feudal sumptuary laws, colours were restricted by class; for instance, indigo-dyed clothing was allowed for all classes, and was commonly seen in hand-dyed cotton, linen or hemp kasuri fabrics, but other dyes, such as reds and purples, were forbidden to those below a certain class. Sometimes, for some classes, designs were restricted to below the belt, to the bottoms of the sleeves (for furisode) or to along the hem (suso-moyo); sometimes they were banned altogether, and were transferred to the collar of the underkimono, or the inside of the hem, where only the faintest glimpse would be intermittently visible. This type of subtle ostentation became an aesthetic known as iki, and outlasted the sumptuary laws. Modern-day rules of formality, however, still echo clothing distinctions typically employed by the uppermost samurai classes.
Aspects of men's kimono still follow this extreme of iki. Bright, elaborate decoration is used on the lining of the haori (jacket), and on men's juban (underkimono), which is not worn as an outer layer outside the home, and so only shows at the neck and inside the sleeves. Women's juban were once bright and boldly-patterned (and were often kimono too damaged to use as an outer layer, repurposed), but are now typically muted pastel shades. The outside of men's garments tended towards subtle patterns and colours even after the sumptuary laws lifted, with blues and blacks predominating, but designers later came to use browns, greens, purples, and other colours in increasingly bold patterns.
Older people generally wear more subtle patterns, and younger people brighter, bolder ones.
Kimono vary widely in fabric type, and are not all made of silk. Certain types of fabric, such as wool, cotton, linen and hemp, are always considered informal, and so are not seen on more formal varieties of kimono. Certain varieties of silk, such as tsumugi, are considered informal, having once been woven only by silk farmers out of unusable cocoons for their own use; other, more modern varieties, such as meisen, were designed to be used as casual, cheap daywear, and are machine-spun and -woven using brightly-patterned yarns. Some varieties of crêpe are on the lowest end of formal, with their rougher texture considered unsuitable for formal use; other varieties, such as smooth crêpe, are used for all varieties of formal kimono. The most formal kimono are only ever made of smooth, fine silks, such as glossy silk fabrics like habutai.
Some fabrics are also worn only at certain times of year; ro, for instance, is a plain-weave fabric with leno weave stripes only worn in high summer (July and August), but is used for all types of kimono and for other garments, such as under-kimono and obi. Some fabrics – such as certain types of crêpe – are never seen in certain varieties of kimono, and some fabrics such as shusu (heavy satin) silk are barely ever seen in modern kimono or obi altogether, having been more popular in previous eras than in the present-day.
Despite their informal nature, many types of traditional, informal kimono fabrics are highly-prized for their craftsmanship. Varieties of tsumugi, kasuri, and fabrics woven from Musa basjoo are valued for their traditional production, and regularly command high prices.
In the summer months (from June until October in the most stringent kimono guides, such as those for tea ceremony), kimono are unlined (hitoe); for the rest of the year, they are lined (awase). This applies to all types of kimono, with a few caveats: the very informal yukata is always unlined, and thus only worn in summer; the most formal kimono, in contrast, are unlikely to be worn unlined in summer, as many people simply do not have more than one formal kimono to wear, and do not wear formal kimono often enough to warrant the purchase of a new, unlined kimono, just for summer wear. Obi also change fabric type in the summer months.
Within the two realms of lined and unlined, further distinctions exist for different months. Lined kimono are either made from transparent or gauze fabrics (usu-mono) or opaque fabrics, with kimono transitioning towards gauze fabrics at the height of summer and away from them as autumn begins. In one kimono guide for tea ceremony, at the start of the unlined season in June, fabrics such as kawari-chirimen (a type of silk crêpe noted as a more "wrinkle-resistant" form of hitokoshi-chirimen) and komayori ro (a thicker type of ro with twisted silk threads) are recommended for wear. Following the beginning of the rainy season in some time in July, fabrics switch over to gauzier varieties, and highly-prized hemp fabrics such as Echigo-jofu are worn. Continuing into August, hemp, ro and sha continue to be worn; in September, they are still worn, but fabrics such as hitokoshi chirimen, worn in June, become suitable again, and opaque fabrics become preferred over sheer, though sheer may still be worn if the weather is hot.
In the same kimono guide, the first lined kimono are worn in October, and the transition away from plainer opaque fabrics to richer silks such as rinzu is immediate. The richness of fabrics increases going into November and December, with figured silks featuring woven patterns appropriate. Coming into January, crêpe fabrics with a rougher texture become appropriate, with fabrics such as tsumugi worn in February. Figured silks continue to be worn until June, when the unlined season begins again. In Japan, this process of changing clothes is referred to as koromogae.
Formality is also determined by the number and type of mon or kamon (crests). Five crests (itsutsu mon) are the most formal, three crests (mitsu mon) are mid-formality, and one crest (hitotsu mon) is the least formal, used for occasions such as tea ceremony. Kimono (and other garments, like hakama) with mon are called montsuki ("mon-carrying"). The type of crest adds formality as well. A "full sun" (hinata) crest, where the design is outlined and filled in with white, is the most formal type. A "mid-shadow" (nakakage) crest is mid-formality, with only the outline of the crest visible in white. A "shadow" (kage) crest is the least formal, with the outline of the crest relatively faint. Shadow crests may be embroidered onto the kimono, and full-embroidery crests, called nui mon, are also seen.
Formality can also be determined by the type and colour of accessories. For women, this may be the weave of obijime and the style of obiage. For men, adding a haori (a traditional jacket) makes an outfit more formal, and adding both haori and hakama (traditional trousers) is more formal still. The material, colour, and pattern of these overgarments also varies in formality. Longer haori are also more formal.
Both men's and women's kimono feature sleeves considered relatively short, with men's sleeves shorter than women's. Though lengths can vary by a few centimetres, these lengths are informally standardised.
Men's kimono sleeves are only ever one length, and women's sleeves are limited to a short length suitable for almost all types of kimono, or a longer length used for only one type of formal young women's kimono. In the modern day, the two lengths of women's sleeve worn on kimono are furisode length, which almost reaches the floor, and a shorter length, used for every other variety of women's kimono.
Before WWII, the length of women's kimono sleeves varied, with sleeves gradually shortening as a woman got older. During WWII, due to shortage of fabric, the 'short' length of women's kimono sleeves became standardised, and post-WWII, the realm of long kimono sleeves was narrowly curtailed to the realm of furisode only – formal young women's and girl's kimono, where previously longer sleeves were seen on other varieties of dress, both formal and informal. Pre-WWII women's kimono are recognisable for their longer sleeves, which, though not furisode length, are longer than most women's kimono sleeves today.
Young women are not limited to wearing only furisode, and outside of formal occasions that warrant it, can wear all other types of women's kimono which feature shorter sleeves.
The juban, also referred to as the nagajuban, is an under-kimono worn by both men and women. Juban resemble a kimono in construction, with a few key differences: the sleeves are typically open along the entire cuff side, with only a few stitches sewing both sides together placed where a normal kimono sleeve cuff would end; the sleeve has no curve sewn into the outer edge, instead being square; the juban is typically a little shorter than the length of a kimono when worn, and features no extra length to be bloused into an ohashori for women's kimono; the front either does not have any overlapping panels (okumi) or features only thin ones, with the collar set at a lower angle than that of a regular kimono. Juban are considered an essential piece of kimono underwear, and are worn with all types of kimono except for yukata.
Juban are typically made of lightweight materials, often silk. Women's juban and can either be patterned or entirely plain, and modern women's juban are frequently white in colour.
Men's juban are often dyed in dark colours, and can be made of the same material as the outer kimono, as some kimono fabric bolts (tanmono) are woven with enough length to accommodate this. Men's juban are frequently more decorative than women's, often featuring a dyed pictorial scene in the upper back, such as a scene from The Tale of Genji.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, women's juban transitioned from being mostly red with bold white motifs to being white or light pastel colours. The dye technique previously used to achieve this, beni itajime, fell out of fashion and knowledge and was rediscovered in 2010.
Hadajuban are a type of kimono undergarment traditionally worn underneath the nagajuban. Hadajuban are even further removed from resembling a kimono in construction than the nagajuban; the hadajuban comes in two pieces (a wrap-front top and a skirt), features no collar, and either has tube sleeves or is sleeveless.
Unlike the nagajuban, the hadajuban is not considered an essential piece of kimono underwear, and a t-shirt and shorts are frequently substituted in its place.
Yukata (浴衣) are casual cotton summer kimono worn by both men and women. Yukata were originally very simple indigo and white cotton kimono, little more than a bathrobe worn either within the house, or for a short walk locally; yukata were also worn by guests at inns, with the design of the yukata displaying the inn a person was staying at. From roughly the mid-1980s onwards, they began to be produced in a wider variety of colours and designs, responding to demand for a more casual kimono that could be worn to a summer festival, and have since become more formal than their previous status as bathrobes, with high-end, less colourful yukata sometimes standing in place of komon.
In the present day, many yukata are brightly coloured, featuring large motifs from a variety of different seasons. For women, they are worn with either a hanhaba obi (half-width obi) or a heko obi (a soft, sash-like obi), and are often accessorised with colourful hair accessories. For men, yukata are worn with either an informal kaku obi or a heko obi. Children generally wear a heko obi with yukata.
Yukata are always unlined, and it is possible for women to wear a casual nagoya obi with a high-end, more subdued yukata, often with a juban underneath. A high-end men's yukata could also be dressed up in the same way.
A yukata is traditionally worn as a single layer or over a hadajuban (an underkimono worn underneath the nagajuban, featuring a simplified construction). Yukata may also be worn over the top of a t-shirt and shorts. This distinguishes yukata from a more-formal komon kimono, where a nagajuban (also simply referred to as a juban, an underkimono resembling) is worn underneath, showing a second layer of collar at the neckline. However, some modern yukata are worn with collared cotton juban featuring a collar of linen, cotton or ro, for occasions such as informal eating-out.
Komon (小紋, lit. 'small pattern', though the patterns may in fact be large) are informal women's kimono. They were the type most often worn as everyday womenswear in pre-war Japan. Though informal, komon with smaller, denser patterns are considered a shade more formal than komon with larger, bolder patterns.
Komon mostly have no kamon (crests), and the sleeves are fairly short. They are made with a repeating designs, though the repeat length may be quite long. Designs can be made with any method; woven patterns, prints, stencilled patterns in alternating orientations, freehand painting (yūzen) or tie-dye patterns (shibori). Traditionally the direction of the fabric was alternated in adjacent panels (necessary due to the lack of shoulder seam), so patterns were generally reversible. If the pattern is the same way up on each panel, the komon is more formal, approaching tsukesage-level formality.
Woven geometric patterns (such as stripes) have no season, but others show images representing the season in general. Woven non-geometric patterns (kasuri) are also common. Small, dense patterns are often used; this is practical, as fine-scale patterns hides stains.
Komon are made with informal materials such as tsumugi (slubbed silk), cotton, linen, ramie, and hemp. In the modern day, synthetic blends and synthetics are also used; rayon (jinken) and polyester are common.
Now that kimono are not typically worn as informal clothing, komon are not worn as often as formal kimono, though they have a wider range of suitable use. Edo komon are the most formal type of komon; they may have one to three crests, with a small, fine pattern that appears to be a solid colour from a distance, and so resembles the more formal iromuji.
Edo komon (江戸小紋) are a type of komon worn by women characterised by an extremely small repeating pattern, usually done in white on a coloured background. The edo komon dyeing technique is sometimes said to originate in the late Heian period (circa mid-12th century), with a motif called kozakura, which shows tiny stylised cherry blossoms on a background of white dots. In the Edo period (1603–1867), the samurai classes used them for kamishimo formal wear, with specific patterns becoming associated with specific families. Towards the end of the Edo period, in the early 1800s, commoners began to wear them. Edo komon are of a similar formality to iromuji, and edo komon with one kamon can be worn as low-formality visiting wear; because of this, they are always made of silk, unlike regular komon.
Iromuji (色無地, lit. 'solid colour') are monochromatic, undecorated women's kimono mainly worn to tea ceremonies, as the monochrome appearance is considered to be unobtrusive to the ceremony itself. Despite being monochromatic, iromuji may feature a woven design; iromuji suitable for autumn are often made of rinzu damask silk. Some edo komon with incredibly fine patterns are also considered suitable for tea ceremony, as from a distance they are visually similar to iromuji. Iromuji may occasionally have one kamon, though likely no more than this, and are always made of silk. Shibori accessories such as obiage are never worn with iromuji if the purpose of wear is a tea ceremony; instead, flat and untextured silks are chosen for accessories.
Tsukesage (付け下げ) are low-ranking women's formalwear, and are a step below hōmongi, though the two sometimes appear similar or indistinguishable. The motifs on a tsukesage are placed similarly to those of a hōmongi – across the back-right shoulder and back-right sleeve, the front-left shoulder and the front-left sleeve, and across the hem, higher at the left than the right – but, unlike hōmongi, do not typically cross over the seams of each kimono panel, though some confusingly do. In older examples, the motifs may instead be placed symmetrically along the hem, with the skirt patterns mirrored down the centre-back seam.
Similarities between tsukesage and hōmongi often lead to confusion, with some tsukesage indistinguishable from hōmongi; often, tsukesage are only distinguishable from hōmongi by the size of the motifs used, with smaller, less fluid motifs generally considered to be tsukesage, and larger, more fluid motifs considered to be hōmongi.
Tsukesage can have between one and three kamon, and can be worn to parties, but not ceremonies or highly formal events.
Hōmongi (訪問着, lit. 'visiting wear') are women's formal kimono with the same pattern placement as a tsukesage, but with patterns generally matching across the seams. They are always made of silk, and are considered more formal than the tsukesage.
Hōmongi are first roughly sewn up, and the design is sketched onto the fabric, before the garment is taken apart to be dyed again. The hōmongi's close relative, the tsukesage, has its patterns dyed on the bolt before sewing up. This method of production can usually distinguish the two, as the motifs on a hōmongi are likely to cross fluidly over seams in a way a tsukesage generally will not. However, the two can prove near-indistinguishable at times.
Hōmongi may be worn by both married and unmarried women; often friends of the bride will wear hōmongi to weddings (except relatives) and receptions. They may also be worn to formal parties.
Irotomesode (色留袖, lit. 'colour short-sleeve') are formal women's kimono that feature a design along the hem on a coloured background. They are slightly less formal than kurotomesode, which have roughly the same pattern placement on a black background. Irotomesode, though worn to formal events, may be chosen when a kurotomesode would make the wearer appear to be overdressed for the situation. The pattern placement for irotomesode is roughly identical to kurotomesode, though patterns seen along the fuki and okumi may drift slightly into the back hem itself. Irotomesode with five kamon are of the same formality as any kurotomesode. Irotomesode may be made of figured silk such as rinzū.
Iro-montsuki (lit. 'colour mon-decorated') are formal men's kimono. Iro-montsuki feature formal crests along the shoulders on a colour background, which, apart from the cut of the sleeve, appears the same as an irotomesode from the waist up, and thus cannot be distinguished in pattern when worn under the hakama. Because formalwear for men requires hakama, men do not wear formal kimono that have elaborate patterns on the hem, as these would be hidden.
Kurotomesode (黒留袖, lit. 'black short-sleeve') are formal women's kimono, featuring a black background and a design along the hem. They are the most formal women's kimono, and are worn to formal events such as weddings and wedding parties. The design is only present along the hem; the further up the body this design reaches, the younger the wearer is considered to be, though for a very young woman an irotomesode may be chosen instead, kurotomesode being considered somewhat more mature. The design is either symmetrically placed on the fuki and okumi portions of the kimono, or asymmetrically placed along the entirety of the hem, with the design being larger and higher-placed at the left side than the right. Vintage kimono are more likely to have the former pattern placement than the latter, though this is not a hard rule.
Kurotomesode are always made of silk, and may have a hiyoku – a false lining layer – attached, occasionally with a slightly padded hem. A kurotomesode usually has between 3 and 5 crests; a kurotomesode of any number of crests outranks an irotomesode with less than five. Kurotomesode, though formalwear, are not allowed at the royal court, as black is the colour of mourning, despite the colour designs decorating the kimono itself; outside of the royal court, this distinction for kurotomesode does not exist. Kurotomesode are never made of flashy silks such as rinzū, but are instead likely to be a matte fabric with little texture.
Kurotomesode typically feature kazari jitsuke (飾り仕付け), small white decorative prickstitches along the collar.
Kuro-montsuki ("black mon-decorated") are the most formal men's kimono, which, apart from the cut of the sleeve, look exactly the same from the waist up as a kurotomesode, and thus cannot be distinguished in pattern when worn under the hakama required for men's formal dress.
Mofuku (喪服) are a category of kimono and kimono accessories suitable for mourning, worn by both men and women. Mofuku kimono, obi and accessories are characterised by their plain, solid black appearance. Mofuku kimono are plain black silk with five kamon, worn with white undergarments and white tabi. Men wear a kimono of the same kind, with a subdued obi and a black-and-white or black-and-grey striped hakama, worn with black or white zōri.
A completely black mourning ensemble for women – a plain black obi, black obijime and black obiage – is usually reserved for those closest to the deceased. Those further away will wear kimono in dark and subdued colours, rather than a plain black kimono with a reduced number of crests. In time periods when kimono were worn more often, those closest to the deceased would slowly begin dressing in coloured kimono over a period of weeks after the death, with the obijime being the last thing to be changed over to colour.
Uchikake (打ち掛け) are highly formal women's over-kimono, worn only by brides or onstage. The name uchikake comes from the Japanese verb uchikake-ru, "to drape upon", originating in roughly the 16th century from a fashion among the ruling classes of the time to wear kimono (then called kosode, lit. 'small sleeve') unbelted over the shoulders of one's other garments; the uchikake progressed into being an over-kimono worn by samurai women before being adopted some time in the 20th century as bridal wear.
Uchikake are designed to be worn over the top of a complete kimono outfit with obi, and thus are not designed to be worn belted. Unlike their 16th century counterparts, modern uchikake generally could not double as a regular kimono, as they often feature heavy, highly-formal decoration and may be padded throughout, if not solely on the hem. They are designed to trail along the floor, and the heavily-padded hem helps to achieve this.
Bridal uchikake are typically red or white, and often decorated heavily with auspicious motifs. Because they are not designed to be worn with an obi, the designs cover the entirety of the back.
Shiromuku (白無垢, lit. 'white pure-innocence') are pure-white wedding kimono worn by brides for a traditional Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony. Comparable to an uchikake and sometimes described as a white uchikake, the shiromuku is worn for the part of the wedding ceremony, symbolising the purity of the bride coming into the marriage. The bride may later change into a red uchikake after the ceremony to symbolise good luck.
A shiromuku will form part of a bridal ensemble with matching or coordinating accessories, such as a bridal katsura (bridal wig), a set of matching kanzashi (usually mock-tortoiseshell), and a sensu fan tucked into the kimono. Due to the expensive nature of traditional bridal clothing, few are likely to buy brand-new shiromuku; it is not unusual to rent kimono for special occasions, and Shinto shrines are known to keep and rent out shiromuku for traditional weddings. Those who do possess shiromuku already are likely to have inherited them from close family members.
Susohiki (lit. 'trailing skirt') (also known as hikizuri) are women's kimono with a specialised construction that allows them to be worn trailing, with a deep-set and widely-spaced collar. Susohiki are extremely long kimono worn by geisha, maiko, actors in kabuki and people performing traditional Japanese dance. A susohiki can be up to 230 cm (91 in) long, and are generally no shorter than 200 cm (79 in) from shoulder to hem; this is to allow the kimono to trail along the floor.
Susohiki are sewn differently to normal kimono due to the way they are worn. The collar on a susohiki is sewn further and deeper back into the nape of the neck, so that it can be pulled down much lower without causing the front of the kimono to ride up. The sleeves are set unevenly onto the body, shorter at the back than at the front, so that the underarm does not show when the collar is pulled down.
Susohiki are also tied differently when they are put on – whereas regular kimono are tied with a visible ohashori, and the side seams are kept straight, susohiki are pulled up somewhat diagonally, to emphasise the hips and ensure the kimono trails nicely on the floor. A small ohashori is tied, larger at the back than the front, but it wrapped against the body with a momi (lit. 'red silk') wrap, which is then covered by the obi, rendering the ohashori invisible.
Aside from their specialised construction, susohiki can resemble many other types of women's kimono in their decoration, fabric type, colour and sleeve length. The susohiki worn by geisha and their apprentices are formal kimono worn to engagements, and so are always made of fine silk, resembling kimono of hōmongi formality and above in their pattern placement and background colour.
The susohiki worn by kabuki actors varies by role, and so can appear as the humble clothing of an Edo-period merchant's daughter, as well as the fine silk clothing of a samurai woman. These costumes may be made of polyester, as well as silk, informal silk fabrics, cotton, linen or hemp. Pattern placement, colour and design varies by role, with many roles having costume designs preserved from previous centuries.
The susohiki worn by people performing traditional Japanese dance typically feature a bold design in block colours, as their clothing must stand out from the stage. Performers performing in a group wear kimono identical to one another, with the bold designs creating visual unity between performers.
Though the kimono is the national dress of Japan, it has never been the sole item of clothing worn throughout Japan; even before the introduction of Western dress to Japan, many different styles of dress were worn, such as the attus of the Ainu people and the ryusou of the Ryukyuan people. Though similar to the kimono, these garments are distinguishable by their separate cultural heritage, and are not considered to be simply 'variations' of kimono such as the clothing worn by the working class is considered to be.
Some related garments still worn today were the contemporary clothing of previous time periods, and have survived on in an official and/or ceremonial capacity, worn only on certain occasions by certain people.
There are a number of accessories that can be worn with the kimono, and these vary by occasion and use. Some are ceremonial, or worn only for special occasions, whereas others are part of dressing in kimono and are used in a more practical sense.
Both geisha and maiko wear variations on common accessories that are not found in everyday dress. As an extension of this, many practitioners of Japanese traditional dance wear similar kimono and accessories to geisha and maiko.
For certain traditional holidays and occasions some specific types of kimono accessories are worn. For instance, okobo, also known as pokkuri, are worn by girls for shichi-go-san, alongside brightly coloured furisode. Okobo are also worn by young women on seijin no hi (Coming of Age Day).
Pre-WW2, kimono were commonly worn layered, with three being the standard number of layers worn over the top of undergarments. The layered kimono underneath were known as dōnuki, and were often a patchwork of older or unwearable kimono taken apart for their fabric. Specifically-designed matching sets of formal layered kimono were known as o-tsui, and generally featured the same design presented on different background colours, such as white (innermost), red (middle layer) and black (outermost). The innermost layers, known as shitagi, typically featured the plainest decorative techniques, such as dyework only, and the successive outer layers would feature techniques such as embroidery and couched gold thread, with the outermost layer – known as the uwagi – displaying the most extensive decoration. These matching sets would be designed and created together, commonly as part of a bride's outfit for a wedding. Extant intact sets of o-tsui kimono are difficult to find, particularly in good condition, with the innermost kimono typically damaged and in poor condition.
In modern Japan, at least one layer is typically worn next to the skin when wearing kimono. Traditionally, this would be the hadagi or hadajuban, a tube-sleeved, wrapped-front garment considered to be underwear, though in the modern day, regular underwear is sometimes worn instead, and a traditional hadajuban is not considered strictly necessary. A hadajuban is typically made of something more washable than silk, such as cotton, hemp, linen or some synthetic fibres.
For all forms of kimono except the yukata (excluding high-quality yukata dressed up as komon), a nagajuban (lit. 'long juban'), often known and referred to as a juban, is worn over the top of any underwear. The juban resembles a kimono made of a lighter, thinner fabric, not uncommonly constructed without an okumi panel at the front, and often has a collar cover known as a han'eri sewn over its collar. The han'eri, which is visible at the neckline when worn underneath a kimono, is designed to be replaced and washed when needed.
In modern-day Japan, layered kimono are generally only seen on the stage, whether for classical dances or in kabuki. A false second layer called a hiyoku (比翼, "second wing") may be attached instead of an entirely separate kimono to achieve this look; the hiyoku resembles the lower half of a kimono's lining which, and is sewn to the kimono horizontally along the back. A hiyoku may have a false collar attached to it, or a matching false collar sewn to the kimono separately, creating the illusion of a layered kimono at the neckline; separate false sleeve cuffs may also be sewn into the kimono to create this effect.
Kimono featuring hiyoku can be seen in some kabuki performances such as Fuji Musume, where the kimono is worn with the okumi flipped back slightly underneath the obi to expose the design on the hiyoku. The hiyoku can also be seen on some bridal kimono.
In the past, a kimono would often be entirely taken apart for washing, and then re-sewn for wearing. This traditional washing method involves two steps: taking the kimono apart and washing each piece (toki arai) and then stretching each piece of a kimono onto a board to dry after they have been washed and starched (arai hari). Because the stitches must be taken out for washing, traditional kimono need to be hand sewn. The process of traditionally washing kimono is very expensive and difficult and is one of the causes of the declining popularity of kimono. Modern fabrics and cleaning methods have been developed that eliminate this need, although the traditional washing of kimono is still practiced, especially for high-end garments.
New, custom-made kimono are generally delivered to a customer with long, loose basting stitches placed around the outside edges. These stitches are called shitsuke ito (not to be confused with kazari jitsuke, the small white prickstitching seen along the collar of kurotomesode). They are sometimes replaced for storage. They help to prevent bunching, folding and wrinkling, and keep the kimono's layers in alignment.
Like many other traditional Japanese garments, there are specific ways to fold kimono. These methods help to preserve the garment and to keep it from creasing when stored. Kimono are often stored wrapped in acid-free paper envelopes known as tatōshi.
Kimono need to be aired out at least seasonally and before and after each time they are worn. Many people prefer to have their kimono dry cleaned. Although this can be extremely expensive, it is generally less expensive than the traditional method of taking a kimono apart to clean it. This may, however, be impossible for certain fabrics or dyes.
Kimono are worn outside of Japan in a variety of circumstances. Kimono may be worn to Shinto ceremonies by Brazilian girls of Japanese descent in Curitiba, in the Brazilian state of Paraná.
Kimono are also worn by Japanese Americans, and by other members of the Japanese diaspora overseas, such as Japanese Filipinos in the Philippines (see Japanese in the Philippines).
Kimono are collected in the same way as Japanese hobbyists by some non-Japanese, and may be worn to events such as Kimono de Jack gatherings.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The kimono (きもの/着物, lit. 'thing to wear') is a traditional Japanese garment and the national dress of Japan. The kimono is a wrapped-front garment with square sleeves and a rectangular body, and is worn left side wrapped over right, unless the wearer is deceased. The kimono is traditionally worn with a broad sash, called an obi, and is commonly worn with accessories such as zōri sandals and tabi socks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kimono have a set method of construction and are typically made from a long, narrow bolt of cloth known as a tanmono, though Western-style fabric bolts are also sometimes used. There are different types of kimono for men, women, and children, varying based on the occasion, the season, the wearer's age, and – less commonly in the modern day – the wearer's marital status. Despite the kimono's reputation as a formal and difficult-to-wear garment, there are types of kimono suitable for both formal and informal occasions. The way a person wears their kimono is known as kitsuke (着付け, lit. 'dressing').",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The history of the kimono can be tracked back to the Heian period (794-1185), when Japan's nobility embraced a distinctive style of clothing. Though previously the most common Japanese garment, the kimono in the present day has fallen out of favor and is rarely worn as everyday dress. Kimonos are now most frequently seen at summer festivals, where people frequently wear the yukata, the most informal type of kimono; however, more formal types of kimonos are also worn to funerals, weddings, graduations, and other formal events. Other people who commonly wear kimonos include geisha and maiko, who are required to wear it as part of their profession, and rikishi, or sumo wrestlers, who must wear kimonos at all times in public.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Despite the low number of people who wear kimonos regularly and the garment's reputation as a complicated article of clothing, the kimono has experienced a number of revivals in previous decades, and is still worn today as fashionable clothing in Japan.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first instances of kimono-like garments in Japan were traditional Chinese clothing introduced to Japan via Chinese envoys in the Kofun period (300–538 CE; the first part of the Yamato period), through immigration between the two countries and envoys to the Tang dynasty court leading to Chinese styles of dress, appearance, and culture becoming extremely popular in Japanese court society. The Imperial Japanese court quickly adopted Chinese styles of dress and clothing, with evidence of the oldest samples of shibori tie-dyed fabric stored at the Shōsōin Temple being of Chinese origin, due to the limitations of Japan's ability to produce the fabrics at the time. As early as the 4th century CE, images of priestess-queens and tribal chiefs in Japan depicted figures wearing clothing similar that of Han dynasty China.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 718 CE, the Yoro clothing code was instituted, which stipulated that all robes had to be overlapped at the front with a left-to-right closure, following typical Chinese fashions. This convention of wear is still followed today, with a right-to-left closure worn only by the deceased.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Clothing used by the upper classes was significantly simpler to don and wear than dress from the following Heian period. Sleeves, while narrow, were long enough to cover the fingers, since status was associated with covering more of the body.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During the Heian period (794–1193 CE), Japan stopped sending envoys to the Chinese dynastic courts. This prevented Chinese-imported goods—including clothing—from entering the Imperial Palace. This also prevented dissemination to the upper classes, who were the main arbiters of traditional Japanese culture at the time, and the only people allowed to wear such clothing. The ensuing cultural vacuum facilitated the development of a Japanese culture independent from Chinese fashions. Elements previously lifted from the Tang Dynastic courts developed independently into what is known literally as \"national culture\" or \"kokufū culture\" (国風文化, kokufū-bunka). The term is used to refer to Heian-period Japanese culture, particularly that of the upper classes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Women's clothing in the imperial palace became increasingly stylized in the formal jūnihitoe, with some elements being abandoned by both male and female courtiers, such as the round-necked and tube-sleeved chun ju jacket worn by both genders in the early 7th century. Others, such as the wrapped front robes also worn by men and women, were kept. Some elements, such as the mo skirt worn by women, continued to in a reduced capacity, worn only to formal occasions; the mо̄ [ja] (裳) grew too narrow to wrap all the way around and became a trapezoidal pleated train. Hakama (trousers) became longer than the legs and also trailed behind the wearer.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the later Heian period, various clothing edicts reduced the number of layers a woman could wear, leading to the kosode (lit. 'small sleeve') garment—previously considered underwear—becoming outerwear by the time of the Muromachi period (1336–1573 CE). Originally worn with hakama, the kosode began to be held closed with a small belt known as an obi instead. The kosode resembled a modern kimono, though at this time the sleeves were sewn shut at the back and were smaller in width (shoulder seam to cuff) than the body of the garment. During the Sengoku period (1467–1615) and the Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568–1600), the decoration of the kosode developed further, with bolder designs and flashy colours becoming popular. By this time, separate lower-body garments, such as the mō and hakama, were almost never worn, allowing full-length patterns to be seen.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During the Edo period (1603–1867 CE), both Japan's culture and economy developed significantly. A particular factor in the development of the Edo period was the early Genroku period (1688–1704 CE), wherein \"Genroku culture\" – luxurious displays of wealth and increased patronage of the arts – led to the further development of many art forms, including those of clothing. Genroku culture was led by the growing and increasingly-powerful merchant classes (chōnin), whose clothing was representative of their increasing economic power and rivaled the aristocracy and samurai classes, shown by their brightly-coloured kimono that utilised expensive production techniques, such as hand-painted dyework. Rinzu, a damask fabric, also became the preferred material for kimono at this time, replacing the previously-popular nerinuki plain-weave silk, which had been used to create tsujigahana.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In response to the increasing material wealth of the merchant classes, the Tokugawa shogunate issued a number of sumptuary laws on kimono for the lower classes, prohibiting the use of purple or red fabric, gold embroidery, and the use of intricately dyed shibori patterns. As a result, a school of aesthetic thought known as Iki developed. They valued and prioritised the display of wealth through almost mundande appearance, and the concept of kimono design and wear continues to this day as a major influence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From this point onwards, the basic shape of both men's and women's kimono remained largely unchanged. The sleeves of the kosode began to grow in length, especially amongst unmarried women, and the obi became much longer and wider, with various styles of knots coming into fashion, alongside stiffer weaves of material to support them.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In the Edo period, the kimono market was divided into craftspeople, who made the tanmono and accessories, tonya, or wholesalers, and retailers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1869, the social class system was abolished, and with them, class-specific sumptuary laws. Kimono with formerly-restricted elements, like red and purple colours, became popular, particularly with the advent of synthetic dyestuffs such as mauvine.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Following the opening of Japan's borders in the early Meiji period to Western trade, a number of materials and techniques – such as wool and the use of synthetic dyestuffs – became popular, with casual wool kimono being relatively common in pre-1960s Japan; the use of safflower dye (beni) for silk linings fabrics (known as momi; literally, \"red silk\") was also common in pre-1960s Japan, making kimono from this era easily identifiable.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "During the Meiji period, the opening of Japan to Western trade after the enclosure of the Edo period led to a drive towards Western dress as a sign of \"modernity\". After an edict by Emperor Meiji, policemen, railroad workers and teachers moved to wearing Western clothing within their job roles, with the adoption of Western clothing by men in Japan happening at a much greater pace than by women. Initiatives such as the Tokyo Women's & Children's Wear Manufacturers' Association (東京婦人子供服組合) promoted Western dress as everyday clothing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Western clothing quickly became standard issue as army uniform for men and school uniform for boys, and between 1920 and 1930, the fuku sailor outfit replaced the kimono and undivided hakama as school uniform for girls. However, kimono still remained popular as an item of everyday fashion; following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, cheap, informal and ready-to-wear meisen kimono, woven from raw and waste silk threads unsuitable for other uses, became highly popular, following the loss of many people's possessions. By 1930, ready-to-wear meisen kimono had become highly popular for their bright, seasonally changing designs, many of which took inspiration from the Art Deco movement. Meisen kimono were usually dyed using the ikat (kasuri) technique of dyeing, where either warp or both warp and weft threads (known as heiyō-gasuri) were dyed using a stencil pattern before weaving.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "It was during the Taishō period that the modern formalisation of kimono and kimono types began to emerge. The Meiji period had seen the slow introduction of kimono types that mediated between the informal and the most formal, a trend that continued throughout the Taishō period, as social occasions and opportunities for leisure increased under the abolition of class distinctions. As Western clothing increased in popularity for men as everyday clothing, the kimono industry further established its own traditions of formal and informal dress for women; this saw the invention of the hōmongi, divisions of tomesode (short-sleeved) kimono for women, and montsuki hakama. The bridal kimono trousseau (oyomeiri dōgu), an uncommon practice of the upper classes in the Edo period, also became common throughout the middle classes; traditions of kimono bridalwear for marriage ceremonies were also codified in this time, which resembled the bridalwear of samurai-class women. Standards of kitsuke at this time began to slowly graduate to a more formalised, neatened appearance, with a flat, uniform ohashori and a smooth, uncreased obi, which also resembled the \"proper\" kitsuke of upper-class women. However, kitsuke standards were still relatively informal, and would not become formalised until after World War II.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "While kimono were no longer common wear for men, they remained everyday wear for Japanese women until World War II (1940–1945). Though the Taishō period had seen a number of invented traditions, standards of kitsuke (wearing kimono) were still not as formalised in this time, with creases, uneven ohashori and crooked obi still deemed acceptable.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "During the war, kimono factories shut down, and the government encouraged people to wear monpe (also romanised as mompe) – trousers constructed from old kimono – instead. Fibres such as rayon became widespread during WWII, being inexpensive to produce and cheap to buy, and typically featured printed designs. Cloth rationing persisted until 1951, so most kimono were made at home from repurposed fabrics.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the second half of the 20th century, the Japanese economy boomed, and silk became cheaper, making it possible for the average family to afford silk kimono. The kimono retail industry had developed an elaborate codification of rules for kimono-wearing, with types of kimono, levels of formality, and rules on seasonality, which intensified after the war; there had previously been rules about kimono-wearing, but these were not rigidly codified and varied by region and class. Formalisation sought perfection, with no creases or unevenness in the kimono, and an increasingly tubular figure was promoted as the ideal for women in kimono. The kimono-retail industry also promoted a sharp distinction between Japanese and Western clothes; for instance, wearing Western shoes with Japanese clothing (while common in the Taishō period) was codified as improper; these rules on proper dressing are often described in Japanese using the English phrase \"Time, Place, and Occasion\" (TPO). As neither Japanese men or women commonly wore kimono, having grown up under wartime auspices, commercial kitsuke schools were set up to teach women how to don kimono. Men in this period rarely wore kimono, and menswear thus escaped most of the formalisation.).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kimono were promoted as essential for ceremonial occasions; for instance, the expensive furisode worn by young women for Seijinshiki was deemed a necessity. Bridal trousseaus containing tens of kimono of every possible subtype were also promoted as de rigueur, and parents felt obliged to provide kimono trousseaus that cost up to 10 million yen (~£70,000), which were displayed and inspected publicly as part of the wedding, including being transported in transparent trucks.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "By the 1970s, formal kimono formed the vast majority of kimono sales. Kimono retailers, due to the pricing structure of brand new kimono, had developed a relative monopoly on not only prices but also a perception of kimono knowledge, allowing them to dictate prices and heavily promote more formal (and expensive) purchases, as selling a single formal kimono could support the seller comfortably for three months. The kimono industry peaked in 1975, with total sales of 2.8 trillion yen (~£18 billion). The sale of informal brand new kimono was largely neglected.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The economic collapse of the 1990s bankrupted much of the kimono industry and ended a number of expensive practices. The rules for how to wear kimono lost their previous hold over the entire industry, and formerly-expensive traditions such as bridal kimono trousseaus generally disappeared, and when still given, were much less extensive. It was during this time that it became acceptable and even preferred for women to wear Western dress to ceremonial occasions like weddings and funerals. Many women had dozens or even hundreds of kimono, mostly unworn, in their homes; a secondhand kimono, even if unworn, would sell for about 500 yen (less than £3.50; about US$5), a few percent of the bought-new price. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many secondhand kimono shops opened as a result of this.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the early years of the 21st century, the cheaper and simpler yukata became popular with young people. Around 2010, men began wearing kimono again in situations other than their own wedding, and kimono were again promoted and worn as everyday dress by a small minority.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Today, the majority of people in Japan wear Western clothing as everyday attire, and are most likely to wear kimono either to formal occasions such as wedding ceremonies and funerals, or to summer events, where the standard kimono is the easy-to-wear, single-layer cotton yukata.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2019, the mayor of Kyoto announced that his staff were working to register \"Kimono Culture\" on UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Both kimono and obi are made from a wide variety of fibre types, including hemp, linen, silk, Japanese crêpe (known as chirimen), and figured damask weaves (rinzu). Fabrics are typically – for both obi and kimono – woven as tanmono (bolts of narrow width), save for certain types of obi (such as the maru obi), woven to double-width. Formal kimono are almost always made from silk, with thicker, heavier, stiff or matte fabrics generally being considered informal.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Modern kimono are widely available in fabrics considered easier to care for, such as polyester. Kimono linings are typically silk or imitation silk, and often match the top fabric in fibre type, though the lining of some casual silk kimono may be cotton, wool or linen.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kimono fabrics are often decorated, sometimes by hand, before construction. Customarily, kimono with woven patterns are considered more informal, though for obi, the reverse is true, with obi featuring dyed patterns being less formal than obi with woven patterns. Though kimono fabrics with woven patterns are typically not especially heavy and can be lightweight, obi fabrics with woven patterns are often very heavy, with many formal obi being made from thickly-woven brocade. Traditionally, woven kimono are paired with obi that are decorated with dyed patterns, and vice versa. However, for all but the most formal kimono, this is more of a general suggestion than a strict rule. Formal kimono are typically decorated with dyed patterns, commonly found along the hemline. These patterns may feature embroidery in parts, couched gold and silver thread, and/or gold and silver foil. The layout of motifs can denote a kimono's age, with patterns that mirror along the vertical back seam (ryōzuma) being typical for kimono made before the 1930s.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Many kimono motifs are seasonal, and denote the season in which the kimono can be worn; however, some motifs have no season and can be worn all-year round. Others, such as the combination of pine, plum and bamboo – a grouping referred to as the Three Friends of Winter – are auspicious, and thus worn to formal occasions for the entire year. Motifs seen on yukata are commonly seasonal motifs worn out of season, either to denote the spring just passed or the desire for cooler autumn or winter temperatures. Colour also contributes to the seasonality of kimono, with some seasons – such as autumn – generally favouring warmer, darker colours over lighter, cooler ones.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "A number of different guides on seasonal kimono motifs exist, with some guides – such as those for tea ceremony in particular – being especially stringent on their reflection of the seasons. Motifs typically represent the flora, fauna, landscape or culture of Japan; one such example is cherry blossoms, a famously seasonal motif worn in spring until just before the actual cherry blossoms begin to bloom, it being considered unlucky to try and 'compete' with the cherries. Motifs are typically worn a few weeks before the official 'start' of any given season, as it is considered fashionable to anticipate the coming season.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Though men's kimono historically displayed just as much decoration and variety as women's kimono, in the modern era, the principal distinction of men's kimono in terms of seasonality and occasion is the fabric. The typical men's kimono is a subdued, dark colour; black, dark blues, greens and browns are common. Fabrics are usually matte, in contrast to the occasional satin weaves of some women's kimono. Some men's kimono have a subtle pattern, and textured fabrics are more common in informal men's kimono. Informal men's kimono may also feature slightly brighter colours, such as lighter purples, greens and blues. Sumo wrestlers have occasionally been known to wear quite bright colours, such as fuchsia, in their kimono, which they are required to wear when appearing in public.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The fabrics that kimono are made from are classified in two categories within Japan. Gofuku (呉服) is the term used to indicate silk kimono fabrics, composed of the characters go (呉, meaning \"Wu\", a kingdom in ancient China where the technology of weaving silk developed) and fuku (服, meaning \"clothing\").",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The term gofuku is also used to refer to kimono in general within Japan, particularly within the context of the kimono industry, as traditional kimono shops are referred to as either gofukuten (呉服店) or gofukuya (呉服屋) – with the additional character of ya (屋) meaning 'shop'.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Cotton and hemp fabrics are referred to generally as futomono (太物), meaning \"thick materials\", with both cotton and hemp yarns being considerably thicker than silk yarns used for weaving. Cotton kimono are specifically referred to in the context of materials as momenfuku (木綿服), \"cotton clothes\", whereas hemp kimono are known as asafuku (麻服), \"hemp clothes\", in Japanese, with the character for hemp – asa (麻) – also being used to refer widely to hemp, linen and ramie kimono fabrics.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Until the end of the Edo period, the tailoring of both gofuku and futomono fabrics was separated, with silk kimono handled at shops known as gofuku dana, and kimono of other fibres sold at shops known as futomono dana. Stores that handled all types of fabric were known as gofuku futomono dana, though after the Meiji period, stores only retailing futomono kimono became less profitable in the face of cheaper everyday Western clothing, and eventually went out of business, leaving only gofuku stores to sell kimono – leading to kimono shops becoming known only as gofukuya today.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Kimono can readily be resized, or unpicked back into tanmono (bolt) lengths.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Outside of being re-woven into new fabrics, worn-out kimono have historically been recycled in a variety of ways, depending on the type of kimono and its original use. When the cloth is worn out, it may be used as fabric for smaller items or to create boroboro (patchwork) kimono (which were also sometimes made for the sake of fashion). The fact that the pattern pieces of a kimono consist of rectangles, and not complex shapes, make reuse in garments or other items easier. Sashiko are used to hold cloth together and decorate it. The cloth used for patchwork clothing must all be of similar weight, drape, and handle.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Formal kimono, made of expensive and thin silk fabrics, would have been re-sewn into children's kimono when they became unusable for adults, as they were typically unsuitable for practical clothing; kimono were shortened, with the okumi taken off and the collar re-sewn to create haori, or were simply cut at the waist to create a side-tying jacket. After marriage or a certain age, young women would shorten the sleeves of their kimono; the excess fabric would be used as a furoshiki (wrapping cloth), could be used to lengthen the kimono at the waist, or could be used to create a patchwork undergarment known as a dōnuki. Kimono that were in better condition could be re-used as an under-kimono, or to create a false underlayer known as a hiyoku.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Children also traditionally wore kataire, kimono made of a fancier material in the okumi and upper back.",
"title": "Textiles"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Kimono are traditionally made from a single bolt of fabric known as a tanmono, which is roughly 11.5 metres (38 ft) long and 36 centimetres (14 in) wide for women, and 12.5 metres (41 ft) long and 42 centimetres (17 in) wide for men. The entire bolt is used to make one kimono, and some men's tanmono are woven to be long enough to create a matching haori jacket and juban as well. Kimono linings are made from bolts of the same width.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Some custom bolts of fabric are produced for especially tall or heavy people, such as sumo wrestlers, who must have kimono custom-made by either joining multiple bolts, weaving custom-width fabric, or using non-standard size fabric. For children, in the early 1900s, shorter lengths were used, and sometimes the body of the kimono was made only a single cloth width wide (hitotsumi). Tucks were also used to take in the garment; an outwards-facing pleat at each shoulder (kata-nue-age) and a kolpos-like overfold at the hip (koshi-nue-age), so that the child appeared to be wearing a sleeveless vest of the same fabric over their garment. These sewn tucks were let out as the child grew, and are mostly only seen today on the kimono of apprentice geisha in Kyoto, as apprentices previously began their training at a young age, requiring tucks to be let out as they grew. In the present day, apprentices begin their training in their late teenage years, and the tucks are retained merely as an anachronism.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Though adult women also retained a 'tuck' at the hip, this was a leftover from the trailing length of most women's kimono, which had previously been either held up by hand when walking or tied up loosely with a shigoki obi; though kimono were not worn as trailing towards the end of the 19th century, the excess length of most women's kimono remained, with the hip fold formalised and neatened into the ohashori of the modern day.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Kimono have a set method of construction, which allows the entire garment to be taken apart, cleaned and resewn easily. As the seam allowance on nearly every panel features two selvedges that will not fray, the woven edges of the fabric bolt are retained when the kimono is sewn, leading to large and often uneven seam allowances; unlike Western clothing, the seam allowances are not trimmed down, allowing for a kimono to be resewn to different measurements without the fabric fraying at the seams. This was also used to prolong the life of the garment by reversing the sleeves (hiding the worn cuff hem in the shoulder seam) or the back panels (swapping the high-stress center seam and the low-stress sides), like the European custom of side-to-middling or end-to-middling bedsheets.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Historically, kimono were taken apart entirely to be washed – a process known as arai-hari. Once cleaned, the fabric would be resewn by hand; this process, though necessary in previous centuries, is uncommon in modern-day Japan, as it is relatively expensive.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Despite the expense of hand-sewing, however, some modern kimono, including silk kimono and all formal kimono, are still hand-sewn entirely; even machine-sewn kimono require some degree of hand-sewing, particularly in finishing the collar, the hem, and the lining, if present. Hand-sewn kimono are usually sewn with a single running stitch roughly 3 millimetres (0.12 in) to 4 millimetres (0.16 in) long, with stitches growing shorter around the collar area for strength. Kimono seams, instead of being pressed entirely flat, are pressed to have a 'lip' of roughly 2 millimetres (0.079 in) (known as the kise) pressed over each seam. This disguises the stitches, as hand-sewn kimono are not tightly sewn, rendering the stitches visible if pressed entirely flat.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A number of terms are used to refer to the different parts of a kimono. Kimono that are lined are known as awase kimono, whereas unlined kimono are known as hitoe kimono; partially lined kimono – with lining only at the sleeve cuff, the back of the sleeve, the lower chest portion of the dōura and the entirety of the hakkake – are known as dō-bitoe (lit. 'chest-single-layer') kimono. Some fully lined kimono do not have a separate lower and upper lining, and are instead lined with solid panels on the okumi, the maemigoro and the ushiromigoro.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "These terms refer to parts of a kimono:",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Though the basic shape of the kimono has not changed in centuries, proportions have, historically, varied in different eras of Japanese history. Beginning in the later Heian period, the hitoe – an unlined robe worn as underwear – became the predominant outerwear garment for both men and women, known as the kosode (lit. 'small sleeve'). Court-appropriate dress continued to resemble the previous eras.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "By the beginning of the Kamakura period, the kosode was an ankle-length garment for both men and women, and had small, rounded sleeves that were sewn to the body of the garment. The obi was a relatively thin belt tied somewhat low on the waist, usually in a plain bow, and was known as a hoso-obi. During this time period, the fashion of wearing a kosode draped around the shoulders, over the head, or as the outermost garment stripped off the shoulders and held in place by the obi, led to the rise of the uchikake – a heavily decorated over-kimono, stemming from the verb uchikake-ru (lit. 'to drape upon'), worn unbelted over the top of the kosode – becoming popular as formal dress for the upper classes.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "In the following centuries, the kosode mostly retained its small, narrow and round-sleeved nature, with the length of women's sleeves gradually increasing over time and eventually becoming mostly detached from the body of the garment below the shoulders. The collar on both men's and women's kosode retained its relatively long and wide proportions, and the okumi front panel kept its long, shallow angle towards the hem. During the Edo period, the kosode had developed roughly modern kimono proportions, though variety existed until roughly the mid- to later years of the era. Men's sleeves continued to be sewn shut to the body of the kimono down most of their length, with no more than a few inches unattached at the bottom, unlike the women's style of very deep sleeves mostly detached from the body of the kimono. Men's sleeves were also less deep than women's kimono sleeves so that they did not get tied under the narrow obi around the hips, whereas on a woman's kimono, the long, unattached bottom of the sleeve could hang over the wider obi without getting in the way. Sleeves for both men and women grew in proportion to be of roughly equal width to the body panels, and the collar for both men's and women's kimono became shorter and narrower.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In the present day, both men's and women's kimono retain some historical features – for instance, women's kimono trailed along the floor throughout certain eras, and when the wearer went outside, the excess length would be tucked and tied underneath the obi in a hip fold known as the ohashori. The ohashori is now used for fine length adjustments, and takes up 7–10 inches (18–25 cm) of excess length. A hand-sewn tuck across the back under the obi is used for coarse adjustments, and made deliberately weak so that the stitches will tear before the cloth does under tension. Men's kimono, on the other hand, are cut to the length of the wearer's body and tied with a narrow belt at the hips, with no extra fabric in the kimono's length for an overfold at the hip.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Formal women's kimono also retain the wider collar of previous eras (made from a full tanmono-width instead of a half width), though it is always folded in half lengthwise before wearing – a style known as hiro-eri (lit. 'wide collar', as opposed to bachi-eri, a normal width collar).",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Women's kimono are still worn trailing in some situations, such as onstage, in historical dramas, and by geisha and maiko. In these instances, the kimono worn is constructed differently to a regular women's kimono: the collar is set back further into the neck, the sleeves are sewn to the body unevenly (further down the front than the back), and the body is elongated. This style of kimono is referred to as a susohiki or hikizuri. Though the length of the kimono, collar style and sleeve construction differs for this type of kimono, in all other types of women's kimono, the construction is generally the same; the collar is set back only slightly into the nape of the neck, the sleeves are attached evenly only at the shoulder (not all the way down the sleeve length) and the kimono's length from shoulder to hem is ideally the entire height of the woman wearing it, to allow for the creation of the ohashori.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The sleeve length (dropping down from the arm towards the floor when held outstretched) varies in kimono.",
"title": "Construction"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Both men's and women's brand-new kimono can range in expense (in 2023) from around ¥1000 (~$7 USD) to ¥150,000 (~$1050 US)",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The high expense of some hand-crafted brand-new kimono reflects the traditional kimono making industry, where the most skilled artisans practice specific, expensive and time-consuming techniques, known to and mastered only by a few. These techniques, such as hand-plied bashofu fabrics and hand-tied kanoko shibori dotwork dyeing, may take over a year to finish. Kimono artisans may be made Living National Treasures in recognition of their work, with the pieces they produce being considered culturally important.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Even kimono that have not been hand-crafted will constitute a relatively high expense when bought new, as even for one outfit, a number of accessories of the right formality and appearance must be bought. Not all brand-new kimono originate from artisans, and mass-production of kimono – mainly of casual or semi-formal kimono – does exist, with mass-produced pieces being mostly cheaper than those purchased through a gofukuya (kimono shop).",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Though artisan-made kimono are some of the most accomplished works of textile art on the market, many pieces are not bought solely for appreciation of the craft. Unwritten social obligations to wear kimono to certain events – weddings, funerals – often leads consumers to purchase artisan pieces for reasons other than personal choice, fashion sense or love of kimono:",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "[Third-generation yūzen dyer Jotaro Saito] believes we are in a strange age where people who know nothing about kimono are the ones who spend a lot of money on a genuine handcrafted kimono for a wedding that is worn once by someone who suffers wearing it, and then is never used again.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "The high cost of most brand-new kimono reflects in part the pricing techniques within the industry. Most brand-new kimono are purchased through gofukuya, where kimono are sold as fabric rolls only, the price of which is often left to the shop's discretion. The shop will charge a fee separate to the cost of the fabric for it to be sewn to the customer's measurements, and fees for washing the fabric or weatherproofing it may be added as another separate cost. If the customer is unfamiliar with wearing kimono, they may hire a service to help dress them; the end cost of a new kimono, therefore, remains uncertain until the kimono itself has been finished and worn.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Gofukuya are also regarded as notorious for sales practices seen as unscrupulous and pressuring:",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Many [Japanese kimono consumers] feared a tactic known as kakoikomi: being surrounded by staff and essentially pressured into purchasing an expensive kimono [...] Shops are also renowned for lying about the origins of their products and who made them [...] [My kimono dressing (kitsuke) teacher] gave me careful instructions before we entered the [gofukuya]: 'do not touch anything. And even if you don't buy a kimono today, you have to buy something, no matter how small it is.'",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In contrast, kimono bought by hobbyists are likely to be less expensive, purchased from second-hand stores with no such sales practices or obligation to buy. Hobbyists may also buy cheaper synthetic kimono (marketed as 'washable') brand-new. Some enthusiasts also make their own kimono; this may be due to difficulty finding kimono of the right size, or simply for personal choice and fashion.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Second-hand items are seen as highly affordable; costs can be as little as ¥100 (about US$0.90) at thrift stores within Japan, and certain historic kimono production areas around the country – such as the Nishijin district of Kyoto – are well known for their second-hand kimono markets. Kimono themselves do not go out of fashion, making even vintage or antique pieces viable for wear, depending on condition.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "However, even second-hand women's obi are likely to remain somewhat pricey; a used, well-kept and high-quality second-hand obi can cost upwards of US$300, as they are often intricately woven, or decorated with embroidery, goldwork and may be hand-painted. Men's obi, in contrast, retail much cheaper, as they are narrower, shorter, and have either very little or no decoration, though high-end men's obi can still retail at a high cost equal to that of a high-end women's obi.",
"title": "Cost"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Several different types of kimono exist. These varieties are primarily based on formality and gender, with more women's varieties of kimono existing than men's.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The modern kimono canon was roughly formalised after WWII, following fabric shortages, a generation unfamiliar with wearing kimono in everyday life, and the postwar revival of kimono sales by gofukuya, traditional kimono shops. In previous centuries, types of kimono were not as distinct, with factors such as age and social class playing a much larger role in determining kimono types than they do presently. Beginning in the Meiji period, and following the Meiji Restoration and the abolition of class distinctions, kimono varieties began to change as Japanese society did, with new varieties being invented for new social situations.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Kimono range in variation from extremely formal to very casual. For women, the formality is determined mostly by pattern placement, decoration style, fabric choice and colour. For men, whose kimono are generally monochromatic, formality is determined typically by fabric choice and colour. For both men and women, the accessories and obi worn with the kimono also determine formality.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The formality levels of different types of kimono are a relatively modern invention, having been developed between late Meiji- to post-war Japan, following the abolition of Edo-period sumptuary clothing laws in 1868. These laws changed constantly, as did the strictness with which they were enforced, and were designed to keep the nouveau riche merchant classes from dressing above their station, and appearing better-dressed than monetarily-poor but status-rich samurai class.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Under feudal sumptuary laws, colours were restricted by class; for instance, indigo-dyed clothing was allowed for all classes, and was commonly seen in hand-dyed cotton, linen or hemp kasuri fabrics, but other dyes, such as reds and purples, were forbidden to those below a certain class. Sometimes, for some classes, designs were restricted to below the belt, to the bottoms of the sleeves (for furisode) or to along the hem (suso-moyo); sometimes they were banned altogether, and were transferred to the collar of the underkimono, or the inside of the hem, where only the faintest glimpse would be intermittently visible. This type of subtle ostentation became an aesthetic known as iki, and outlasted the sumptuary laws. Modern-day rules of formality, however, still echo clothing distinctions typically employed by the uppermost samurai classes.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Aspects of men's kimono still follow this extreme of iki. Bright, elaborate decoration is used on the lining of the haori (jacket), and on men's juban (underkimono), which is not worn as an outer layer outside the home, and so only shows at the neck and inside the sleeves. Women's juban were once bright and boldly-patterned (and were often kimono too damaged to use as an outer layer, repurposed), but are now typically muted pastel shades. The outside of men's garments tended towards subtle patterns and colours even after the sumptuary laws lifted, with blues and blacks predominating, but designers later came to use browns, greens, purples, and other colours in increasingly bold patterns.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Older people generally wear more subtle patterns, and younger people brighter, bolder ones.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Kimono vary widely in fabric type, and are not all made of silk. Certain types of fabric, such as wool, cotton, linen and hemp, are always considered informal, and so are not seen on more formal varieties of kimono. Certain varieties of silk, such as tsumugi, are considered informal, having once been woven only by silk farmers out of unusable cocoons for their own use; other, more modern varieties, such as meisen, were designed to be used as casual, cheap daywear, and are machine-spun and -woven using brightly-patterned yarns. Some varieties of crêpe are on the lowest end of formal, with their rougher texture considered unsuitable for formal use; other varieties, such as smooth crêpe, are used for all varieties of formal kimono. The most formal kimono are only ever made of smooth, fine silks, such as glossy silk fabrics like habutai.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Some fabrics are also worn only at certain times of year; ro, for instance, is a plain-weave fabric with leno weave stripes only worn in high summer (July and August), but is used for all types of kimono and for other garments, such as under-kimono and obi. Some fabrics – such as certain types of crêpe – are never seen in certain varieties of kimono, and some fabrics such as shusu (heavy satin) silk are barely ever seen in modern kimono or obi altogether, having been more popular in previous eras than in the present-day.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Despite their informal nature, many types of traditional, informal kimono fabrics are highly-prized for their craftsmanship. Varieties of tsumugi, kasuri, and fabrics woven from Musa basjoo are valued for their traditional production, and regularly command high prices.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In the summer months (from June until October in the most stringent kimono guides, such as those for tea ceremony), kimono are unlined (hitoe); for the rest of the year, they are lined (awase). This applies to all types of kimono, with a few caveats: the very informal yukata is always unlined, and thus only worn in summer; the most formal kimono, in contrast, are unlikely to be worn unlined in summer, as many people simply do not have more than one formal kimono to wear, and do not wear formal kimono often enough to warrant the purchase of a new, unlined kimono, just for summer wear. Obi also change fabric type in the summer months.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Within the two realms of lined and unlined, further distinctions exist for different months. Lined kimono are either made from transparent or gauze fabrics (usu-mono) or opaque fabrics, with kimono transitioning towards gauze fabrics at the height of summer and away from them as autumn begins. In one kimono guide for tea ceremony, at the start of the unlined season in June, fabrics such as kawari-chirimen (a type of silk crêpe noted as a more \"wrinkle-resistant\" form of hitokoshi-chirimen) and komayori ro (a thicker type of ro with twisted silk threads) are recommended for wear. Following the beginning of the rainy season in some time in July, fabrics switch over to gauzier varieties, and highly-prized hemp fabrics such as Echigo-jofu are worn. Continuing into August, hemp, ro and sha continue to be worn; in September, they are still worn, but fabrics such as hitokoshi chirimen, worn in June, become suitable again, and opaque fabrics become preferred over sheer, though sheer may still be worn if the weather is hot.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "In the same kimono guide, the first lined kimono are worn in October, and the transition away from plainer opaque fabrics to richer silks such as rinzu is immediate. The richness of fabrics increases going into November and December, with figured silks featuring woven patterns appropriate. Coming into January, crêpe fabrics with a rougher texture become appropriate, with fabrics such as tsumugi worn in February. Figured silks continue to be worn until June, when the unlined season begins again. In Japan, this process of changing clothes is referred to as koromogae.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Formality is also determined by the number and type of mon or kamon (crests). Five crests (itsutsu mon) are the most formal, three crests (mitsu mon) are mid-formality, and one crest (hitotsu mon) is the least formal, used for occasions such as tea ceremony. Kimono (and other garments, like hakama) with mon are called montsuki (\"mon-carrying\"). The type of crest adds formality as well. A \"full sun\" (hinata) crest, where the design is outlined and filled in with white, is the most formal type. A \"mid-shadow\" (nakakage) crest is mid-formality, with only the outline of the crest visible in white. A \"shadow\" (kage) crest is the least formal, with the outline of the crest relatively faint. Shadow crests may be embroidered onto the kimono, and full-embroidery crests, called nui mon, are also seen.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Formality can also be determined by the type and colour of accessories. For women, this may be the weave of obijime and the style of obiage. For men, adding a haori (a traditional jacket) makes an outfit more formal, and adding both haori and hakama (traditional trousers) is more formal still. The material, colour, and pattern of these overgarments also varies in formality. Longer haori are also more formal.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Both men's and women's kimono feature sleeves considered relatively short, with men's sleeves shorter than women's. Though lengths can vary by a few centimetres, these lengths are informally standardised.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "Men's kimono sleeves are only ever one length, and women's sleeves are limited to a short length suitable for almost all types of kimono, or a longer length used for only one type of formal young women's kimono. In the modern day, the two lengths of women's sleeve worn on kimono are furisode length, which almost reaches the floor, and a shorter length, used for every other variety of women's kimono.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Before WWII, the length of women's kimono sleeves varied, with sleeves gradually shortening as a woman got older. During WWII, due to shortage of fabric, the 'short' length of women's kimono sleeves became standardised, and post-WWII, the realm of long kimono sleeves was narrowly curtailed to the realm of furisode only – formal young women's and girl's kimono, where previously longer sleeves were seen on other varieties of dress, both formal and informal. Pre-WWII women's kimono are recognisable for their longer sleeves, which, though not furisode length, are longer than most women's kimono sleeves today.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Young women are not limited to wearing only furisode, and outside of formal occasions that warrant it, can wear all other types of women's kimono which feature shorter sleeves.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "The juban, also referred to as the nagajuban, is an under-kimono worn by both men and women. Juban resemble a kimono in construction, with a few key differences: the sleeves are typically open along the entire cuff side, with only a few stitches sewing both sides together placed where a normal kimono sleeve cuff would end; the sleeve has no curve sewn into the outer edge, instead being square; the juban is typically a little shorter than the length of a kimono when worn, and features no extra length to be bloused into an ohashori for women's kimono; the front either does not have any overlapping panels (okumi) or features only thin ones, with the collar set at a lower angle than that of a regular kimono. Juban are considered an essential piece of kimono underwear, and are worn with all types of kimono except for yukata.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Juban are typically made of lightweight materials, often silk. Women's juban and can either be patterned or entirely plain, and modern women's juban are frequently white in colour.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "Men's juban are often dyed in dark colours, and can be made of the same material as the outer kimono, as some kimono fabric bolts (tanmono) are woven with enough length to accommodate this. Men's juban are frequently more decorative than women's, often featuring a dyed pictorial scene in the upper back, such as a scene from The Tale of Genji.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "In the late 19th and early 20th century, women's juban transitioned from being mostly red with bold white motifs to being white or light pastel colours. The dye technique previously used to achieve this, beni itajime, fell out of fashion and knowledge and was rediscovered in 2010.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Hadajuban are a type of kimono undergarment traditionally worn underneath the nagajuban. Hadajuban are even further removed from resembling a kimono in construction than the nagajuban; the hadajuban comes in two pieces (a wrap-front top and a skirt), features no collar, and either has tube sleeves or is sleeveless.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Unlike the nagajuban, the hadajuban is not considered an essential piece of kimono underwear, and a t-shirt and shorts are frequently substituted in its place.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "Yukata (浴衣) are casual cotton summer kimono worn by both men and women. Yukata were originally very simple indigo and white cotton kimono, little more than a bathrobe worn either within the house, or for a short walk locally; yukata were also worn by guests at inns, with the design of the yukata displaying the inn a person was staying at. From roughly the mid-1980s onwards, they began to be produced in a wider variety of colours and designs, responding to demand for a more casual kimono that could be worn to a summer festival, and have since become more formal than their previous status as bathrobes, with high-end, less colourful yukata sometimes standing in place of komon.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "In the present day, many yukata are brightly coloured, featuring large motifs from a variety of different seasons. For women, they are worn with either a hanhaba obi (half-width obi) or a heko obi (a soft, sash-like obi), and are often accessorised with colourful hair accessories. For men, yukata are worn with either an informal kaku obi or a heko obi. Children generally wear a heko obi with yukata.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "Yukata are always unlined, and it is possible for women to wear a casual nagoya obi with a high-end, more subdued yukata, often with a juban underneath. A high-end men's yukata could also be dressed up in the same way.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "A yukata is traditionally worn as a single layer or over a hadajuban (an underkimono worn underneath the nagajuban, featuring a simplified construction). Yukata may also be worn over the top of a t-shirt and shorts. This distinguishes yukata from a more-formal komon kimono, where a nagajuban (also simply referred to as a juban, an underkimono resembling) is worn underneath, showing a second layer of collar at the neckline. However, some modern yukata are worn with collared cotton juban featuring a collar of linen, cotton or ro, for occasions such as informal eating-out.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "Komon (小紋, lit. 'small pattern', though the patterns may in fact be large) are informal women's kimono. They were the type most often worn as everyday womenswear in pre-war Japan. Though informal, komon with smaller, denser patterns are considered a shade more formal than komon with larger, bolder patterns.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "Komon mostly have no kamon (crests), and the sleeves are fairly short. They are made with a repeating designs, though the repeat length may be quite long. Designs can be made with any method; woven patterns, prints, stencilled patterns in alternating orientations, freehand painting (yūzen) or tie-dye patterns (shibori). Traditionally the direction of the fabric was alternated in adjacent panels (necessary due to the lack of shoulder seam), so patterns were generally reversible. If the pattern is the same way up on each panel, the komon is more formal, approaching tsukesage-level formality.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "Woven geometric patterns (such as stripes) have no season, but others show images representing the season in general. Woven non-geometric patterns (kasuri) are also common. Small, dense patterns are often used; this is practical, as fine-scale patterns hides stains.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "Komon are made with informal materials such as tsumugi (slubbed silk), cotton, linen, ramie, and hemp. In the modern day, synthetic blends and synthetics are also used; rayon (jinken) and polyester are common.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "Now that kimono are not typically worn as informal clothing, komon are not worn as often as formal kimono, though they have a wider range of suitable use. Edo komon are the most formal type of komon; they may have one to three crests, with a small, fine pattern that appears to be a solid colour from a distance, and so resembles the more formal iromuji.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Edo komon (江戸小紋) are a type of komon worn by women characterised by an extremely small repeating pattern, usually done in white on a coloured background. The edo komon dyeing technique is sometimes said to originate in the late Heian period (circa mid-12th century), with a motif called kozakura, which shows tiny stylised cherry blossoms on a background of white dots. In the Edo period (1603–1867), the samurai classes used them for kamishimo formal wear, with specific patterns becoming associated with specific families. Towards the end of the Edo period, in the early 1800s, commoners began to wear them. Edo komon are of a similar formality to iromuji, and edo komon with one kamon can be worn as low-formality visiting wear; because of this, they are always made of silk, unlike regular komon.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Iromuji (色無地, lit. 'solid colour') are monochromatic, undecorated women's kimono mainly worn to tea ceremonies, as the monochrome appearance is considered to be unobtrusive to the ceremony itself. Despite being monochromatic, iromuji may feature a woven design; iromuji suitable for autumn are often made of rinzu damask silk. Some edo komon with incredibly fine patterns are also considered suitable for tea ceremony, as from a distance they are visually similar to iromuji. Iromuji may occasionally have one kamon, though likely no more than this, and are always made of silk. Shibori accessories such as obiage are never worn with iromuji if the purpose of wear is a tea ceremony; instead, flat and untextured silks are chosen for accessories.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Tsukesage (付け下げ) are low-ranking women's formalwear, and are a step below hōmongi, though the two sometimes appear similar or indistinguishable. The motifs on a tsukesage are placed similarly to those of a hōmongi – across the back-right shoulder and back-right sleeve, the front-left shoulder and the front-left sleeve, and across the hem, higher at the left than the right – but, unlike hōmongi, do not typically cross over the seams of each kimono panel, though some confusingly do. In older examples, the motifs may instead be placed symmetrically along the hem, with the skirt patterns mirrored down the centre-back seam.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Similarities between tsukesage and hōmongi often lead to confusion, with some tsukesage indistinguishable from hōmongi; often, tsukesage are only distinguishable from hōmongi by the size of the motifs used, with smaller, less fluid motifs generally considered to be tsukesage, and larger, more fluid motifs considered to be hōmongi.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Tsukesage can have between one and three kamon, and can be worn to parties, but not ceremonies or highly formal events.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Hōmongi (訪問着, lit. 'visiting wear') are women's formal kimono with the same pattern placement as a tsukesage, but with patterns generally matching across the seams. They are always made of silk, and are considered more formal than the tsukesage.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Hōmongi are first roughly sewn up, and the design is sketched onto the fabric, before the garment is taken apart to be dyed again. The hōmongi's close relative, the tsukesage, has its patterns dyed on the bolt before sewing up. This method of production can usually distinguish the two, as the motifs on a hōmongi are likely to cross fluidly over seams in a way a tsukesage generally will not. However, the two can prove near-indistinguishable at times.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Hōmongi may be worn by both married and unmarried women; often friends of the bride will wear hōmongi to weddings (except relatives) and receptions. They may also be worn to formal parties.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Irotomesode (色留袖, lit. 'colour short-sleeve') are formal women's kimono that feature a design along the hem on a coloured background. They are slightly less formal than kurotomesode, which have roughly the same pattern placement on a black background. Irotomesode, though worn to formal events, may be chosen when a kurotomesode would make the wearer appear to be overdressed for the situation. The pattern placement for irotomesode is roughly identical to kurotomesode, though patterns seen along the fuki and okumi may drift slightly into the back hem itself. Irotomesode with five kamon are of the same formality as any kurotomesode. Irotomesode may be made of figured silk such as rinzū.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "Iro-montsuki (lit. 'colour mon-decorated') are formal men's kimono. Iro-montsuki feature formal crests along the shoulders on a colour background, which, apart from the cut of the sleeve, appears the same as an irotomesode from the waist up, and thus cannot be distinguished in pattern when worn under the hakama. Because formalwear for men requires hakama, men do not wear formal kimono that have elaborate patterns on the hem, as these would be hidden.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Kurotomesode (黒留袖, lit. 'black short-sleeve') are formal women's kimono, featuring a black background and a design along the hem. They are the most formal women's kimono, and are worn to formal events such as weddings and wedding parties. The design is only present along the hem; the further up the body this design reaches, the younger the wearer is considered to be, though for a very young woman an irotomesode may be chosen instead, kurotomesode being considered somewhat more mature. The design is either symmetrically placed on the fuki and okumi portions of the kimono, or asymmetrically placed along the entirety of the hem, with the design being larger and higher-placed at the left side than the right. Vintage kimono are more likely to have the former pattern placement than the latter, though this is not a hard rule.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Kurotomesode are always made of silk, and may have a hiyoku – a false lining layer – attached, occasionally with a slightly padded hem. A kurotomesode usually has between 3 and 5 crests; a kurotomesode of any number of crests outranks an irotomesode with less than five. Kurotomesode, though formalwear, are not allowed at the royal court, as black is the colour of mourning, despite the colour designs decorating the kimono itself; outside of the royal court, this distinction for kurotomesode does not exist. Kurotomesode are never made of flashy silks such as rinzū, but are instead likely to be a matte fabric with little texture.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Kurotomesode typically feature kazari jitsuke (飾り仕付け), small white decorative prickstitches along the collar.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Kuro-montsuki (\"black mon-decorated\") are the most formal men's kimono, which, apart from the cut of the sleeve, look exactly the same from the waist up as a kurotomesode, and thus cannot be distinguished in pattern when worn under the hakama required for men's formal dress.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "Mofuku (喪服) are a category of kimono and kimono accessories suitable for mourning, worn by both men and women. Mofuku kimono, obi and accessories are characterised by their plain, solid black appearance. Mofuku kimono are plain black silk with five kamon, worn with white undergarments and white tabi. Men wear a kimono of the same kind, with a subdued obi and a black-and-white or black-and-grey striped hakama, worn with black or white zōri.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "A completely black mourning ensemble for women – a plain black obi, black obijime and black obiage – is usually reserved for those closest to the deceased. Those further away will wear kimono in dark and subdued colours, rather than a plain black kimono with a reduced number of crests. In time periods when kimono were worn more often, those closest to the deceased would slowly begin dressing in coloured kimono over a period of weeks after the death, with the obijime being the last thing to be changed over to colour.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "Uchikake (打ち掛け) are highly formal women's over-kimono, worn only by brides or onstage. The name uchikake comes from the Japanese verb uchikake-ru, \"to drape upon\", originating in roughly the 16th century from a fashion among the ruling classes of the time to wear kimono (then called kosode, lit. 'small sleeve') unbelted over the shoulders of one's other garments; the uchikake progressed into being an over-kimono worn by samurai women before being adopted some time in the 20th century as bridal wear.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Uchikake are designed to be worn over the top of a complete kimono outfit with obi, and thus are not designed to be worn belted. Unlike their 16th century counterparts, modern uchikake generally could not double as a regular kimono, as they often feature heavy, highly-formal decoration and may be padded throughout, if not solely on the hem. They are designed to trail along the floor, and the heavily-padded hem helps to achieve this.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Bridal uchikake are typically red or white, and often decorated heavily with auspicious motifs. Because they are not designed to be worn with an obi, the designs cover the entirety of the back.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "Shiromuku (白無垢, lit. 'white pure-innocence') are pure-white wedding kimono worn by brides for a traditional Japanese Shinto wedding ceremony. Comparable to an uchikake and sometimes described as a white uchikake, the shiromuku is worn for the part of the wedding ceremony, symbolising the purity of the bride coming into the marriage. The bride may later change into a red uchikake after the ceremony to symbolise good luck.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "A shiromuku will form part of a bridal ensemble with matching or coordinating accessories, such as a bridal katsura (bridal wig), a set of matching kanzashi (usually mock-tortoiseshell), and a sensu fan tucked into the kimono. Due to the expensive nature of traditional bridal clothing, few are likely to buy brand-new shiromuku; it is not unusual to rent kimono for special occasions, and Shinto shrines are known to keep and rent out shiromuku for traditional weddings. Those who do possess shiromuku already are likely to have inherited them from close family members.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "Susohiki (lit. 'trailing skirt') (also known as hikizuri) are women's kimono with a specialised construction that allows them to be worn trailing, with a deep-set and widely-spaced collar. Susohiki are extremely long kimono worn by geisha, maiko, actors in kabuki and people performing traditional Japanese dance. A susohiki can be up to 230 cm (91 in) long, and are generally no shorter than 200 cm (79 in) from shoulder to hem; this is to allow the kimono to trail along the floor.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "Susohiki are sewn differently to normal kimono due to the way they are worn. The collar on a susohiki is sewn further and deeper back into the nape of the neck, so that it can be pulled down much lower without causing the front of the kimono to ride up. The sleeves are set unevenly onto the body, shorter at the back than at the front, so that the underarm does not show when the collar is pulled down.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "Susohiki are also tied differently when they are put on – whereas regular kimono are tied with a visible ohashori, and the side seams are kept straight, susohiki are pulled up somewhat diagonally, to emphasise the hips and ensure the kimono trails nicely on the floor. A small ohashori is tied, larger at the back than the front, but it wrapped against the body with a momi (lit. 'red silk') wrap, which is then covered by the obi, rendering the ohashori invisible.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Aside from their specialised construction, susohiki can resemble many other types of women's kimono in their decoration, fabric type, colour and sleeve length. The susohiki worn by geisha and their apprentices are formal kimono worn to engagements, and so are always made of fine silk, resembling kimono of hōmongi formality and above in their pattern placement and background colour.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "The susohiki worn by kabuki actors varies by role, and so can appear as the humble clothing of an Edo-period merchant's daughter, as well as the fine silk clothing of a samurai woman. These costumes may be made of polyester, as well as silk, informal silk fabrics, cotton, linen or hemp. Pattern placement, colour and design varies by role, with many roles having costume designs preserved from previous centuries.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "The susohiki worn by people performing traditional Japanese dance typically feature a bold design in block colours, as their clothing must stand out from the stage. Performers performing in a group wear kimono identical to one another, with the bold designs creating visual unity between performers.",
"title": "Types of kimono"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "Though the kimono is the national dress of Japan, it has never been the sole item of clothing worn throughout Japan; even before the introduction of Western dress to Japan, many different styles of dress were worn, such as the attus of the Ainu people and the ryusou of the Ryukyuan people. Though similar to the kimono, these garments are distinguishable by their separate cultural heritage, and are not considered to be simply 'variations' of kimono such as the clothing worn by the working class is considered to be.",
"title": "Related garments and accessories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "Some related garments still worn today were the contemporary clothing of previous time periods, and have survived on in an official and/or ceremonial capacity, worn only on certain occasions by certain people.",
"title": "Related garments and accessories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "There are a number of accessories that can be worn with the kimono, and these vary by occasion and use. Some are ceremonial, or worn only for special occasions, whereas others are part of dressing in kimono and are used in a more practical sense.",
"title": "Related garments and accessories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "Both geisha and maiko wear variations on common accessories that are not found in everyday dress. As an extension of this, many practitioners of Japanese traditional dance wear similar kimono and accessories to geisha and maiko.",
"title": "Related garments and accessories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "For certain traditional holidays and occasions some specific types of kimono accessories are worn. For instance, okobo, also known as pokkuri, are worn by girls for shichi-go-san, alongside brightly coloured furisode. Okobo are also worn by young women on seijin no hi (Coming of Age Day).",
"title": "Related garments and accessories"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Pre-WW2, kimono were commonly worn layered, with three being the standard number of layers worn over the top of undergarments. The layered kimono underneath were known as dōnuki, and were often a patchwork of older or unwearable kimono taken apart for their fabric. Specifically-designed matching sets of formal layered kimono were known as o-tsui, and generally featured the same design presented on different background colours, such as white (innermost), red (middle layer) and black (outermost). The innermost layers, known as shitagi, typically featured the plainest decorative techniques, such as dyework only, and the successive outer layers would feature techniques such as embroidery and couched gold thread, with the outermost layer – known as the uwagi – displaying the most extensive decoration. These matching sets would be designed and created together, commonly as part of a bride's outfit for a wedding. Extant intact sets of o-tsui kimono are difficult to find, particularly in good condition, with the innermost kimono typically damaged and in poor condition.",
"title": "Layering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "In modern Japan, at least one layer is typically worn next to the skin when wearing kimono. Traditionally, this would be the hadagi or hadajuban, a tube-sleeved, wrapped-front garment considered to be underwear, though in the modern day, regular underwear is sometimes worn instead, and a traditional hadajuban is not considered strictly necessary. A hadajuban is typically made of something more washable than silk, such as cotton, hemp, linen or some synthetic fibres.",
"title": "Layering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "For all forms of kimono except the yukata (excluding high-quality yukata dressed up as komon), a nagajuban (lit. 'long juban'), often known and referred to as a juban, is worn over the top of any underwear. The juban resembles a kimono made of a lighter, thinner fabric, not uncommonly constructed without an okumi panel at the front, and often has a collar cover known as a han'eri sewn over its collar. The han'eri, which is visible at the neckline when worn underneath a kimono, is designed to be replaced and washed when needed.",
"title": "Layering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "In modern-day Japan, layered kimono are generally only seen on the stage, whether for classical dances or in kabuki. A false second layer called a hiyoku (比翼, \"second wing\") may be attached instead of an entirely separate kimono to achieve this look; the hiyoku resembles the lower half of a kimono's lining which, and is sewn to the kimono horizontally along the back. A hiyoku may have a false collar attached to it, or a matching false collar sewn to the kimono separately, creating the illusion of a layered kimono at the neckline; separate false sleeve cuffs may also be sewn into the kimono to create this effect.",
"title": "Layering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Kimono featuring hiyoku can be seen in some kabuki performances such as Fuji Musume, where the kimono is worn with the okumi flipped back slightly underneath the obi to expose the design on the hiyoku. The hiyoku can also be seen on some bridal kimono.",
"title": "Layering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "In the past, a kimono would often be entirely taken apart for washing, and then re-sewn for wearing. This traditional washing method involves two steps: taking the kimono apart and washing each piece (toki arai) and then stretching each piece of a kimono onto a board to dry after they have been washed and starched (arai hari). Because the stitches must be taken out for washing, traditional kimono need to be hand sewn. The process of traditionally washing kimono is very expensive and difficult and is one of the causes of the declining popularity of kimono. Modern fabrics and cleaning methods have been developed that eliminate this need, although the traditional washing of kimono is still practiced, especially for high-end garments.",
"title": "Care"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "New, custom-made kimono are generally delivered to a customer with long, loose basting stitches placed around the outside edges. These stitches are called shitsuke ito (not to be confused with kazari jitsuke, the small white prickstitching seen along the collar of kurotomesode). They are sometimes replaced for storage. They help to prevent bunching, folding and wrinkling, and keep the kimono's layers in alignment.",
"title": "Care"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "Like many other traditional Japanese garments, there are specific ways to fold kimono. These methods help to preserve the garment and to keep it from creasing when stored. Kimono are often stored wrapped in acid-free paper envelopes known as tatōshi.",
"title": "Care"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 142,
"text": "Kimono need to be aired out at least seasonally and before and after each time they are worn. Many people prefer to have their kimono dry cleaned. Although this can be extremely expensive, it is generally less expensive than the traditional method of taking a kimono apart to clean it. This may, however, be impossible for certain fabrics or dyes.",
"title": "Care"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 143,
"text": "Kimono are worn outside of Japan in a variety of circumstances. Kimono may be worn to Shinto ceremonies by Brazilian girls of Japanese descent in Curitiba, in the Brazilian state of Paraná.",
"title": "Outside of Japan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 144,
"text": "Kimono are also worn by Japanese Americans, and by other members of the Japanese diaspora overseas, such as Japanese Filipinos in the Philippines (see Japanese in the Philippines).",
"title": "Outside of Japan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 145,
"text": "Kimono are collected in the same way as Japanese hobbyists by some non-Japanese, and may be worn to events such as Kimono de Jack gatherings.",
"title": "Outside of Japan"
}
] |
The kimono is a traditional Japanese garment and the national dress of Japan. The kimono is a wrapped-front garment with square sleeves and a rectangular body, and is worn left side wrapped over right, unless the wearer is deceased. The kimono is traditionally worn with a broad sash, called an obi, and is commonly worn with accessories such as zōri sandals and tabi socks. Kimono have a set method of construction and are typically made from a long, narrow bolt of cloth known as a tanmono, though Western-style fabric bolts are also sometimes used. There are different types of kimono for men, women, and children, varying based on the occasion, the season, the wearer's age, and – less commonly in the modern day – the wearer's marital status. Despite the kimono's reputation as a formal and difficult-to-wear garment, there are types of kimono suitable for both formal and informal occasions. The way a person wears their kimono is known as kitsuke. The history of the kimono can be tracked back to the Heian period (794-1185), when Japan's nobility embraced a distinctive style of clothing. Though previously the most common Japanese garment, the kimono in the present day has fallen out of favor and is rarely worn as everyday dress. Kimonos are now most frequently seen at summer festivals, where people frequently wear the yukata, the most informal type of kimono; however, more formal types of kimonos are also worn to funerals, weddings, graduations, and other formal events. Other people who commonly wear kimonos include geisha and maiko, who are required to wear it as part of their profession, and rikishi, or sumo wrestlers, who must wear kimonos at all times in public. Despite the low number of people who wear kimonos regularly and the garment's reputation as a complicated article of clothing, the kimono has experienced a number of revivals in previous decades, and is still worn today as fashionable clothing in Japan.
|
2001-09-29T19:43:24Z
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2023-12-12T03:20:24Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimono
|
16,876 |
Kingston upon Thames
|
Kingston upon Thames (hyphenated until 1965, colloquially known as Kingston) is a town in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, England. It is situated on the River Thames and 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Charing Cross. It is notable as the ancient market town in which Saxon kings were crowned and today is the administrative centre of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.
Historically in the county of Surrey, the ancient parish of Kingston became absorbed in the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, reformed in 1835. From 1893 to 2021 it was the location of Surrey County Council, extraterritorially in terms of local government administration since 1965, when Kingston became a part of Greater London.
Today, most of the town centre is part of the KT1 postcode area, but some areas north of Kingston railway station are within KT2 and SW15, as well as parts of New Malden has SW20. The United Kingdom Census 2011 recorded the population of the town (comprising the four wards of Canbury, Grove, Norbiton and Tudor) as 43,013, while the borough overall counted 175,470. Kingston is identified as a metropolitan centre in the London Plan and is one of the biggest retail centres in the UK, receiving 18 million visitors a year. It is also home to Kingston University.
Kingston was called Cyninges tun in 838 AD, Chingestune in 1086, Kingeston in 1164, Kyngeston super Tamisiam in 1321 and Kingestowne upon Thames in 1589. The name means 'the king's manor or estate' from the Old English words cyning and tun. It belonged to the king in Saxon times and was the earliest royal borough.
The first surviving record of Kingston is from AD 838 as the site of a meeting between King Egbert of Wessex and Ceolnoth, Archbishop of Canterbury. Kingston lay on the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, until in the early tenth century when King Athelstan united both to create the kingdom of England. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, two tenth-century kings were consecrated in Kingston: Æthelstan (925), and Æthelred the Unready (978). There are certain other kings who are said to have been crowned there, but for whom the evidence (including the writings of Florence of Worcester and Ralph de Diceto) is less substantial: Edward the Elder (902), Edmund I (939), Eadred (946), Eadwig (956), Edgar the Peaceful (circa 960) and Edward the Martyr (975). It was later thought that the coronations were conducted in the chapel of St Mary, which collapsed in 1730. Tradition dating to the 18th century holds that a large stone recovered from the ruins played a part in the coronations. It was initially used as a mounting block, but in 1850 it was moved to a more dignified place in the market before finally being moved to its current location in the grounds of the Guildhall.
From Medieval times Shrovetide Football was played annually at Kingston upon Thames and in surrounding towns including Richmond and Twickenham. The windows of the houses and shops were boarded up and from 12 noon the inhabitants would kick several balls around the town before retiring to the public houses. The last game was played in 1866, by which time the urban development of the town meant it caused too much damage and the custom was outlawed.
Kingston upon Thames formed an ancient parish in the Kingston hundred of Surrey. The parish of Kingston upon Thames covered a large area including Hook, Kew, New Malden, Petersham, Richmond, Surbiton, Thames Ditton and East Molesey.
The town of Kingston was granted a charter by King John in 1200, but the oldest one to survive is from 1208 and this document is housed in the town's archives. Other charters were issued by later kings, including Edward IV's charter that gave the town the status of a borough in 1481.
The borough covered a much smaller area than the ancient parish, although as new parishes were split off the borough and parish eventually became identical in 1894. The borough was reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, becoming the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames (then spelt with hyphens). It had been known as a Royal borough through custom and the right to the title was confirmed by George V in 1927. Kingston upon Thames was the seat of Surrey County Council when it moved from Newington in 1893 through until 2021 despite not being governed by it.
In 1965, the local government of Greater London was reorganised and the municipal borough was abolished. Its former area was merged with that of the Municipal Borough of Surbiton and the Municipal Borough of Malden and Coombe, to form the London Borough of Kingston upon Thames. At the request of Kingston upon Thames London Borough Council another royal charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth II entitling it to continue using the title "Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames" for the new borough.
Kingston was built at the first crossing point of the Thames upstream from London Bridge and a bridge still exists at the same site. It was this 'great bridge' that gave it its early importance in the 13th century. Kingston was occupied by the Romans, and later it was either a royal residence or a royal demesne. There is a record of a council held there in 838, at which Egbert of Wessex, King of Wessex, and his son Ethelwulf of Wessex were present. In the Domesday Book it was held by William the Conqueror. Its domesday assets were: a church, five mills, four fisheries worth 10s, 27 ploughs, 40 acres (16 ha) of meadow, woodland worth six hogs. It rendered £31 10s (£31.50).
In 1730, the chapel containing the royal effigies collapsed, burying the sexton, who was digging a grave, the sexton's daughter and another person. The daughter survived this accident and was her father's successor as sexton. Kingston sent members to early Parliaments, until a petition by the inhabitants prayed to be relieved from the burden. Another chapel, the collegiate chapel of St Mary Magdalene, The Lovekyn Chapel, still exists. It was founded in 1309 by a former mayor of London, Edward Lovekyn. It is the only private chantry chapel to survive the Reformation.
With the coming of the railway in the 1830s, there was much building development to the south of the town. Much of this became the new town of Surbiton, but the Surbiton Park estate, built in the grounds of Surbiton Place in the 1850s, remained part of Kingston during the period of the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames.
A permanent military presence was established in the borough with the completion of The Barracks in 1875.
Kingston evolved as a market town from the Saxon period, with goods transported on the Thames and over land via the crossing point. Rights to hold markets were amongst the liberties granted by the royal charter of 1208 and the market formally established in 1242. A horse fair was held at a site on the downstream side of the river north of the bridge and a market extended from there to around the church by the 17th century and further south towards the course of the Hogsmill River. Goods traded included oats, wheat, rye, malt, apples and other fruit, flowers, wool, leather and cheese. Cattle, meat and fish were also traded. The regular Saturday market was supplemented by a Wednesday market in 1662. In addition to markets, regular fairs were held. Local industries included pottery, brick making, tanning, leather-working, fishing, milling, brewing and boat-building.
The presence of fabric and wood-working craft skills associated with boat-building was a factor in the choice of Kingston as the site chosen by Tommy Sopwith to expand production of early aircraft from Sopwith Aviation's origins at Brooklands. Well known aviation personalities Sydney Camm, Harry Hawker and Tommy Sopwith were responsible for much of Kingston's achievements in aviation. For much of the 20th century, Kingston was a major military aircraft manufacturing centre specialising in fighter aircraft – first with Sopwith Aviation, H G Hawker Engineering, later Hawker Aircraft, Hawker Siddeley and eventually British Aerospace. The renowned Sopwith Camel, Hawker Fury, Hurricane, Hunter and Harrier jump jet were all designed and built in the town and examples of all of these aircraft can be seen today at the nearby Brooklands Museum in Weybridge. British Aerospace finally closed its Lower Ham Road factory in 1992; part of the site was subsequently redeveloped for housing but the riverside part houses a community centre and sports complex.
Following the construction of the Kingston Relief Road (commonly known as the "Kingston one-way system") in 1989, major shopping streets in the town centre and the historic Market Place were pedestrianised. Two major commercial developments were also built in Kingston town centre - with John Lewis Kingston department store opening in 1990 and the Bentall Centre shopping centre opening in 1992. In the early 2000s, the Charter Quay development south of Kingston Bridge completed the riverside walk, as well as adding bars, restaurants and the Rose Theatre, which opened in 2008 with Sir Peter Hall as the director. Also, in 2001, the old Kingston bus garage and bus station, closed the previous year, was demolished and the site redeveloped as the Rotunda complex, with an Odeon Cinema, restaurants and tenpin bowling.
Kingston straddles two Parliamentary constituencies: the area north of the railway line is part of Richmond Park, which is represented by Sarah Olney of the Liberal Democrats, and the area south of the railway line (including the ancient town centre) is part of Kingston and Surbiton which is represented by Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats.
Central Kingston is a busy, largely pedestrian and predominantly retail centre, with a small number of commercial offices and civic buildings.
The shopping centre includes a shopping mall, "The Bentall Centre", containing the Bentalls department store and large branches of chain stores found in many British high streets. There is a large branch of the John Lewis department store group, with a Waitrose supermarket in the basement. A smaller 1960s shopping centre called Eden Walk exists nearby. The Rotunda, in a former Bentalls furniture depository building (a local landmark), includes a bowling alley, fitness centre, a 15-screen Odeon multiplex cinema and a few restaurants.
The ancient market is still held daily in the Market Place, including such produce as fish, jewellery, exotic foods, local foods and flowers.
Kingston's civic buildings include Kingston Museum, public library, modern Crown Court, smaller County Court and the Guildhall. The Guildhall is located by the part-culverted mouth of the Hogsmill River, and houses Kingston Council and magistrates' court. A short distance away is the County Hall Building which houses the main offices of Surrey County Council. From 1893 to 1965, before Kingston became one of the 32 London boroughs of Greater London, it was the county town of Surrey following the period of 1791–1893 when Newington had this role. Guildford has officially reclaimed this ancient, now ceremonial title as Kingston is no longer administered by Surrey.
Kingston's main open space is the River Thames, with its lively frontage of bars and restaurants. Downstream there is a walk through Canbury Gardens towards Teddington Lock. Upstream there is a promenade crossing the Hogsmill river and reaching almost to Surbiton. Eagle Brewery Wharf is a council-owned public space located on the riverside. Across Kingston Bridge is a tree lined river bank fronting the expanse of Hampton Court Park.
Kingston has many pubs and restaurants and several public houses in the centre have become restaurants or bars. The more traditional pubs tend to be in the northern part of the town (Canbury) and include The Canbury Arms, Park Tavern, The Wych Elm and Willoughby Arms. Further south are found the Druid's Head, the Spring Grove, The Cricketers, The Albion Tavern, The Duke of Buckingham, and several small local pubs around Fairfield. The Druid's Head is notable as one of the first taverns to make syllabub, the famous dessert, in the 18th century. There are several Chinese, Indian, Thai and Italian restaurants.
The local newspapers are the weekly Surrey Comet, which celebrated its 150th year in 2004, and the Kingston Guardian.
In 2010 retail footprint research, Kingston ranked 25th in terms of retail expenditure in the UK at £810 million, equal to Covent Garden and just ahead of Southampton. This puts it as generating the fifth highest level of retail sales in Greater London, passing Croydon, with just four West End alternatives ahead. In 2005, Kingston was 24th with £864 million, and 3rd in London. In a 2015 study by CACI, Kingston was ranked 28th in the UK in the Hot 100 Retail Locations - and the second highest in Greater London after Croydon. In 2018, Kingston was ranked joint 5th in the UK by Knight Frank in the "High Street Investment Ranking", only bettered by Cambridge, Bath, Chichester and Reading.
In 2013 Kingston became the location for a local currency scheme, designed to boost and strengthen the local economy in Kingston, as part of the Transition towns initiative. The Kingston pound began as a digital currency, and from 2018 existed in paper format, with denominations of K£1;K£5;K£10;and K£20 designed by graphic design students from Kingston University. These were taken out of circulation in 2021, but have been sold to many collectors all over the world. The Kingston Pound is a 'tagged' sterling that can be exchanged either way on a 1 for 1 basis without any penalty.
As of 2011, Kingston upon Thames has the fourth highest retail turnover for comparison goods in Greater London, £432 million annually, only bettered by the West End, Shepherd's Bush and Stratford. As of 2012, Kingston has 276,438 square metres (2,975,550 sq ft) of total town centre floorspace, the 3rd highest in London.
A notable dramatic arts venue is the Rose Theatre, opened on 16 January 2008 and seating about 900 people. The audience are arranged around the semi-circular stage. All Saints Church is host to classical choral and music concerts mostly on Saturdays and houses a Frobenius organ. There are a number of choral societies including the Kingston Orpheus Choir and the Kingston Choral Society, an amateur symphony orchestra the Kingston Philharmonia, and the Kingston and District Chamber Music Society. A number of annual festivals are organised by the Council and Kingston Arts Council including Kingston Readers' Festival, Think-in-Kingston and the Festival of the Voice. Kingston University runs the Stanley Picker Gallery and Kingston Museum has a changing gallery on the first floor. A regular singing group at the Rose Theatre caters to schools and families.
John Galsworthy the author was born on Kingston Hill and Jacqueline Wilson grew up, and went to school in Kingston and still lives there today. Both are commemorated at Kingston University – Galsworthy in the newest building and Wilson in the main hall. Also commemorated at the university is photographer Eadweard Muybridge who was born at Kingston and changed the spelling of his first name in reference to the name of the Saxon king on the Coronation Stone. He was a pioneer in the photography of the moving image. R. C. Sherriff the playwright is also associated with Kingston, writing his first play to support Kingston Rowing Club. An earlier writer born in Kingston was John Cleland.
Kingston has been covered in literature, film and television. It is where the comic Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome begins; cannons aimed against the Martians in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds are positioned on Kingston Hill; in The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence the youngest Brangwen dreams of a job in Kingston upon Thames in a long, lyrical passage; Mr. Knightly in Emma by Jane Austen regularly visits Kingston, although the narrative never follows him there.
Fine art is also a prominent feature in the history of Kingston. Both John Hoyland and Jeremy Moon worked from permanent studios in Kingston and many artists and designers have studied at the university including Fiona Banner, John Bratby, David Nash and Jasper Morrison.
Early in his music career, the guitarist and singer-songwriter Eric Clapton spent time busking in Kingston upon Thames, having grown up and studied in the area. Rock band Cardiacs were formed in the town.
Recently, a scene from Mujhse Dosti Karoge, a Bollywood film starring Hrithik Roshan as the leading actor, was filmed by the toppled telephone boxes sculpture in Old London Road.
The 1974 Doctor Who story "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" used several locations in the town for filming. The 2008 series of Primeval, shown on ITV1 in January, featured almost an entire episode filmed inside the Bentall Centre and John Lewis department stores. Kingston featured in Primeval again in May 2009 with several scenes shot in and around the Market Place. Nipper, the famous "His Master's Voice" (HMV) dog, is buried in the town under Lloyds Bank. His owners lived nearby in Fife Road.
Kingston Green Fair was held annually from 1987 to 2008 in Canbury Gardens, next to the river, on the Spring Bank Holiday. The word "Green" in the title refers to the ethos of the fair as promoting sustainable development. For instance no meat or other products derived from dead animals were allowed to be sold, and no electricity was permitted on the site unless generated by wind, sun, or bicycle power.
One of the more unusual sights in Kingston is Out of Order by David Mach, a sculpture in the form of twelve disused red telephone boxes that have been tipped up to lean against one another in an arrangement resembling dominoes. The work was commissioned in 1988 as part of the landscaping for the new Relief Road, and was described by its creator as "anti-minimalist".
Kingston is principally served by Kingston railway station, which opened in 1863.
The station is in London fare zone 6 and is served by South Western Railway trains from London Waterloo. Trains to Waterloo link Kingston directly to destinations such as Wimbledon, Clapham Junction and Vauxhall. Eastbound trains travel to Shepperton via Teddington, Hampton and Sunbury. Eastbound trains also travel on the Kingston loop line towards Teddington, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham and Richmond, after which trains continue towards Waterloo. From Waterloo, trains to Kingston are advertised towards "Shepperton" and "Strawberry Hill".
A nearby station in Norbiton (in fare zone 5) is on the same lines.
Nearby Surbiton station - originally named Kingston when it opened in 1838 - is on the South West Main Line in London fare zone 6. Surbiton is also served by South Western Railway trains from Waterloo. Southbound services link Surbiton to destinations in Surrey and Hampshire, such as Hampton Court, Guildford, Woking and Basingstoke. The station building at Surbiton was built in 1937, designed in Art Deco style by James Robb Scott. It is Grade II listed.
Kingston is served by two bus stations, Cromwell Road and Fairfield, and a large number of bus stops, with destinations across Greater London and Surrey including links directly to Heathrow Airport.
The Kingston Bypass passes to the south and east of Kingston. The bypass carries the A3, which links the area to Wandsworth, Clapham and the City of London to the north. To the south, the A3 runs to Portsmouth via Guildford and Petersfield.
A portion of the bypass carries the A309 to Thames Ditton, Hampton Court and the A308.
There are several radial routes including:
In the 1960s, planners proposed a partially elevated ring road encircling the town centre, to alleviate congestion on major shopping streets and traffic heading towards Kingston Bridge. After objections from local residents, an interim one-way system was implemented in July 1963. Following this, the Kingston Relief Road was constructed in Kingston town centre in the late 1980s. Commonly known as the "Kingston one-way system", the road encircles the town centre, allowing for major shopping streets such as Clarence Street to be pedestrianised. On the western side of the town centre, the road passes underneath John Lewis Kingston before crossing the River Thames via Kingston Bridge. As part of the project, two bus stations were constructed, cycle lanes installed and several artworks commissioned including Out of Order by David Mach and River Celebration by Carole Hodgson.
Kingston Town End and Kingston Turks piers are situated in Kingston. Turk Launches operates a Summer-only river tour between Hampton Court and Richmond St Helena.
There is a network of cycle lanes throughout Kingston linking the area to destinations throughout south-west London and England.
Key routes include:
Kingston is the location of Kingston University and Kingston College. Primary schools in the town include Latchmere School, Fernhill School, St Luke's School, King Athelstan School and St Agatha's Catholic Primary School. Secondary schools in the town include The Kingston Academy, Tiffin School, Tiffin Girls' School and Kingston Grammar School, all of which have large catchment areas across Greater London and Surrey.
The growth and development of Kingston Polytechnic, and its transformation into Kingston University in 1992, has made Kingston a university town.
The 12th-century All Saints Church serves the Church of England parish of Kingston which lies ecclesiastically in the Diocese of Southwark, although there has been a church in Kingston since at least 838. The suffragan or Area Bishop of Kingston is the Rt Rev Dr Richard Cheetham. Other Anglican churches in Kingston, of more recent date, are St John the Evangelist and St Luke.
Kingston lies in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark, and there is a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to Saint Agatha.
Kingston is also the home of the Kingston Surbiton & District Synagogue. It also has a Quaker meeting house, a Mosque and a Sikh Gurdwara.
Lady Booth Road, formerly Fairfield Road, is named to commemorate the former location of the Salvation Army citadel.
Kingston is the home of four association football clubs, Chelsea F.C. Women who play at the Kingsmeadow Stadium, Corinthian-Casuals and Kingstonian who play in Tolworth, and Chessington & Hook United who play in Chessington. Chelsea F.C. Women play in the FA Women's Super League, whereas Kingstonian, Corinthian-Casuals and Chessington & Hook United are non-league clubs.
Kingston Athletic Club and Polytechnic Harriers are based at the neighbouring Kingsmeadow athletics stadium. This stadium has a 400m track which is floodlit, a gym and 5-a-side football facilities. Kingston Rugby Club is based on the outskirts of the town, and Kingston Rowing Club (founded in 1858) is based in Canbury Gardens on the River Thames. The Club holds two large timed race events (HEADs) in the Spring and Autumn. Kingston Regatta takes place on the river just above the bridge over a weekend in early July.
The town has a large leisure centre next to Fairfield named the Kingfisher Centre, which contains an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium. Sport in Kingston is promoted and encouraged by Sport Kingston, an organisation funded by the Royal Borough of Kingston.
Kingston Wildcats School of Basketball is a community basketball development club that practices and plays its home fixtures at Chessington School, competing in the Surrey League and Basketball England National League.
Prior to the opening of the games, Kingston hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay on two occasions with the flame travelling through the borough on 24 July 2012 and aboard the Gloriana in a cauldron on 27 July 2012 en route to the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony. The borough was the setting for four cycling events during the Olympics, the men's road race, women's road race, men's road time trial and women's road time trial.
Following the games, the London–Surrey Classic professional road bicycle race ran through the town from 2013 to 2018, using a similar course to the Olympic road race. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the race will not return to Kingston, with the RideLondon festival using the roads of Essex instead.
Kingston is 3 miles (5 km) south-east of Twickenham, 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Walton-on-Thames, and 6 miles (10 km) north-west of Sutton.
Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Oldenburg in Germany since 2010. It also has been historically twinned with Delft in the Netherlands. Since 2016, Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kingston upon Thames (hyphenated until 1965, colloquially known as Kingston) is a town in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, England. It is situated on the River Thames and 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Charing Cross. It is notable as the ancient market town in which Saxon kings were crowned and today is the administrative centre of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Historically in the county of Surrey, the ancient parish of Kingston became absorbed in the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, reformed in 1835. From 1893 to 2021 it was the location of Surrey County Council, extraterritorially in terms of local government administration since 1965, when Kingston became a part of Greater London.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Today, most of the town centre is part of the KT1 postcode area, but some areas north of Kingston railway station are within KT2 and SW15, as well as parts of New Malden has SW20. The United Kingdom Census 2011 recorded the population of the town (comprising the four wards of Canbury, Grove, Norbiton and Tudor) as 43,013, while the borough overall counted 175,470. Kingston is identified as a metropolitan centre in the London Plan and is one of the biggest retail centres in the UK, receiving 18 million visitors a year. It is also home to Kingston University.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kingston was called Cyninges tun in 838 AD, Chingestune in 1086, Kingeston in 1164, Kyngeston super Tamisiam in 1321 and Kingestowne upon Thames in 1589. The name means 'the king's manor or estate' from the Old English words cyning and tun. It belonged to the king in Saxon times and was the earliest royal borough.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The first surviving record of Kingston is from AD 838 as the site of a meeting between King Egbert of Wessex and Ceolnoth, Archbishop of Canterbury. Kingston lay on the boundary between the ancient kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, until in the early tenth century when King Athelstan united both to create the kingdom of England. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, two tenth-century kings were consecrated in Kingston: Æthelstan (925), and Æthelred the Unready (978). There are certain other kings who are said to have been crowned there, but for whom the evidence (including the writings of Florence of Worcester and Ralph de Diceto) is less substantial: Edward the Elder (902), Edmund I (939), Eadred (946), Eadwig (956), Edgar the Peaceful (circa 960) and Edward the Martyr (975). It was later thought that the coronations were conducted in the chapel of St Mary, which collapsed in 1730. Tradition dating to the 18th century holds that a large stone recovered from the ruins played a part in the coronations. It was initially used as a mounting block, but in 1850 it was moved to a more dignified place in the market before finally being moved to its current location in the grounds of the Guildhall.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From Medieval times Shrovetide Football was played annually at Kingston upon Thames and in surrounding towns including Richmond and Twickenham. The windows of the houses and shops were boarded up and from 12 noon the inhabitants would kick several balls around the town before retiring to the public houses. The last game was played in 1866, by which time the urban development of the town meant it caused too much damage and the custom was outlawed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kingston upon Thames formed an ancient parish in the Kingston hundred of Surrey. The parish of Kingston upon Thames covered a large area including Hook, Kew, New Malden, Petersham, Richmond, Surbiton, Thames Ditton and East Molesey.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The town of Kingston was granted a charter by King John in 1200, but the oldest one to survive is from 1208 and this document is housed in the town's archives. Other charters were issued by later kings, including Edward IV's charter that gave the town the status of a borough in 1481.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The borough covered a much smaller area than the ancient parish, although as new parishes were split off the borough and parish eventually became identical in 1894. The borough was reformed by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, becoming the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames (then spelt with hyphens). It had been known as a Royal borough through custom and the right to the title was confirmed by George V in 1927. Kingston upon Thames was the seat of Surrey County Council when it moved from Newington in 1893 through until 2021 despite not being governed by it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1965, the local government of Greater London was reorganised and the municipal borough was abolished. Its former area was merged with that of the Municipal Borough of Surbiton and the Municipal Borough of Malden and Coombe, to form the London Borough of Kingston upon Thames. At the request of Kingston upon Thames London Borough Council another royal charter was granted by Queen Elizabeth II entitling it to continue using the title \"Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames\" for the new borough.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Kingston was built at the first crossing point of the Thames upstream from London Bridge and a bridge still exists at the same site. It was this 'great bridge' that gave it its early importance in the 13th century. Kingston was occupied by the Romans, and later it was either a royal residence or a royal demesne. There is a record of a council held there in 838, at which Egbert of Wessex, King of Wessex, and his son Ethelwulf of Wessex were present. In the Domesday Book it was held by William the Conqueror. Its domesday assets were: a church, five mills, four fisheries worth 10s, 27 ploughs, 40 acres (16 ha) of meadow, woodland worth six hogs. It rendered £31 10s (£31.50).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1730, the chapel containing the royal effigies collapsed, burying the sexton, who was digging a grave, the sexton's daughter and another person. The daughter survived this accident and was her father's successor as sexton. Kingston sent members to early Parliaments, until a petition by the inhabitants prayed to be relieved from the burden. Another chapel, the collegiate chapel of St Mary Magdalene, The Lovekyn Chapel, still exists. It was founded in 1309 by a former mayor of London, Edward Lovekyn. It is the only private chantry chapel to survive the Reformation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "With the coming of the railway in the 1830s, there was much building development to the south of the town. Much of this became the new town of Surbiton, but the Surbiton Park estate, built in the grounds of Surbiton Place in the 1850s, remained part of Kingston during the period of the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A permanent military presence was established in the borough with the completion of The Barracks in 1875.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kingston evolved as a market town from the Saxon period, with goods transported on the Thames and over land via the crossing point. Rights to hold markets were amongst the liberties granted by the royal charter of 1208 and the market formally established in 1242. A horse fair was held at a site on the downstream side of the river north of the bridge and a market extended from there to around the church by the 17th century and further south towards the course of the Hogsmill River. Goods traded included oats, wheat, rye, malt, apples and other fruit, flowers, wool, leather and cheese. Cattle, meat and fish were also traded. The regular Saturday market was supplemented by a Wednesday market in 1662. In addition to markets, regular fairs were held. Local industries included pottery, brick making, tanning, leather-working, fishing, milling, brewing and boat-building.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The presence of fabric and wood-working craft skills associated with boat-building was a factor in the choice of Kingston as the site chosen by Tommy Sopwith to expand production of early aircraft from Sopwith Aviation's origins at Brooklands. Well known aviation personalities Sydney Camm, Harry Hawker and Tommy Sopwith were responsible for much of Kingston's achievements in aviation. For much of the 20th century, Kingston was a major military aircraft manufacturing centre specialising in fighter aircraft – first with Sopwith Aviation, H G Hawker Engineering, later Hawker Aircraft, Hawker Siddeley and eventually British Aerospace. The renowned Sopwith Camel, Hawker Fury, Hurricane, Hunter and Harrier jump jet were all designed and built in the town and examples of all of these aircraft can be seen today at the nearby Brooklands Museum in Weybridge. British Aerospace finally closed its Lower Ham Road factory in 1992; part of the site was subsequently redeveloped for housing but the riverside part houses a community centre and sports complex.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Following the construction of the Kingston Relief Road (commonly known as the \"Kingston one-way system\") in 1989, major shopping streets in the town centre and the historic Market Place were pedestrianised. Two major commercial developments were also built in Kingston town centre - with John Lewis Kingston department store opening in 1990 and the Bentall Centre shopping centre opening in 1992. In the early 2000s, the Charter Quay development south of Kingston Bridge completed the riverside walk, as well as adding bars, restaurants and the Rose Theatre, which opened in 2008 with Sir Peter Hall as the director. Also, in 2001, the old Kingston bus garage and bus station, closed the previous year, was demolished and the site redeveloped as the Rotunda complex, with an Odeon Cinema, restaurants and tenpin bowling.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Kingston straddles two Parliamentary constituencies: the area north of the railway line is part of Richmond Park, which is represented by Sarah Olney of the Liberal Democrats, and the area south of the railway line (including the ancient town centre) is part of Kingston and Surbiton which is represented by Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats.",
"title": "Governance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Central Kingston is a busy, largely pedestrian and predominantly retail centre, with a small number of commercial offices and civic buildings.",
"title": "Notable locations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The shopping centre includes a shopping mall, \"The Bentall Centre\", containing the Bentalls department store and large branches of chain stores found in many British high streets. There is a large branch of the John Lewis department store group, with a Waitrose supermarket in the basement. A smaller 1960s shopping centre called Eden Walk exists nearby. The Rotunda, in a former Bentalls furniture depository building (a local landmark), includes a bowling alley, fitness centre, a 15-screen Odeon multiplex cinema and a few restaurants.",
"title": "Notable locations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The ancient market is still held daily in the Market Place, including such produce as fish, jewellery, exotic foods, local foods and flowers.",
"title": "Notable locations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kingston's civic buildings include Kingston Museum, public library, modern Crown Court, smaller County Court and the Guildhall. The Guildhall is located by the part-culverted mouth of the Hogsmill River, and houses Kingston Council and magistrates' court. A short distance away is the County Hall Building which houses the main offices of Surrey County Council. From 1893 to 1965, before Kingston became one of the 32 London boroughs of Greater London, it was the county town of Surrey following the period of 1791–1893 when Newington had this role. Guildford has officially reclaimed this ancient, now ceremonial title as Kingston is no longer administered by Surrey.",
"title": "Notable locations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kingston's main open space is the River Thames, with its lively frontage of bars and restaurants. Downstream there is a walk through Canbury Gardens towards Teddington Lock. Upstream there is a promenade crossing the Hogsmill river and reaching almost to Surbiton. Eagle Brewery Wharf is a council-owned public space located on the riverside. Across Kingston Bridge is a tree lined river bank fronting the expanse of Hampton Court Park.",
"title": "Notable locations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kingston has many pubs and restaurants and several public houses in the centre have become restaurants or bars. The more traditional pubs tend to be in the northern part of the town (Canbury) and include The Canbury Arms, Park Tavern, The Wych Elm and Willoughby Arms. Further south are found the Druid's Head, the Spring Grove, The Cricketers, The Albion Tavern, The Duke of Buckingham, and several small local pubs around Fairfield. The Druid's Head is notable as one of the first taverns to make syllabub, the famous dessert, in the 18th century. There are several Chinese, Indian, Thai and Italian restaurants.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The local newspapers are the weekly Surrey Comet, which celebrated its 150th year in 2004, and the Kingston Guardian.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2010 retail footprint research, Kingston ranked 25th in terms of retail expenditure in the UK at £810 million, equal to Covent Garden and just ahead of Southampton. This puts it as generating the fifth highest level of retail sales in Greater London, passing Croydon, with just four West End alternatives ahead. In 2005, Kingston was 24th with £864 million, and 3rd in London. In a 2015 study by CACI, Kingston was ranked 28th in the UK in the Hot 100 Retail Locations - and the second highest in Greater London after Croydon. In 2018, Kingston was ranked joint 5th in the UK by Knight Frank in the \"High Street Investment Ranking\", only bettered by Cambridge, Bath, Chichester and Reading.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2013 Kingston became the location for a local currency scheme, designed to boost and strengthen the local economy in Kingston, as part of the Transition towns initiative. The Kingston pound began as a digital currency, and from 2018 existed in paper format, with denominations of K£1;K£5;K£10;and K£20 designed by graphic design students from Kingston University. These were taken out of circulation in 2021, but have been sold to many collectors all over the world. The Kingston Pound is a 'tagged' sterling that can be exchanged either way on a 1 for 1 basis without any penalty.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "As of 2011, Kingston upon Thames has the fourth highest retail turnover for comparison goods in Greater London, £432 million annually, only bettered by the West End, Shepherd's Bush and Stratford. As of 2012, Kingston has 276,438 square metres (2,975,550 sq ft) of total town centre floorspace, the 3rd highest in London.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A notable dramatic arts venue is the Rose Theatre, opened on 16 January 2008 and seating about 900 people. The audience are arranged around the semi-circular stage. All Saints Church is host to classical choral and music concerts mostly on Saturdays and houses a Frobenius organ. There are a number of choral societies including the Kingston Orpheus Choir and the Kingston Choral Society, an amateur symphony orchestra the Kingston Philharmonia, and the Kingston and District Chamber Music Society. A number of annual festivals are organised by the Council and Kingston Arts Council including Kingston Readers' Festival, Think-in-Kingston and the Festival of the Voice. Kingston University runs the Stanley Picker Gallery and Kingston Museum has a changing gallery on the first floor. A regular singing group at the Rose Theatre caters to schools and families.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "John Galsworthy the author was born on Kingston Hill and Jacqueline Wilson grew up, and went to school in Kingston and still lives there today. Both are commemorated at Kingston University – Galsworthy in the newest building and Wilson in the main hall. Also commemorated at the university is photographer Eadweard Muybridge who was born at Kingston and changed the spelling of his first name in reference to the name of the Saxon king on the Coronation Stone. He was a pioneer in the photography of the moving image. R. C. Sherriff the playwright is also associated with Kingston, writing his first play to support Kingston Rowing Club. An earlier writer born in Kingston was John Cleland.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kingston has been covered in literature, film and television. It is where the comic Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome begins; cannons aimed against the Martians in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds are positioned on Kingston Hill; in The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence the youngest Brangwen dreams of a job in Kingston upon Thames in a long, lyrical passage; Mr. Knightly in Emma by Jane Austen regularly visits Kingston, although the narrative never follows him there.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Fine art is also a prominent feature in the history of Kingston. Both John Hoyland and Jeremy Moon worked from permanent studios in Kingston and many artists and designers have studied at the university including Fiona Banner, John Bratby, David Nash and Jasper Morrison.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Early in his music career, the guitarist and singer-songwriter Eric Clapton spent time busking in Kingston upon Thames, having grown up and studied in the area. Rock band Cardiacs were formed in the town.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Recently, a scene from Mujhse Dosti Karoge, a Bollywood film starring Hrithik Roshan as the leading actor, was filmed by the toppled telephone boxes sculpture in Old London Road.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The 1974 Doctor Who story \"Invasion of the Dinosaurs\" used several locations in the town for filming. The 2008 series of Primeval, shown on ITV1 in January, featured almost an entire episode filmed inside the Bentall Centre and John Lewis department stores. Kingston featured in Primeval again in May 2009 with several scenes shot in and around the Market Place. Nipper, the famous \"His Master's Voice\" (HMV) dog, is buried in the town under Lloyds Bank. His owners lived nearby in Fife Road.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kingston Green Fair was held annually from 1987 to 2008 in Canbury Gardens, next to the river, on the Spring Bank Holiday. The word \"Green\" in the title refers to the ethos of the fair as promoting sustainable development. For instance no meat or other products derived from dead animals were allowed to be sold, and no electricity was permitted on the site unless generated by wind, sun, or bicycle power.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "One of the more unusual sights in Kingston is Out of Order by David Mach, a sculpture in the form of twelve disused red telephone boxes that have been tipped up to lean against one another in an arrangement resembling dominoes. The work was commissioned in 1988 as part of the landscaping for the new Relief Road, and was described by its creator as \"anti-minimalist\".",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Kingston is principally served by Kingston railway station, which opened in 1863.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The station is in London fare zone 6 and is served by South Western Railway trains from London Waterloo. Trains to Waterloo link Kingston directly to destinations such as Wimbledon, Clapham Junction and Vauxhall. Eastbound trains travel to Shepperton via Teddington, Hampton and Sunbury. Eastbound trains also travel on the Kingston loop line towards Teddington, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham and Richmond, after which trains continue towards Waterloo. From Waterloo, trains to Kingston are advertised towards \"Shepperton\" and \"Strawberry Hill\".",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "A nearby station in Norbiton (in fare zone 5) is on the same lines.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Nearby Surbiton station - originally named Kingston when it opened in 1838 - is on the South West Main Line in London fare zone 6. Surbiton is also served by South Western Railway trains from Waterloo. Southbound services link Surbiton to destinations in Surrey and Hampshire, such as Hampton Court, Guildford, Woking and Basingstoke. The station building at Surbiton was built in 1937, designed in Art Deco style by James Robb Scott. It is Grade II listed.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Kingston is served by two bus stations, Cromwell Road and Fairfield, and a large number of bus stops, with destinations across Greater London and Surrey including links directly to Heathrow Airport.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The Kingston Bypass passes to the south and east of Kingston. The bypass carries the A3, which links the area to Wandsworth, Clapham and the City of London to the north. To the south, the A3 runs to Portsmouth via Guildford and Petersfield.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "A portion of the bypass carries the A309 to Thames Ditton, Hampton Court and the A308.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "There are several radial routes including:",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In the 1960s, planners proposed a partially elevated ring road encircling the town centre, to alleviate congestion on major shopping streets and traffic heading towards Kingston Bridge. After objections from local residents, an interim one-way system was implemented in July 1963. Following this, the Kingston Relief Road was constructed in Kingston town centre in the late 1980s. Commonly known as the \"Kingston one-way system\", the road encircles the town centre, allowing for major shopping streets such as Clarence Street to be pedestrianised. On the western side of the town centre, the road passes underneath John Lewis Kingston before crossing the River Thames via Kingston Bridge. As part of the project, two bus stations were constructed, cycle lanes installed and several artworks commissioned including Out of Order by David Mach and River Celebration by Carole Hodgson.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Kingston Town End and Kingston Turks piers are situated in Kingston. Turk Launches operates a Summer-only river tour between Hampton Court and Richmond St Helena.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "There is a network of cycle lanes throughout Kingston linking the area to destinations throughout south-west London and England.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Key routes include:",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Kingston is the location of Kingston University and Kingston College. Primary schools in the town include Latchmere School, Fernhill School, St Luke's School, King Athelstan School and St Agatha's Catholic Primary School. Secondary schools in the town include The Kingston Academy, Tiffin School, Tiffin Girls' School and Kingston Grammar School, all of which have large catchment areas across Greater London and Surrey.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The growth and development of Kingston Polytechnic, and its transformation into Kingston University in 1992, has made Kingston a university town.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The 12th-century All Saints Church serves the Church of England parish of Kingston which lies ecclesiastically in the Diocese of Southwark, although there has been a church in Kingston since at least 838. The suffragan or Area Bishop of Kingston is the Rt Rev Dr Richard Cheetham. Other Anglican churches in Kingston, of more recent date, are St John the Evangelist and St Luke.",
"title": "Religious sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kingston lies in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark, and there is a Roman Catholic Church dedicated to Saint Agatha.",
"title": "Religious sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Kingston is also the home of the Kingston Surbiton & District Synagogue. It also has a Quaker meeting house, a Mosque and a Sikh Gurdwara.",
"title": "Religious sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Lady Booth Road, formerly Fairfield Road, is named to commemorate the former location of the Salvation Army citadel.",
"title": "Religious sites"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Kingston is the home of four association football clubs, Chelsea F.C. Women who play at the Kingsmeadow Stadium, Corinthian-Casuals and Kingstonian who play in Tolworth, and Chessington & Hook United who play in Chessington. Chelsea F.C. Women play in the FA Women's Super League, whereas Kingstonian, Corinthian-Casuals and Chessington & Hook United are non-league clubs.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Kingston Athletic Club and Polytechnic Harriers are based at the neighbouring Kingsmeadow athletics stadium. This stadium has a 400m track which is floodlit, a gym and 5-a-side football facilities. Kingston Rugby Club is based on the outskirts of the town, and Kingston Rowing Club (founded in 1858) is based in Canbury Gardens on the River Thames. The Club holds two large timed race events (HEADs) in the Spring and Autumn. Kingston Regatta takes place on the river just above the bridge over a weekend in early July.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The town has a large leisure centre next to Fairfield named the Kingfisher Centre, which contains an indoor swimming pool and gymnasium. Sport in Kingston is promoted and encouraged by Sport Kingston, an organisation funded by the Royal Borough of Kingston.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Kingston Wildcats School of Basketball is a community basketball development club that practices and plays its home fixtures at Chessington School, competing in the Surrey League and Basketball England National League.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Prior to the opening of the games, Kingston hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay on two occasions with the flame travelling through the borough on 24 July 2012 and aboard the Gloriana in a cauldron on 27 July 2012 en route to the Olympic Stadium for the opening ceremony. The borough was the setting for four cycling events during the Olympics, the men's road race, women's road race, men's road time trial and women's road time trial.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Following the games, the London–Surrey Classic professional road bicycle race ran through the town from 2013 to 2018, using a similar course to the Olympic road race. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, the race will not return to Kingston, with the RideLondon festival using the roads of Essex instead.",
"title": "Sport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Kingston is 3 miles (5 km) south-east of Twickenham, 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Walton-on-Thames, and 6 miles (10 km) north-west of Sutton.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Oldenburg in Germany since 2010. It also has been historically twinned with Delft in the Netherlands. Since 2016, Kingston upon Thames has been twinned with Jaffna in Sri Lanka.",
"title": "Town twinning"
}
] |
Kingston upon Thames is a town in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames, southwest London, England. It is situated on the River Thames and 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Charing Cross. It is notable as the ancient market town in which Saxon kings were crowned and today is the administrative centre of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Historically in the county of Surrey, the ancient parish of Kingston became absorbed in the Municipal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, reformed in 1835. From 1893 to 2021 it was the location of Surrey County Council, extraterritorially in terms of local government administration since 1965, when Kingston became a part of Greater London. Today, most of the town centre is part of the KT1 postcode area, but some areas north of Kingston railway station are within KT2 and SW15, as well as parts of New Malden has SW20. The United Kingdom Census 2011 recorded the population of the town as 43,013, while the borough overall counted 175,470. Kingston is identified as a metropolitan centre in the London Plan and is one of the biggest retail centres in the UK, receiving 18 million visitors a year. It is also home to Kingston University.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_upon_Thames
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Karnataka
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Karnataka (/kərˈnɑːtəkə/; ISO: Karnāṭaka, Kannada: [kɐɾˈnaːʈɐkɐ], also known as Karunāḍu), formerly Mysore State /maɪˈsɔːr/, is a state in the southwestern region of India. It was formed as Mysore State on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, and renamed Karnataka in 1973. The state was part of the Carnatic region in British terminology. Its capital and largest city is Bengaluru (Bangalore).
Karnataka is bordered by the Lakshadweep Sea to the west, Goa to the northwest, Maharashtra to the north, Telangana to the northeast, Andhra Pradesh to the east, Tamil Nadu to the southeast, and Kerala to the southwest. It is the only southern state to have land borders with all of the other four southern Indian sister states. The state covers an area of 191,791 km (74,051 sq mi), or 5.83 percent of the total geographical area of India. It is the sixth-largest Indian state by area. With 61,130,704 inhabitants at the 2011 census, Karnataka is the eighth-largest state by population, comprising 31 districts. Kannada, one of the classical languages of India, is the most widely spoken and official language of the state. Other minority languages spoken include Urdu, Konkani, Marathi, Tulu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kodava and Beary. Karnataka also contains some of the only villages in India where Sanskrit is primarily spoken.
Though several etymologies have been suggested for the name Karnataka, the generally accepted one is that Karnataka is derived from the Kannada words karu and nādu, meaning "elevated land". Karu Nadu may also be read as karu, meaning "black" and nadu, meaning "region", as a reference to the black cotton soil found in the Bayalu Seeme region of the state. The British used the word Carnatic, sometimes Karnatak, to describe both sides of peninsular India, south of the Krishna.
With an antiquity that dates to the paleolithic, Karnataka has been home to some of the most powerful empires of ancient and medieval India. The philosophers and musical bards patronised by these empires launched socio-religious and literary movements which have endured to the present day. Karnataka has contributed significantly to both forms of Indian classical music, the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions.
The economy of Karnataka is the fifth-largest of any Indian state with ₹20.5 trillion (US$260 billion) in gross domestic product and a per capita GDP of ₹305,000 (US$3,800). Karnataka has the fifteenth-highest ranking among Indian states in Human Development Index.
Karnataka's pre-history goes back to a paleolithic hand-axe culture evidenced by discoveries of, among other things, hand axes and cleavers in the region. Evidence of neolithic and megalithic cultures have also been found in the state. Gold discovered in Harappa was found to be imported from mines in Karnataka, prompting scholars to hypothesise about contacts between ancient Karnataka and the Indus Valley civilisation c. 3300 BCE.
Prior to the third century BCE, most of Karnataka formed part of the Nanda Empire before coming under the Mauryan empire of Emperor Ashoka. Four centuries of Satavahana rule followed, allowing them to control large areas of Karnataka. The decline of Satavahana power led to the rise of the earliest native kingdoms, the Kadambas and the Western Gangas, marking the region's emergence as an independent political entity. The Kadamba Dynasty, founded by Mayurasharma, had its capital at Banavasi; the Western Ganga Dynasty was formed with Talakad as its capital.
These were also the first kingdoms to use Kannada in administration, as evidenced by the Halmidi inscription and a fifth-century copper coin discovered at Banavasi. These dynasties were followed by imperial Kannada empires such as the Badami Chalukyas, the Rashtrakuta Empire of Manyakheta and the Western Chalukya Empire, which ruled over large parts of the Deccan and had their capitals in what is now Karnataka. The Western Chalukyas patronised a unique style of architecture and Kannada literature which became a precursor to the Hoysala art of the 12th century. Parts of modern-day Southern Karnataka (Gangavadi) were occupied by the Chola Empire at the turn of the 11th century. The Cholas and the Hoysalas fought over the region in the early 12th century before it eventually came under Hoysala rule.
At the turn of the first millennium, the Hoysalas gained power in the region. Literature flourished during this time, which led to the emergence of distinctive Kannada literary metres, and the construction of temples and sculptures adhering to the Vesara style of architecture. The expansion of the Hoysala Empire brought minor parts of modern Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu under its rule. In the early 14th century, Harihara and Bukka Raya established the Vijayanagara empire with its capital, Hosapattana (later named Vijayanagara), on the banks of the Tungabhadra River in the modern Bellary district. Under the rule of Krishnadevaraya, a distinct form of literature and architecture evolved. The empire rose as a bulwark against Muslim advances into South India, which it completely controlled for over two centuries. In 1537, Kempe Gowda I, a chieftain of the Vijayanagara Empire, widely held as the founder of modern Bangalore, built a fort and established the area around it as Bengaluru Pete.
In 1565, Karnataka and the rest of South India experienced a major geopolitical shift when the Vijayanagara empire fell to a confederation of Islamic sultanates in the Battle of Talikota. The Bijapur Sultanate, which had risen after the demise of the Bahmani Sultanate of Bidar, soon took control of the Deccan; it was defeated by the Moghuls in the late 17th century. The Bahmani and Bijapur rulers encouraged Urdu and Persian literature and Indo-Saracenic architecture, the Gol Gumbaz being one of the high points of this style. During the sixteenth century, Konkani Hindus migrated to Karnataka, mostly from Salcette, Goa, while during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Goan Catholics migrated to North Canara and South Canara, especially from Bardes, Goa, as a result of food shortages, epidemics and heavy taxation imposed by the Portuguese.
In the period that followed, parts of northern Karnataka were ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Maratha Empire, the British, and other powers. In the south, the Mysore Kingdom, a former vassal of the Vijayanagara Empire, was briefly independent. With the death of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, Haidar Ali, the commander-in-chief of the Mysore army, gained control of the region. After his death, the kingdom was inherited by his son Tipu Sultan. To contain European expansion in South India, Haidar Ali and later Tipu Sultan fought four significant Anglo-Mysore Wars, the last of which resulted in Tippu Sultan's death and the incorporation of Mysore into the British Raj in 1799. The Kingdom of Mysore was restored to the Wodeyars and Mysore remained a princely state under the British Raj.
As the "doctrine of lapse" gave way to dissent and resistance from princely states across the country, Kittur Chennamma, Sangolli Rayanna and others spearheaded rebellions in Karnataka in 1830, nearly three decades before the Indian Rebellion of 1857. However, Kitturu was taken over by the British East India Company even before the doctrine was officially articulated by Lord Dalhousie in 1848. Other uprisings followed, such as the ones at Supa, Bagalkot, Shorapur, Nargund and Dandeli. These rebellions—which coincided with the Indian Rebellion of 1857—were led by Mundargi Bhimarao, Bhaskar Rao Bhave, the Halagali Bedas, Raja Venkatappa Nayaka and others. By the late 19th century, the independence movement had gained momentum; Karnad Sadashiva Rao, Aluru Venkata Raya, S. Nijalingappa, Kengal Hanumanthaiah, Nittoor Srinivasa Rau and others carried on the struggle into the early 20th century.
After India's independence, the Maharaja, Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, allowed his kingdom's accession to India. In 1950, Mysore became an Indian state of the same name; the former Maharaja served as its Rajpramukh (head of state) until 1975. Following the long-standing demand of the Ekikarana Movement, Kodagu- and Kannada-speaking regions from the adjoining states of Madras, Hyderabad and Bombay were incorporated into the Mysore state, under the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. The thus expanded state was renamed Karnataka, seventeen years later, on 1 November 1973. In the early 1900s through the post-independence era, industrial visionaries such as Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya, played an important role in the development of Karnataka's strong manufacturing and industrial base.
The state has three principal geographical zones:
The bulk of the state is in the Bayaluseeme region, the northern part of which is the second-largest arid region in India. The highest point in Karnataka is the Mullayanagiri hills in Chikmagalur district which has an altitude of 1,925 m (6,316 ft). The two main river systems of the state are the Krishna and its tributaries, the Bhima, Ghataprabha, Vedavathi, Malaprabha and Tungabhadra in North Karnataka, and the Kaveri and its tributaries, the Hemavati, Shimsha, Arkavati, Lakshmana Thirtha and Kabini, in South Karnataka. Most of these rivers flow out of Karnataka eastward, reaching the sea at the Bay of Bengal. Other prominent rivers such as the Sharavati in Shimoga and Netravati in Dakshina Kannada flow westward to the Lakshadweep Sea. A large number of dams and reservoirs are constructed across these rivers which richly add to the irrigation and hydroelectricity power generation capacities of the state.
Karnataka consists of four main types of geological formations – the Archean complex made up of Dharwad schists and granitic gneisses, the Proterozoic non-fossiliferous sedimentary formations of the Kaladgi and Bhima series, the Deccan trappean and intertrappean deposits and the tertiary and recent laterites and alluvial deposits. Laterite cappings that are found in many districts over the Deccan Traps were formed after the cessation of volcanic activity in the early tertiary period. Eleven groups of soil orders are found in Karnataka, viz. Entisols, Inceptisols, Mollisols, Spodosols, Alfisols, Ultisols, Oxisols, Aridisols, Vertisols, Andisols and Histosols. Depending on the agricultural capability of the soil, the soil types are divided into six types, viz. red, lateritic, black, alluvio-colluvial, forest and coastal soils.
About 38,284 km (14,782 sq mi) of Karnataka (i.e. 16% of the state's geographic area) is covered by forests. The forests are classified as reserved, protected, unclosed, village and private forests. The percentage of forested area is slightly less than the all-India average of about 23%, and significantly less than the 33% prescribed in the National Forest Policy.
Karnataka experiences four seasons. The winter in January and February is followed by summer between March and May, the monsoon season between June and September and the post-monsoon season from October till December. Meteorologically, Karnataka is divided into three zones – coastal, north interior and south interior. Of these, the coastal zone receives the heaviest rainfall with an average rainfall of about 3,638.5 mm (143 in) per annum, far in excess of the state average of 1,139 mm (45 in). Amagaon in Khanapura taluka of Belgaum district received 10,068 mm (396 in) of rainfall in 2010. In 2014 Kokalli in Sirsi taluka of Uttara Kannada district received 8,746 mm (344 in) of rainfall. Agumbe in Thirthahalli taluka and Hulikal of Hosanagara taluka in Shimoga district were the rainiest cities in Karnataka, situated in one of the wettest regions in the world.
The state is projected to warm about 2.0 °C (4 °F) by 2030. The monsoon is set to provide less rainfall. Agriculture in Karnataka is mostly rainfed as opposed to irrigated, making it highly vulnerable to expected changes in the monsoon. The highest recorded temperature was 45.6 °C (114 °F) in Raichuru district. The lowest recorded temperature was 2.8 °C (37 °F) at Bidar district.
Karnataka is home to a variety of wildlife. It has a recorded forest area of 38,720 km (14,950 sq mi) which constitutes 12.3% of the total geographical area of the state. These forests support 25% of the elephant and 10% of the tiger population of India. Many regions of Karnataka are as yet unexplored, so new species of flora and fauna are found periodically. The Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, includes the western region of Karnataka. The Bandipur and Nagarahole National Parks were included in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in 1986, a UNESCO designation. The Indian roller and the Indian elephant are recognised as the state bird and animal while sandalwood and the lotus are recognised as the state tree and flower respectively. Karnataka has five national parks: Anshi, Bandipur, Bannerghatta, Kudremukh and Nagarhole. It also has 27 wildlife sanctuaries of which seven are bird sanctuaries.
Wild animals that are found in Karnataka include the elephant, the tiger, the leopard, the gaur, the sambar deer, the chital or spotted deer, the muntjac, the bonnet macaque, the slender loris, the common palm civet, the small Indian civet, the sloth bear, the dhole, the striped hyena, the Bengal fox and the golden jackal. Some of the birds found here are the great hornbill, the Malabar pied hornbill, the Ceylon frogmouth, herons, ducks, kites, eagles, falcons, quails, partridges, lapwings, sandpipers, pigeons, doves, parakeets, cuckoos, owls, nightjars, swifts, kingfishers, bee-eaters and munias. Some species of trees found in Karnataka are Calophyllum tomentosum, Calophyllum wightianum, Garcinia cambogia, Garcinia morella, Alstonia scholaris, Flacourtia montana, Artocarpus hirsutus, Artocarpus lacucha, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, Grewia tiliifolia, Santalum album, Shorea talura, Emblica officinalis, Vitex altissima and Wrightia tinctoria. Wildlife in Karnataka is threatened by poaching, habitat destruction, human-wildlife conflict and pollution.
There are 31 districts in Karnataka. Each district (zila) is governed by a district commissioner (ziladar). The districts are further divided into sub-districts (talukas), which are governed by sub-commissioners (talukdars); sub-divisions comprise blocks (tehsils/hobli), which are governed by block development officers (tehsildars), which contain village councils (panchayats), town municipal councils (purasabhe), city municipal councils (nagarasabhe), and city municipal corporations (mahanagara palike).
According to the 2011 census of India, the total population of Karnataka was 61,095,297 of which 30,966,657 (50.7%) were male and 30,128,640 (49.3%) were female, or 1000 males for every 973 females. This represents a 15.60% increase over the population in 2001. The population density was 319 per km and 38.67% of the people lived in urban areas. The literacy rate was 75.36% with 82.47% of males and 68.08% of females being literate.
In 2007 the state had a birth rate of 2.2%, a death rate of 0.7%, an infant mortality rate of 5.5% and a maternal mortality rate of 0.2%. The total fertility rate was 2.2.
Karnataka's private sector speciality health care competes with the best in the world. Karnataka has also established a modicum of public health services having a better record of health care and child care than most other states of India. In spite of these advances, some parts of the state still suffer from the lack of primary health care.
Adi Shankara (788–820 CE) chose Sringeri in Karnataka to establish the first of his four mathas (monastery). Madhvacharya (1238–1317) was the chief proponent of Tattvavada (philosophy of reality), popularly known as Dvaita or Dualistic school of Hindu philosophy – one of the three most influential Vedanta philosophies. Madhvacharya was one of the important philosophers during the Bhakti movement. He was a pioneer in many ways, going against standard conventions and norms. According to tradition, Madhvacharya is believed to be the third incarnation of Vayu (Mukhyaprana), after Hanuman and Bhima. The Haridasa devotional movement is considered one of the turning points in the cultural history of India. Over a span of nearly six centuries, several saints and mystics helped shape the culture, philosophy, and art of South India and Karnataka in particular by exerting considerable spiritual influence over the masses and kingdoms that ruled South India.
This movement was ushered in by the Haridasas (literally "servants of Hari") and took shape in the 13th century – 14th century CE, period, prior to and during the early rule of the Vijayanagara empire. The main objective of this movement was to propagate the Dvaita philosophy of Madhvacharya (Madhva Siddhanta) to the masses through a literary medium known as Dasa Sahitya. Purandara dasa is widely recognised as the "Pithamaha" of Carnatic Music for his immense contribution. Ramanuja, the leading expounder of Vishishtadvaita, spent many years in Melkote. He came to Karnataka in 1098 CE and lived here until 1122 CE. He first lived in Tondanur and then moved to Melkote where the Cheluvanarayana Swamy Temple and a well-organised matha were built. He was patronised by the Hoysala king, Vishnuvardhana.
In the twelfth century, Lingayatism emerged in northern Karnataka as a protest against the rigidity of the prevailing social and caste system. Leading figures of this movement were Basava, Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu, who established the Anubhava Mantapa which was the centre of all religious and philosophical thoughts and discussions pertaining to Lingayats. These three social reformers did so by the literary means of "Vachana Sahitya" which is very famous for its simple, straight forward and easily understandable Kannada language. Lingayatism preached women equality by letting women wear Ishtalinga i.e. Symbol of god around their neck. Basava shunned the sharp hierarchical divisions that existed and sought to remove all distinctions between the hierarchically superior master class and the subordinate, servile class. He also supported inter-caste marriages and Kaay Ta tTatva of Basavanna. This was the basis of the Lingayat faith which today counts millions among its followers.
The Jain philosophy and literature have contributed immensely to the religious and cultural landscape of Karnataka.
Islam, which had an early presence on the west coast of India as early as the tenth century, gained a foothold in Karnataka with the rise of the Bahamani and Bijapur sultanates that ruled parts of Karnataka. Christianity reached Karnataka in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese and St. Francis Xavier in 1545.
Buddhism was popular in Karnataka during the first millennium in places such as Gulbarga and Banavasi. A chance discovery of edicts and several Mauryan relics at Sannati in Kalaburagi district in 1986 has proven that the Krishna River basin was once home to both Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism. There are Tibetan refugee camps in Karnataka.
Mysore Dasara is celebrated as the Nada habba (state festival) and this is marked by major festivities at Mysore. Bangalore Karaga, celebrated in the heart of Bangalore, is the second most important festival celebrated in Karnataka. Ugadi (Kannada New Year), Makara Sankranti (the harvest festival), Ganesh Chaturthi, Gowri Habba, Ram Navami, Nagapanchami, Basava Jayanthi, Deepavali, and Balipadyami are the other major festivals of Karnataka.
Languages of Karnataka (2011 census)
Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka, as the native language of 66.46% of its population as of 2011 and is one of the classical languages of India. Urdu is the second largest language, spoken by 10.83% of the population, and is the language of Muslims outside the coastal region. Telugu (5.84%) is a major language in areas bordering Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka as well as Bangalore, while Tamil (3.45%) is a major language of Bangalore and in the Kolar district. Marathi (3.29%) is concentrated in areas of Uttara Kannada, Belgaum and Bidar districts bordering Maharashtra. Lambadi is spoken by the Lambadis scattered throughout North Karnataka, while Hindi is spoken in Bangalore. Tulu (2.61%), Konkani (1.29%), and Malayalam (1.27%) are all found in linguistically diverse Coastal Karnataka, where a number of mixed and distinct dialects such as Are Bhashe, Beary Bhashe, and Nawayathi are found. Kodava Takk is the language of Kodagu.
Kannada played a crucial role in the creation of Karnataka: linguistic demographics played a major role in defining the new state in 1956. Tulu, Konkani and Kodava are other minor native languages that share a long history in the state. Urdu is spoken widely by the Muslim population. Less widely spoken languages include Beary bashe and certain languages such as Sankethi. Some of the regional languages in Karnataka are Tulu, Kodava, Konkani and Beary.
Kannada features a rich and ancient body of literature including religious and secular genre, covering topics as diverse as Jainism (such as Puranas), Lingayatism (such as Vachanas), Vaishnavism (such as Haridasa Sahitya) and modern literature. Evidence from edicts during the time of Ashoka (reigned 274–232 BCE) suggest that Buddhist literature influenced the Kannada script and its literature. The Halmidi inscription, the earliest attested full-length inscription in the Kannada language and script, dates from 450 CE, while the earliest available literary work, the Kavirajamarga, has been dated to 850 CE. References made in the Kavirajamarga, however, prove that Kannada literature flourished in the native composition metres such as Chattana, Beddande and Melvadu during earlier centuries. The classic refers to several earlier greats (purvacharyar) of Kannada poetry and prose.
Kuvempu, the renowned Kannada poet and writer who wrote Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate, the state anthem of Karnataka was the first recipient of the Karnataka Ratna, the highest civilian award bestowed by the Government of Karnataka. Contemporary Kannada literature has received considerable acknowledgement in the arena of Indian literature, with eight Kannada writers winning India's highest literary honour, the Jnanpith award.
Tulu is the majority language in the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada and is the second most spoken in the Udupi district. This region is also known as Tulu Nadu. Tulu Mahabharato, written by Arunabja in the Tigalari script, is the oldest surviving Tulu text. Tigalari script was used by Brahmins to write Sanskrit language. The use of the Kannada script for writing Tulu and non-availability of print in Tigalari script contributed to the marginalisation of Tigalari script.
In Karnataka Konkani is mostly spoken in the Uttara Kannada and Dakshina Kannada districts and in parts of Udupi, Konkani use the Devanagari Script (which is official)/Kannada script( Optional ) for writing as identified by government of Karnataka.
The Kodavas who mainly reside in the Kodagu district, speak Kodava Takk. Kodagu was a separate State with its own Chief Minister and Council of Ministers till 1956. Two regional variations of the language exist, the northern Mendale Takka and the southern Kiggaati Takka. Kodava Takk has its own script, Karnataka Kodava Sahitya Academy has accepted Dr IM Muthanna's Script which was developed in 1970 as the Official Script of Kodava Thakk. English is the medium of education in many schools and widely used for business communication in most private companies.
All of the state's languages are patronised and promoted by governmental and quasi-governmental bodies. The Kannada Sahitya Parishat and the Kannada Sahitya Akademi are responsible for the promotion of Kannada while the Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Akademi, the Tulu Sahitya Akademi and the Kodava Sahitya Akademi promote their respective languages.
Karnataka has a parliamentary system of government with two democratically elected houses, the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council. The Legislative Assembly consists of 224 members who are elected for five-year terms. The Legislative Council is a permanent body of 75 members with one-third (25 members) retiring every two years.
The government of Karnataka is headed by the Chief Minister who is chosen by the ruling party members of the Legislative Assembly. The Chief Minister, along with the council of ministers, executes the legislative agenda and exercises most of the executive powers. However, the constitutional and formal head of the state is the Governor who is appointed for a five-year term by the President of India on the advice of the Union government. The people of Karnataka also elect 28 members to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The members of the state Legislative Assembly elect 12 members to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.
For administrative purposes, Karnataka has been divided into four revenue divisions, 49 sub-divisions, 31 districts, 175 taluks and 745 hoblies / revenue circles. The administration in each district is headed by a Deputy Commissioner who belongs to the Indian Administrative Service and is assisted by a number of officers belonging to Karnataka state services. The Superintendent of Police, an officer belonging to the Indian Police Service and assisted by the officers of the Karnataka Police Service, is entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining law and order and related issues in each district. The Deputy Conservator of Forests, an officer belonging to the Indian Forest Service, is entrusted with the responsibility of managing forests, environment and wildlife of the district, he will be assisted by the officers belonging to Karnataka Forest Service and officers belonging to Karnataka Forest Subordinate Service. Sectoral development in the districts is looked after by the district head of each development department such as Public Works Department, Health, Education, Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, etc. The judiciary in the state consists of the Karnataka High Court (Attara Kacheri) in Bangalore, Hubballi-Dharwad, and Kalaburagi, district and session courts in each district and lower courts and judges at the taluk level.
Politics in Karnataka has been dominated by three political parties, the Indian National Congress, the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Politicians from Karnataka have played prominent roles in federal government of India with some of them having held the high positions of Prime Minister and Vice-President. Border disputes involving Karnataka's claim on the Kasaragod and Solapur districts and Maharashtra's claim on Belagavi are ongoing since the states reorganisation. The official emblem of Karnataka has a Ganda Berunda in the centre. Surmounting this are four lions facing the four directions, taken from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath. The emblem also carries two Sharabhas with the head of an elephant and the body of a lion.
Karnataka had an estimated GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) of about US$115.86 billion in the 2014–15 fiscal year. The state registered a GSDP growth rate of 7% for the year 2014–2015. Karnataka's contribution to India's GDP in the year 2014–15 was 7.54%. With GDP growth of 17.59% and per capita GDP growth of 16.04%, Karnataka is on the 6th position among all states and union territories. In an employment survey conducted for the year 2013–2014, the unemployment rate in Karnataka was 1.8% compared to the national rate of 4.9%. In 2011–2012, Karnataka had an estimated poverty ratio of 20.91% compared to the national ratio of 21.92%.
Nearly 56% of the workforce in Karnataka is engaged in agriculture and related activities. A total of 12.31 million hectares of land, or 64.6% of the state's total area, is cultivated. Much of the agricultural output is dependent on the southwest monsoon as only 26.5% of the sown area is irrigated.
Karnataka is the manufacturing hub for some of the largest public sector industries in India, including Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Bharat Earth Movers Limited and HMT (formerly Hindustan Machine Tools), which are based in Bangalore. Many of India's premier science and technology research centres, such as Indian Space Research Organisation, Central Power Research Institute, Bharat Electronics Limited and the Central Food Technological Research Institute, are also headquartered in Karnataka. Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited is an oil refinery, located in Mangalore.
The state has also begun to invest heavily in solar power centred on the Pavagada Solar Park. As of December 2017, the state has installed an estimated 2.2 gigawatts of block solar panelling and in January 2018 announced a tender to generate a further 1.2 gigawatts in the coming years: Karnataka Renewable Energy Development suggests that this will be based on 24 separate systems (or 'blocks') generating 50 megawatts each.
Since the 1980s, Karnataka has emerged as the pan-Indian leader in the field of IT (information technology). In 2007, there were nearly 2,000 firms operating in Karnataka. Many of them, including two of India's biggest software firms, Infosys and Wipro, are also headquartered in the state. Exports from these firms exceeded ₹500 billion (equivalent to ₹1.6 trillion or US$20 billion in 2023) in 2006–07, accounting for nearly 38% of all IT exports from India. The Nandi Hills area in the outskirts of Devanahalli is the site of the upcoming $22 billion, 50 km BIAL IT Investment Region, one of the largest infrastructure projects in the history of Karnataka. All this has earned the state capital, Bangalore, the sobriquet Silicon Valley of India.
Karnataka also leads the nation in biotechnology. It is home to India's largest biocluster, with 60% of the country's biotechnology firms being based here. The state has 18,000 hectares of land under flower cultivation, an upcoming industry which supplies flowers and ornamental plants worldwide.
Seven of India's banks, Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank, Corporation Bank, Vijaya Bank, Karnataka Bank, ING Vysya Bank and the State Bank of Mysore originated in this state. The coastal districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada have a branch for every 500 persons—the best distribution of banks in India. In March 2002, Karnataka had 4767 branches of different banks with each branch serving 11,000 persons, which is lower than the national average of 16,000.
A majority of the silk industry in India is headquartered in Karnataka, much of it in Doddaballapura in Bangalore Rural district and the state government intends to invest ₹700 million (equivalent to ₹1.4 billion or US$18 million in 2023) in a "Silk City" at Muddenahalli in Chikkaballapura district.
Air transport in Karnataka, as in the rest of the country, is still a fledgling but fast expanding sector. Karnataka has airports at Bangalore, Mangalore, Belgaum, Hubli, Hampi, Bellary, Gulbarga, and Mysore with international operations from Bangalore and Mangalore airports. Shimoga and Bijapur airports are being built under the UDAN Scheme.
Karnataka has a railway network with a total length of approximately 3,089 km (1,919 mi). Until the creation of the South-Western Railway Zone headquartered at Hubballi in 2003, the railway network in the state was in the Southern Railway zone, South-Central Railway Zone and Western Railway zone. Several parts of the state now come under the South Western Railway zone with 3 Railway Divisions at Bangalore, Mysore, Hubli, with the remainder under the Southern Railway zone and Konkan Railway Zone, which is considered one of India's biggest railway projects of the century due to the difficult terrain. Bangalore and other cities in the state are well-connected with intrastate and inter-state destinations.
Karnataka has 11 ports, including the New Mangalore Port, a major port and ten minor ports, of which three were operational in 2012. The New Mangalore port was incorporated as the ninth major port in India on 4 May 1974. This port handled 32.04 million tonnes of traffic in the fiscal year 2006–07 with 17.92 million tonnes of imports and 14.12 million tonnes of exports. The port also handled 1015 vessels including 18 cruise vessels during the year 2006–07. Foreigners can enter Mangalore through the New Mangalore Port with the help of Electronic visa (e-visa). Cruise ships from Europe, North America and UAE arrive at New Mangalore Port to visit the tourist places across Coastal Karnataka. The port of Mangalore is among the 4 major ports of India that receive over 25 international cruise ships every year.
The total lengths of National Highways and State Highways in Karnataka are 3,973 and 9,829 km (2,469 and 6,107 mi), respectively.
The state transport corporations, transports an average of 2.2 million passengers daily and employs about 25,000 people. The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) and The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) headquartered in Bangalore, The Kalyana Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (KKRTC) headquartered in Gulbarga, and The North Western Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (NWKRTC) headquartered in Hubballi are the 4 state-owned transport corporations.
The diverse linguistic and religious ethnicities that are native to Karnataka, combined with their long histories, have contributed immensely to the varied cultural heritage of the state. Apart from Kannadigas, Karnataka is home to Tuluvas, Kodavas and Konkanis. Minor populations of Tibetan Buddhists and tribes like the Soligas, Yeravas, Todas and Siddhis also live in Karnataka. The traditional folk arts cover the entire gamut of music, dance, drama, storytelling by itinerant troupes, etc. Yakshagana of Malnad and coastal Karnataka, a classical dance drama, is one of the major theatrical forms of Karnataka. Contemporary theatre culture in Karnataka remains vibrant with organisations like Ninasam, Ranga Shankara, Rangayana and Prabhat Kalavidaru continuing to build on the foundations laid by Gubbi Veeranna, T. P. Kailasam, B. V. Karanth, K V Subbanna, Prasanna and others. Veeragase, Kamsale, Kolata and Dollu Kunitha are popular dance forms. The Mysore style of Bharatanatya, nurtured and popularised by the likes of the legendary Jatti Tayamma, continues to hold sway in Karnataka, and Bangalore also enjoys an eminent place as one of the foremost centres of Bharatanatya.
Karnataka also has a special place in the world of Indian classical music, with both Karnataka (Carnatic) and Hindustani styles finding place in the state, and Karnataka has produced a number of stalwarts in both styles. The Haridasa movement of the sixteenth century contributed significantly to the development of Karnataka (Carnatic) music as a performing art form. Purandara Dasa, one of the most revered Haridasas, is known as the Karnataka Sangeeta Pitamaha ('Father of Karnataka a.k.a. Carnatic music'). Celebrated Hindustani musicians like Gangubai Hangal, Mallikarjun Mansur, Bhimsen Joshi, Basavaraja Rajaguru, Sawai Gandharva and several others hail from Karnataka, and some of them have been recipients of the Kalidas Samman, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan awards. Noted Carnatic musicians include Violin T. Chowdiah, Veena Sheshanna, Mysore Vasudevachar, Doreswamy Iyengar and Thitte Krishna Iyengar.
Gamaka is another classical music genre based on Carnatic music that is practised in Karnataka. Kannada Bhavageete is a genre of popular music that draws inspiration from the expressionist poetry of modern poets. The Mysore school of painting has produced painters like Sundarayya, Tanjavur Kondayya, B. Venkatappa and Keshavayya. Chitrakala Parishat is an organisation in Karnataka dedicated to promoting painting, mainly in the Mysore painting style.
Saree is the traditional dress of women in Karnataka. Women in Kodagu have a distinct style of wearing the saree, different from the rest of Karnataka. Dhoti, known as Panche in Karnataka, is the traditional attire of men. Shirt, Trousers and Salwar kameez are widely worn in Urban areas. Mysore Peta is the traditional headgear of southern Karnataka, while the pagadi or pataga (similar to the Rajasthani turban) is preferred in the northern areas of the state.
Rice and Ragi form the staple food in South Karnataka, whereas Jolada rotti, Sorghum is staple to North Karnataka. Bisi bele bath, Jolada rotti, Ragi mudde, Uppittu, Benne Dose, Masala Dose and Maddur Vade are some of the popular food items in Karnataka. Among sweets, Mysore Pak, Karadantu of Gokak and Amingad, Belgaavi Kunda and Dharwad pedha are popular. Apart from this, coastal Karnataka and Kodagu have distinctive cuisines of their own. Udupi cuisine of coastal Karnataka is popular all over India.
As per the 2011 census, Karnataka had a literacy rate of 75.60%, with 82.85% of males and 68.13% of females in the state being literate.
The Indian Institute of Science and Manipal Academy of Higher Education were ranked within the top 10 universities of India by NIRF 2020. The state is home to some of the premier educational and research institutions of India such as the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology – Dharwad the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences – Bangalore, the National Institute of Technology Karnataka – Surathkal and the National Law School of India University – Bangalore.
In March 2006, Karnataka had 54,529 primary schools with 252,875 teachers and 8.495 million students, and 9498 secondary schools with 92,287 teachers and 1.384 million students. There are three kinds of schools in the state, viz., government-run, private aided (financial aid is provided by the government) and private unaided (no financial aid is provided). The primary languages of instruction in most schools are Kannada and English.
The syllabus taught in the schools is either of KSEEB (SSLC) and Pre-University Couse (PUC) of the State Syllabus, the CBSE of the Central Syllabus, CISCE, IGCSE, IB, NIOS, etc., are all defined by the Department of Public Instruction of the Government of Karnataka. The state has two Sainik Schools – Kodagu Sainik School in Kodagu and Bijapur Sainik School in Bijapur.
To maximise attendance in schools, the Karnataka Government has launched a mid-day meal scheme in government and aided schools in which free lunch is provided to the students.
Statewide board examinations are conducted at the end of secondary education. Students who qualify are allowed to pursue a two-year pre-university course, after which they become eligible to pursue under-graduate degrees.
There are 481-degree colleges affiliated with one of the universities in the state, viz. Bangalore University, Rani Channamma University, Belagavi, Gulbarga University, Karnatak University, Kuvempu University, Mangalore University and Mysore University. In 1998, the engineering colleges in the state were brought under the newly formed Visvesvaraya Technological University headquartered in Belgaum, whereas the medical colleges are run under the jurisdiction of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences headquartered in Bangalore. Some of these baccalaureate colleges are accredited with the status of a deemed university. There are 186 engineering, 39 medical and 41 dental colleges in the state. Udupi, Sringeri, Gokarna and Melkote are well-known places of Sanskrit and Vedic learning. In 2015 the Central Government decided to establish the first Indian Institute of Technology in Karnataka at Dharwad. Tulu and Konkani languages are taught as an optional subject in the twin districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi.
Christ University, Jain University, CMR University, Dayananda Sagar University, PES University and REVA University are notable private universities in Karnataka.
On 9 February 2022, Karnataka shut its schools for three days after the regional administration-backed schools imposed a hijab ban, leading to widespread protests and violence. Other universities in the state began enforcing prohibitions after Hindu students, supported by right-wing Hindu groups, argued that if hijabs were allowed in classrooms, they should wear saffron shawls. On 5 February 2022, the Karnataka state government advised colleges to guarantee that "clothes which disturb equality, integrity, and public law and order should not be worn" in apparent support of schools' ability to enforce a ban.
The era of Kannada newspapers started in the year 1843 when Hermann Mögling, a missionary from Basel Mission, published the first Kannada newspaper called Mangaluru Samachara in Mangalore. The first Kannada periodical, Mysuru Vrittanta Bodhini was started by Bhashyam Bhashyacharya in Mysore. Shortly after Indian independence in 1948, K. N. Guruswamy founded The Printers (Mysuru) Private Limited and began publishing two newspapers, Deccan Herald and Prajavani. Presently The Times of India and Vijaya Karnataka are the largest-selling English and Kannada newspapers respectively. A vast number of weekly, biweekly and monthly magazines are under publication in both Kannada and English. Udayavani, Kannadaprabha, Samyukta Karnataka, VarthaBharathi, Sanjevani, Eesanje, Hosa digantha, Karavali Ale are also some popular dailies published from Karnataka.
Doordarshan is the broadcaster of the Government of India and its channel DD Chandana is dedicated to Kannada. Prominent Kannada channels include Colors Kannada, Zee Kannada, Star Suvarna and Udaya TV.
Karnataka occupies a special place in the history of Indian radio. In 1935, Aakashvani, the first private radio station in India, was started by Prof. M.V. Gopalaswamy in Mysore. The popular radio station was taken over by the local municipality and later by All India Radio (AIR) and moved to Bangalore in 1955. Later in 1957, AIR adopted the original name of the radio station, Aakashavani as its own. Some of the popular programs aired by AIR Bangalore included Nisarga Sampada and Sasya Sanjeevini which were programs that taught science through songs, plays, and stories. These two programs became so popular that they were translated and broadcast in 18 different languages and the entire series was recorded on cassettes by the Government of Karnataka and distributed to thousands of schools across the state. Karnataka has witnessed a growth in FM radio channels, mainly in the cities of Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore, which has become hugely popular.
Karnataka's smallest district, Kodagu, is a major contributor to Indian field hockey, producing numerous players who have represented India at the international level. The annual Kodava Hockey Festival is the largest hockey tournament in the world. Bangalore has hosted a WTA tennis event and, in 1997, it hosted the fourth National Games of India. The Sports Authority of India, the premier sports institute in the country, and the Nike Tennis Academy are also situated in Bangalore. Karnataka has been referred to as the cradle of Indian swimming because of its high standards in comparison to other states.
One of the most popular sports in Karnataka is cricket. The state cricket team has won the Ranji Trophy seven times, second only to Mumbai in terms of success. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore regularly hosts international Cricket matches and is also the home of the National Cricket Academy, which was opened in 2000 to nurture potential international players. Many cricketers have represented India and in one international match held in the 1990s; players from Karnataka composed the majority of the national team. The Royal Challengers Bangalore, an Indian Premier League franchise, the Bengaluru Football Club, an Indian Super League franchise, the Bengaluru Yodhas, a Pro Wrestling League franchise, the Bengaluru Blasters, a Premier Badminton League franchise and the Bengaluru Bulls, a Pro Kabaddi League franchise are based in Bangalore. The Karnataka Premier League is an inter-regional Twenty20 cricket tournament played in the state.
Notable sportsmen from Karnataka include B.S. Chandrasekhar, Roger Binny, E. A. S. Prasanna, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Rahul Dravid, Venkatesh Prasad, Robin Uthappa, Vinay Kumar, Gundappa Vishwanath, Syed Kirmani, Stuart Binny, K. L. Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Manish Pandey, Karun Nair, Ashwini Ponnappa, Mahesh Bhupathi, Rohan Bopanna, Prakash Padukone who won the All England Badminton Championships in 1980 and Pankaj Advani who has won three world titles in cue sports by the age of 20 including the amateur World Snooker Championship in 2003 and the World Billiards Championship in 2005.
Bijapur district has produced some of the best-known road cyclists in the national circuit. Premalata Sureban was part of the Indian contingent at the Perlis Open '99 in Malaysia. In recognition of the talent of cyclists in the district, the state government laid down a cycling track at the B.R. Ambedkar Stadium at a cost of ₹4 million (US$50,000).
By virtue of its varied geography and long history, Karnataka hosts numerous spots of interest for tourists. There is an array of ancient sculptured temples, modern cities, scenic hill ranges, forests and beaches. Karnataka has been ranked as the fourth most popular destination for tourism among the states of India. Karnataka has the second highest number of nationally protected monuments in India, second only to Uttar Pradesh, in addition to 752 monuments protected by the State Directorate of Archaeology and Museums. Another 25,000 monuments are yet to receive protection.
The districts of the Western Ghats and the southern districts of the state have popular eco-tourism locations including Kudremukh, Madikeri and Agumbe. Karnataka has 25 wildlife sanctuaries and five national parks. Popular among them are Bandipura National Park, Bannerghatta National Park and Nagarhole National Park. The ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire at Hampi and the monuments of Pattadakal are on the list of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. The cave temples at Badami and the rock-cut temples at Aihole representing the Badami Chalukyan style of architecture are also popular tourist destinations. The Hoysala temples at Beluru and Halebidu, which were built with Chloritic schist (soapstone) are proposed UNESCO World Heritage sites. The Gol Gumbaz and Ibrahim Rauza are famous examples of the Deccan Sultanate style of architecture. The monolith of Gomateshwara Bahubali at Shravanabelagola is the tallest sculpted monolith in the world, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims during the Mahamastakabhisheka festival.
The waterfalls of Karnataka and Kudremukh are considered by some to be among the "1001 Natural Wonders of the World". Jog Falls is India's tallest single-tiered waterfall with Gokak Falls, Unchalli Falls, Magod Falls, Abbey Falls and Shivanasamudra Falls among other popular waterfalls.
Several popular beaches dot the coastline, including Murudeshwara, Gokarna, Malpe and Karwar. In addition, Karnataka is home to several places of religious importance. Several Hindu temples including the famous Udupi Sri Krishna Matha, the Marikamba Temple at Sirsi, the Kollur Mookambika Temple, the Sri Manjunatha Temple at Dharmasthala, Kukke Subramanya Temple, Janardhana and Mahakali Temple at Ambalpadi, Sharadamba Temple at Shringeri attract pilgrims from all over India. Most of the holy sites of Lingayatism, like Kudalasangama and Basavana Bagewadi, are found in northern parts of the state. Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri and Karkala are famous for Jain history and monuments. Jainism had a stronghold in Karnataka in the early medieval period with Shravanabelagola as its most important centre. The Shettihalli Rosary Church near Shettihalli, an example of French colonial Gothic architecture, is a rare example of a Christian ruin, is a popular tourist site.
Karnataka has become a center of health care tourism and has the highest number of approved health systems and alternative therapies in India. Along with some ISO certified government-owned hospitals, private institutions which provide international-quality services, Hospitals in Karnataka treat around 8,000 health tourists every year.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Karnataka (/kərˈnɑːtəkə/; ISO: Karnāṭaka, Kannada: [kɐɾˈnaːʈɐkɐ], also known as Karunāḍu), formerly Mysore State /maɪˈsɔːr/, is a state in the southwestern region of India. It was formed as Mysore State on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, and renamed Karnataka in 1973. The state was part of the Carnatic region in British terminology. Its capital and largest city is Bengaluru (Bangalore).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Karnataka is bordered by the Lakshadweep Sea to the west, Goa to the northwest, Maharashtra to the north, Telangana to the northeast, Andhra Pradesh to the east, Tamil Nadu to the southeast, and Kerala to the southwest. It is the only southern state to have land borders with all of the other four southern Indian sister states. The state covers an area of 191,791 km (74,051 sq mi), or 5.83 percent of the total geographical area of India. It is the sixth-largest Indian state by area. With 61,130,704 inhabitants at the 2011 census, Karnataka is the eighth-largest state by population, comprising 31 districts. Kannada, one of the classical languages of India, is the most widely spoken and official language of the state. Other minority languages spoken include Urdu, Konkani, Marathi, Tulu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kodava and Beary. Karnataka also contains some of the only villages in India where Sanskrit is primarily spoken.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Though several etymologies have been suggested for the name Karnataka, the generally accepted one is that Karnataka is derived from the Kannada words karu and nādu, meaning \"elevated land\". Karu Nadu may also be read as karu, meaning \"black\" and nadu, meaning \"region\", as a reference to the black cotton soil found in the Bayalu Seeme region of the state. The British used the word Carnatic, sometimes Karnatak, to describe both sides of peninsular India, south of the Krishna.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "With an antiquity that dates to the paleolithic, Karnataka has been home to some of the most powerful empires of ancient and medieval India. The philosophers and musical bards patronised by these empires launched socio-religious and literary movements which have endured to the present day. Karnataka has contributed significantly to both forms of Indian classical music, the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The economy of Karnataka is the fifth-largest of any Indian state with ₹20.5 trillion (US$260 billion) in gross domestic product and a per capita GDP of ₹305,000 (US$3,800). Karnataka has the fifteenth-highest ranking among Indian states in Human Development Index.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Karnataka's pre-history goes back to a paleolithic hand-axe culture evidenced by discoveries of, among other things, hand axes and cleavers in the region. Evidence of neolithic and megalithic cultures have also been found in the state. Gold discovered in Harappa was found to be imported from mines in Karnataka, prompting scholars to hypothesise about contacts between ancient Karnataka and the Indus Valley civilisation c. 3300 BCE.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Prior to the third century BCE, most of Karnataka formed part of the Nanda Empire before coming under the Mauryan empire of Emperor Ashoka. Four centuries of Satavahana rule followed, allowing them to control large areas of Karnataka. The decline of Satavahana power led to the rise of the earliest native kingdoms, the Kadambas and the Western Gangas, marking the region's emergence as an independent political entity. The Kadamba Dynasty, founded by Mayurasharma, had its capital at Banavasi; the Western Ganga Dynasty was formed with Talakad as its capital.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "These were also the first kingdoms to use Kannada in administration, as evidenced by the Halmidi inscription and a fifth-century copper coin discovered at Banavasi. These dynasties were followed by imperial Kannada empires such as the Badami Chalukyas, the Rashtrakuta Empire of Manyakheta and the Western Chalukya Empire, which ruled over large parts of the Deccan and had their capitals in what is now Karnataka. The Western Chalukyas patronised a unique style of architecture and Kannada literature which became a precursor to the Hoysala art of the 12th century. Parts of modern-day Southern Karnataka (Gangavadi) were occupied by the Chola Empire at the turn of the 11th century. The Cholas and the Hoysalas fought over the region in the early 12th century before it eventually came under Hoysala rule.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "At the turn of the first millennium, the Hoysalas gained power in the region. Literature flourished during this time, which led to the emergence of distinctive Kannada literary metres, and the construction of temples and sculptures adhering to the Vesara style of architecture. The expansion of the Hoysala Empire brought minor parts of modern Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu under its rule. In the early 14th century, Harihara and Bukka Raya established the Vijayanagara empire with its capital, Hosapattana (later named Vijayanagara), on the banks of the Tungabhadra River in the modern Bellary district. Under the rule of Krishnadevaraya, a distinct form of literature and architecture evolved. The empire rose as a bulwark against Muslim advances into South India, which it completely controlled for over two centuries. In 1537, Kempe Gowda I, a chieftain of the Vijayanagara Empire, widely held as the founder of modern Bangalore, built a fort and established the area around it as Bengaluru Pete.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1565, Karnataka and the rest of South India experienced a major geopolitical shift when the Vijayanagara empire fell to a confederation of Islamic sultanates in the Battle of Talikota. The Bijapur Sultanate, which had risen after the demise of the Bahmani Sultanate of Bidar, soon took control of the Deccan; it was defeated by the Moghuls in the late 17th century. The Bahmani and Bijapur rulers encouraged Urdu and Persian literature and Indo-Saracenic architecture, the Gol Gumbaz being one of the high points of this style. During the sixteenth century, Konkani Hindus migrated to Karnataka, mostly from Salcette, Goa, while during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Goan Catholics migrated to North Canara and South Canara, especially from Bardes, Goa, as a result of food shortages, epidemics and heavy taxation imposed by the Portuguese.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the period that followed, parts of northern Karnataka were ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Maratha Empire, the British, and other powers. In the south, the Mysore Kingdom, a former vassal of the Vijayanagara Empire, was briefly independent. With the death of Krishnaraja Wodeyar II, Haidar Ali, the commander-in-chief of the Mysore army, gained control of the region. After his death, the kingdom was inherited by his son Tipu Sultan. To contain European expansion in South India, Haidar Ali and later Tipu Sultan fought four significant Anglo-Mysore Wars, the last of which resulted in Tippu Sultan's death and the incorporation of Mysore into the British Raj in 1799. The Kingdom of Mysore was restored to the Wodeyars and Mysore remained a princely state under the British Raj.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "As the \"doctrine of lapse\" gave way to dissent and resistance from princely states across the country, Kittur Chennamma, Sangolli Rayanna and others spearheaded rebellions in Karnataka in 1830, nearly three decades before the Indian Rebellion of 1857. However, Kitturu was taken over by the British East India Company even before the doctrine was officially articulated by Lord Dalhousie in 1848. Other uprisings followed, such as the ones at Supa, Bagalkot, Shorapur, Nargund and Dandeli. These rebellions—which coincided with the Indian Rebellion of 1857—were led by Mundargi Bhimarao, Bhaskar Rao Bhave, the Halagali Bedas, Raja Venkatappa Nayaka and others. By the late 19th century, the independence movement had gained momentum; Karnad Sadashiva Rao, Aluru Venkata Raya, S. Nijalingappa, Kengal Hanumanthaiah, Nittoor Srinivasa Rau and others carried on the struggle into the early 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "After India's independence, the Maharaja, Jayachamarajendra Wodeyar, allowed his kingdom's accession to India. In 1950, Mysore became an Indian state of the same name; the former Maharaja served as its Rajpramukh (head of state) until 1975. Following the long-standing demand of the Ekikarana Movement, Kodagu- and Kannada-speaking regions from the adjoining states of Madras, Hyderabad and Bombay were incorporated into the Mysore state, under the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. The thus expanded state was renamed Karnataka, seventeen years later, on 1 November 1973. In the early 1900s through the post-independence era, industrial visionaries such as Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya, played an important role in the development of Karnataka's strong manufacturing and industrial base.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The state has three principal geographical zones:",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The bulk of the state is in the Bayaluseeme region, the northern part of which is the second-largest arid region in India. The highest point in Karnataka is the Mullayanagiri hills in Chikmagalur district which has an altitude of 1,925 m (6,316 ft). The two main river systems of the state are the Krishna and its tributaries, the Bhima, Ghataprabha, Vedavathi, Malaprabha and Tungabhadra in North Karnataka, and the Kaveri and its tributaries, the Hemavati, Shimsha, Arkavati, Lakshmana Thirtha and Kabini, in South Karnataka. Most of these rivers flow out of Karnataka eastward, reaching the sea at the Bay of Bengal. Other prominent rivers such as the Sharavati in Shimoga and Netravati in Dakshina Kannada flow westward to the Lakshadweep Sea. A large number of dams and reservoirs are constructed across these rivers which richly add to the irrigation and hydroelectricity power generation capacities of the state.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Karnataka consists of four main types of geological formations – the Archean complex made up of Dharwad schists and granitic gneisses, the Proterozoic non-fossiliferous sedimentary formations of the Kaladgi and Bhima series, the Deccan trappean and intertrappean deposits and the tertiary and recent laterites and alluvial deposits. Laterite cappings that are found in many districts over the Deccan Traps were formed after the cessation of volcanic activity in the early tertiary period. Eleven groups of soil orders are found in Karnataka, viz. Entisols, Inceptisols, Mollisols, Spodosols, Alfisols, Ultisols, Oxisols, Aridisols, Vertisols, Andisols and Histosols. Depending on the agricultural capability of the soil, the soil types are divided into six types, viz. red, lateritic, black, alluvio-colluvial, forest and coastal soils.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "About 38,284 km (14,782 sq mi) of Karnataka (i.e. 16% of the state's geographic area) is covered by forests. The forests are classified as reserved, protected, unclosed, village and private forests. The percentage of forested area is slightly less than the all-India average of about 23%, and significantly less than the 33% prescribed in the National Forest Policy.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Karnataka experiences four seasons. The winter in January and February is followed by summer between March and May, the monsoon season between June and September and the post-monsoon season from October till December. Meteorologically, Karnataka is divided into three zones – coastal, north interior and south interior. Of these, the coastal zone receives the heaviest rainfall with an average rainfall of about 3,638.5 mm (143 in) per annum, far in excess of the state average of 1,139 mm (45 in). Amagaon in Khanapura taluka of Belgaum district received 10,068 mm (396 in) of rainfall in 2010. In 2014 Kokalli in Sirsi taluka of Uttara Kannada district received 8,746 mm (344 in) of rainfall. Agumbe in Thirthahalli taluka and Hulikal of Hosanagara taluka in Shimoga district were the rainiest cities in Karnataka, situated in one of the wettest regions in the world.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The state is projected to warm about 2.0 °C (4 °F) by 2030. The monsoon is set to provide less rainfall. Agriculture in Karnataka is mostly rainfed as opposed to irrigated, making it highly vulnerable to expected changes in the monsoon. The highest recorded temperature was 45.6 °C (114 °F) in Raichuru district. The lowest recorded temperature was 2.8 °C (37 °F) at Bidar district.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Karnataka is home to a variety of wildlife. It has a recorded forest area of 38,720 km (14,950 sq mi) which constitutes 12.3% of the total geographical area of the state. These forests support 25% of the elephant and 10% of the tiger population of India. Many regions of Karnataka are as yet unexplored, so new species of flora and fauna are found periodically. The Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot, includes the western region of Karnataka. The Bandipur and Nagarahole National Parks were included in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in 1986, a UNESCO designation. The Indian roller and the Indian elephant are recognised as the state bird and animal while sandalwood and the lotus are recognised as the state tree and flower respectively. Karnataka has five national parks: Anshi, Bandipur, Bannerghatta, Kudremukh and Nagarhole. It also has 27 wildlife sanctuaries of which seven are bird sanctuaries.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Wild animals that are found in Karnataka include the elephant, the tiger, the leopard, the gaur, the sambar deer, the chital or spotted deer, the muntjac, the bonnet macaque, the slender loris, the common palm civet, the small Indian civet, the sloth bear, the dhole, the striped hyena, the Bengal fox and the golden jackal. Some of the birds found here are the great hornbill, the Malabar pied hornbill, the Ceylon frogmouth, herons, ducks, kites, eagles, falcons, quails, partridges, lapwings, sandpipers, pigeons, doves, parakeets, cuckoos, owls, nightjars, swifts, kingfishers, bee-eaters and munias. Some species of trees found in Karnataka are Calophyllum tomentosum, Calophyllum wightianum, Garcinia cambogia, Garcinia morella, Alstonia scholaris, Flacourtia montana, Artocarpus hirsutus, Artocarpus lacucha, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, Grewia tiliifolia, Santalum album, Shorea talura, Emblica officinalis, Vitex altissima and Wrightia tinctoria. Wildlife in Karnataka is threatened by poaching, habitat destruction, human-wildlife conflict and pollution.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "There are 31 districts in Karnataka. Each district (zila) is governed by a district commissioner (ziladar). The districts are further divided into sub-districts (talukas), which are governed by sub-commissioners (talukdars); sub-divisions comprise blocks (tehsils/hobli), which are governed by block development officers (tehsildars), which contain village councils (panchayats), town municipal councils (purasabhe), city municipal councils (nagarasabhe), and city municipal corporations (mahanagara palike).",
"title": "Sub-divisions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "According to the 2011 census of India, the total population of Karnataka was 61,095,297 of which 30,966,657 (50.7%) were male and 30,128,640 (49.3%) were female, or 1000 males for every 973 females. This represents a 15.60% increase over the population in 2001. The population density was 319 per km and 38.67% of the people lived in urban areas. The literacy rate was 75.36% with 82.47% of males and 68.08% of females being literate.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In 2007 the state had a birth rate of 2.2%, a death rate of 0.7%, an infant mortality rate of 5.5% and a maternal mortality rate of 0.2%. The total fertility rate was 2.2.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Karnataka's private sector speciality health care competes with the best in the world. Karnataka has also established a modicum of public health services having a better record of health care and child care than most other states of India. In spite of these advances, some parts of the state still suffer from the lack of primary health care.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Adi Shankara (788–820 CE) chose Sringeri in Karnataka to establish the first of his four mathas (monastery). Madhvacharya (1238–1317) was the chief proponent of Tattvavada (philosophy of reality), popularly known as Dvaita or Dualistic school of Hindu philosophy – one of the three most influential Vedanta philosophies. Madhvacharya was one of the important philosophers during the Bhakti movement. He was a pioneer in many ways, going against standard conventions and norms. According to tradition, Madhvacharya is believed to be the third incarnation of Vayu (Mukhyaprana), after Hanuman and Bhima. The Haridasa devotional movement is considered one of the turning points in the cultural history of India. Over a span of nearly six centuries, several saints and mystics helped shape the culture, philosophy, and art of South India and Karnataka in particular by exerting considerable spiritual influence over the masses and kingdoms that ruled South India.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "This movement was ushered in by the Haridasas (literally \"servants of Hari\") and took shape in the 13th century – 14th century CE, period, prior to and during the early rule of the Vijayanagara empire. The main objective of this movement was to propagate the Dvaita philosophy of Madhvacharya (Madhva Siddhanta) to the masses through a literary medium known as Dasa Sahitya. Purandara dasa is widely recognised as the \"Pithamaha\" of Carnatic Music for his immense contribution. Ramanuja, the leading expounder of Vishishtadvaita, spent many years in Melkote. He came to Karnataka in 1098 CE and lived here until 1122 CE. He first lived in Tondanur and then moved to Melkote where the Cheluvanarayana Swamy Temple and a well-organised matha were built. He was patronised by the Hoysala king, Vishnuvardhana.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In the twelfth century, Lingayatism emerged in northern Karnataka as a protest against the rigidity of the prevailing social and caste system. Leading figures of this movement were Basava, Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu, who established the Anubhava Mantapa which was the centre of all religious and philosophical thoughts and discussions pertaining to Lingayats. These three social reformers did so by the literary means of \"Vachana Sahitya\" which is very famous for its simple, straight forward and easily understandable Kannada language. Lingayatism preached women equality by letting women wear Ishtalinga i.e. Symbol of god around their neck. Basava shunned the sharp hierarchical divisions that existed and sought to remove all distinctions between the hierarchically superior master class and the subordinate, servile class. He also supported inter-caste marriages and Kaay Ta tTatva of Basavanna. This was the basis of the Lingayat faith which today counts millions among its followers.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Jain philosophy and literature have contributed immensely to the religious and cultural landscape of Karnataka.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Islam, which had an early presence on the west coast of India as early as the tenth century, gained a foothold in Karnataka with the rise of the Bahamani and Bijapur sultanates that ruled parts of Karnataka. Christianity reached Karnataka in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the Portuguese and St. Francis Xavier in 1545.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Buddhism was popular in Karnataka during the first millennium in places such as Gulbarga and Banavasi. A chance discovery of edicts and several Mauryan relics at Sannati in Kalaburagi district in 1986 has proven that the Krishna River basin was once home to both Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism. There are Tibetan refugee camps in Karnataka.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Mysore Dasara is celebrated as the Nada habba (state festival) and this is marked by major festivities at Mysore. Bangalore Karaga, celebrated in the heart of Bangalore, is the second most important festival celebrated in Karnataka. Ugadi (Kannada New Year), Makara Sankranti (the harvest festival), Ganesh Chaturthi, Gowri Habba, Ram Navami, Nagapanchami, Basava Jayanthi, Deepavali, and Balipadyami are the other major festivals of Karnataka.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Languages of Karnataka (2011 census)",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka, as the native language of 66.46% of its population as of 2011 and is one of the classical languages of India. Urdu is the second largest language, spoken by 10.83% of the population, and is the language of Muslims outside the coastal region. Telugu (5.84%) is a major language in areas bordering Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka as well as Bangalore, while Tamil (3.45%) is a major language of Bangalore and in the Kolar district. Marathi (3.29%) is concentrated in areas of Uttara Kannada, Belgaum and Bidar districts bordering Maharashtra. Lambadi is spoken by the Lambadis scattered throughout North Karnataka, while Hindi is spoken in Bangalore. Tulu (2.61%), Konkani (1.29%), and Malayalam (1.27%) are all found in linguistically diverse Coastal Karnataka, where a number of mixed and distinct dialects such as Are Bhashe, Beary Bhashe, and Nawayathi are found. Kodava Takk is the language of Kodagu.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Kannada played a crucial role in the creation of Karnataka: linguistic demographics played a major role in defining the new state in 1956. Tulu, Konkani and Kodava are other minor native languages that share a long history in the state. Urdu is spoken widely by the Muslim population. Less widely spoken languages include Beary bashe and certain languages such as Sankethi. Some of the regional languages in Karnataka are Tulu, Kodava, Konkani and Beary.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kannada features a rich and ancient body of literature including religious and secular genre, covering topics as diverse as Jainism (such as Puranas), Lingayatism (such as Vachanas), Vaishnavism (such as Haridasa Sahitya) and modern literature. Evidence from edicts during the time of Ashoka (reigned 274–232 BCE) suggest that Buddhist literature influenced the Kannada script and its literature. The Halmidi inscription, the earliest attested full-length inscription in the Kannada language and script, dates from 450 CE, while the earliest available literary work, the Kavirajamarga, has been dated to 850 CE. References made in the Kavirajamarga, however, prove that Kannada literature flourished in the native composition metres such as Chattana, Beddande and Melvadu during earlier centuries. The classic refers to several earlier greats (purvacharyar) of Kannada poetry and prose.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Kuvempu, the renowned Kannada poet and writer who wrote Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate, the state anthem of Karnataka was the first recipient of the Karnataka Ratna, the highest civilian award bestowed by the Government of Karnataka. Contemporary Kannada literature has received considerable acknowledgement in the arena of Indian literature, with eight Kannada writers winning India's highest literary honour, the Jnanpith award.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Tulu is the majority language in the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada and is the second most spoken in the Udupi district. This region is also known as Tulu Nadu. Tulu Mahabharato, written by Arunabja in the Tigalari script, is the oldest surviving Tulu text. Tigalari script was used by Brahmins to write Sanskrit language. The use of the Kannada script for writing Tulu and non-availability of print in Tigalari script contributed to the marginalisation of Tigalari script.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In Karnataka Konkani is mostly spoken in the Uttara Kannada and Dakshina Kannada districts and in parts of Udupi, Konkani use the Devanagari Script (which is official)/Kannada script( Optional ) for writing as identified by government of Karnataka.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Kodavas who mainly reside in the Kodagu district, speak Kodava Takk. Kodagu was a separate State with its own Chief Minister and Council of Ministers till 1956. Two regional variations of the language exist, the northern Mendale Takka and the southern Kiggaati Takka. Kodava Takk has its own script, Karnataka Kodava Sahitya Academy has accepted Dr IM Muthanna's Script which was developed in 1970 as the Official Script of Kodava Thakk. English is the medium of education in many schools and widely used for business communication in most private companies.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "All of the state's languages are patronised and promoted by governmental and quasi-governmental bodies. The Kannada Sahitya Parishat and the Kannada Sahitya Akademi are responsible for the promotion of Kannada while the Karnataka Konkani Sahitya Akademi, the Tulu Sahitya Akademi and the Kodava Sahitya Akademi promote their respective languages.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Karnataka has a parliamentary system of government with two democratically elected houses, the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council. The Legislative Assembly consists of 224 members who are elected for five-year terms. The Legislative Council is a permanent body of 75 members with one-third (25 members) retiring every two years.",
"title": "Government and administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The government of Karnataka is headed by the Chief Minister who is chosen by the ruling party members of the Legislative Assembly. The Chief Minister, along with the council of ministers, executes the legislative agenda and exercises most of the executive powers. However, the constitutional and formal head of the state is the Governor who is appointed for a five-year term by the President of India on the advice of the Union government. The people of Karnataka also elect 28 members to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The members of the state Legislative Assembly elect 12 members to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.",
"title": "Government and administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "For administrative purposes, Karnataka has been divided into four revenue divisions, 49 sub-divisions, 31 districts, 175 taluks and 745 hoblies / revenue circles. The administration in each district is headed by a Deputy Commissioner who belongs to the Indian Administrative Service and is assisted by a number of officers belonging to Karnataka state services. The Superintendent of Police, an officer belonging to the Indian Police Service and assisted by the officers of the Karnataka Police Service, is entrusted with the responsibility of maintaining law and order and related issues in each district. The Deputy Conservator of Forests, an officer belonging to the Indian Forest Service, is entrusted with the responsibility of managing forests, environment and wildlife of the district, he will be assisted by the officers belonging to Karnataka Forest Service and officers belonging to Karnataka Forest Subordinate Service. Sectoral development in the districts is looked after by the district head of each development department such as Public Works Department, Health, Education, Agriculture, Animal Husbandry, etc. The judiciary in the state consists of the Karnataka High Court (Attara Kacheri) in Bangalore, Hubballi-Dharwad, and Kalaburagi, district and session courts in each district and lower courts and judges at the taluk level.",
"title": "Government and administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Politics in Karnataka has been dominated by three political parties, the Indian National Congress, the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Politicians from Karnataka have played prominent roles in federal government of India with some of them having held the high positions of Prime Minister and Vice-President. Border disputes involving Karnataka's claim on the Kasaragod and Solapur districts and Maharashtra's claim on Belagavi are ongoing since the states reorganisation. The official emblem of Karnataka has a Ganda Berunda in the centre. Surmounting this are four lions facing the four directions, taken from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath. The emblem also carries two Sharabhas with the head of an elephant and the body of a lion.",
"title": "Government and administration"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Karnataka had an estimated GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) of about US$115.86 billion in the 2014–15 fiscal year. The state registered a GSDP growth rate of 7% for the year 2014–2015. Karnataka's contribution to India's GDP in the year 2014–15 was 7.54%. With GDP growth of 17.59% and per capita GDP growth of 16.04%, Karnataka is on the 6th position among all states and union territories. In an employment survey conducted for the year 2013–2014, the unemployment rate in Karnataka was 1.8% compared to the national rate of 4.9%. In 2011–2012, Karnataka had an estimated poverty ratio of 20.91% compared to the national ratio of 21.92%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Nearly 56% of the workforce in Karnataka is engaged in agriculture and related activities. A total of 12.31 million hectares of land, or 64.6% of the state's total area, is cultivated. Much of the agricultural output is dependent on the southwest monsoon as only 26.5% of the sown area is irrigated.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Karnataka is the manufacturing hub for some of the largest public sector industries in India, including Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, Bharat Earth Movers Limited and HMT (formerly Hindustan Machine Tools), which are based in Bangalore. Many of India's premier science and technology research centres, such as Indian Space Research Organisation, Central Power Research Institute, Bharat Electronics Limited and the Central Food Technological Research Institute, are also headquartered in Karnataka. Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Limited is an oil refinery, located in Mangalore.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The state has also begun to invest heavily in solar power centred on the Pavagada Solar Park. As of December 2017, the state has installed an estimated 2.2 gigawatts of block solar panelling and in January 2018 announced a tender to generate a further 1.2 gigawatts in the coming years: Karnataka Renewable Energy Development suggests that this will be based on 24 separate systems (or 'blocks') generating 50 megawatts each.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Since the 1980s, Karnataka has emerged as the pan-Indian leader in the field of IT (information technology). In 2007, there were nearly 2,000 firms operating in Karnataka. Many of them, including two of India's biggest software firms, Infosys and Wipro, are also headquartered in the state. Exports from these firms exceeded ₹500 billion (equivalent to ₹1.6 trillion or US$20 billion in 2023) in 2006–07, accounting for nearly 38% of all IT exports from India. The Nandi Hills area in the outskirts of Devanahalli is the site of the upcoming $22 billion, 50 km BIAL IT Investment Region, one of the largest infrastructure projects in the history of Karnataka. All this has earned the state capital, Bangalore, the sobriquet Silicon Valley of India.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Karnataka also leads the nation in biotechnology. It is home to India's largest biocluster, with 60% of the country's biotechnology firms being based here. The state has 18,000 hectares of land under flower cultivation, an upcoming industry which supplies flowers and ornamental plants worldwide.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Seven of India's banks, Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank, Corporation Bank, Vijaya Bank, Karnataka Bank, ING Vysya Bank and the State Bank of Mysore originated in this state. The coastal districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada have a branch for every 500 persons—the best distribution of banks in India. In March 2002, Karnataka had 4767 branches of different banks with each branch serving 11,000 persons, which is lower than the national average of 16,000.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "A majority of the silk industry in India is headquartered in Karnataka, much of it in Doddaballapura in Bangalore Rural district and the state government intends to invest ₹700 million (equivalent to ₹1.4 billion or US$18 million in 2023) in a \"Silk City\" at Muddenahalli in Chikkaballapura district.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Air transport in Karnataka, as in the rest of the country, is still a fledgling but fast expanding sector. Karnataka has airports at Bangalore, Mangalore, Belgaum, Hubli, Hampi, Bellary, Gulbarga, and Mysore with international operations from Bangalore and Mangalore airports. Shimoga and Bijapur airports are being built under the UDAN Scheme.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Karnataka has a railway network with a total length of approximately 3,089 km (1,919 mi). Until the creation of the South-Western Railway Zone headquartered at Hubballi in 2003, the railway network in the state was in the Southern Railway zone, South-Central Railway Zone and Western Railway zone. Several parts of the state now come under the South Western Railway zone with 3 Railway Divisions at Bangalore, Mysore, Hubli, with the remainder under the Southern Railway zone and Konkan Railway Zone, which is considered one of India's biggest railway projects of the century due to the difficult terrain. Bangalore and other cities in the state are well-connected with intrastate and inter-state destinations.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Karnataka has 11 ports, including the New Mangalore Port, a major port and ten minor ports, of which three were operational in 2012. The New Mangalore port was incorporated as the ninth major port in India on 4 May 1974. This port handled 32.04 million tonnes of traffic in the fiscal year 2006–07 with 17.92 million tonnes of imports and 14.12 million tonnes of exports. The port also handled 1015 vessels including 18 cruise vessels during the year 2006–07. Foreigners can enter Mangalore through the New Mangalore Port with the help of Electronic visa (e-visa). Cruise ships from Europe, North America and UAE arrive at New Mangalore Port to visit the tourist places across Coastal Karnataka. The port of Mangalore is among the 4 major ports of India that receive over 25 international cruise ships every year.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The total lengths of National Highways and State Highways in Karnataka are 3,973 and 9,829 km (2,469 and 6,107 mi), respectively.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The state transport corporations, transports an average of 2.2 million passengers daily and employs about 25,000 people. The Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) and The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) headquartered in Bangalore, The Kalyana Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (KKRTC) headquartered in Gulbarga, and The North Western Karnataka Road Transport Corporation (NWKRTC) headquartered in Hubballi are the 4 state-owned transport corporations.",
"title": "Transport"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The diverse linguistic and religious ethnicities that are native to Karnataka, combined with their long histories, have contributed immensely to the varied cultural heritage of the state. Apart from Kannadigas, Karnataka is home to Tuluvas, Kodavas and Konkanis. Minor populations of Tibetan Buddhists and tribes like the Soligas, Yeravas, Todas and Siddhis also live in Karnataka. The traditional folk arts cover the entire gamut of music, dance, drama, storytelling by itinerant troupes, etc. Yakshagana of Malnad and coastal Karnataka, a classical dance drama, is one of the major theatrical forms of Karnataka. Contemporary theatre culture in Karnataka remains vibrant with organisations like Ninasam, Ranga Shankara, Rangayana and Prabhat Kalavidaru continuing to build on the foundations laid by Gubbi Veeranna, T. P. Kailasam, B. V. Karanth, K V Subbanna, Prasanna and others. Veeragase, Kamsale, Kolata and Dollu Kunitha are popular dance forms. The Mysore style of Bharatanatya, nurtured and popularised by the likes of the legendary Jatti Tayamma, continues to hold sway in Karnataka, and Bangalore also enjoys an eminent place as one of the foremost centres of Bharatanatya.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Karnataka also has a special place in the world of Indian classical music, with both Karnataka (Carnatic) and Hindustani styles finding place in the state, and Karnataka has produced a number of stalwarts in both styles. The Haridasa movement of the sixteenth century contributed significantly to the development of Karnataka (Carnatic) music as a performing art form. Purandara Dasa, one of the most revered Haridasas, is known as the Karnataka Sangeeta Pitamaha ('Father of Karnataka a.k.a. Carnatic music'). Celebrated Hindustani musicians like Gangubai Hangal, Mallikarjun Mansur, Bhimsen Joshi, Basavaraja Rajaguru, Sawai Gandharva and several others hail from Karnataka, and some of them have been recipients of the Kalidas Samman, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan awards. Noted Carnatic musicians include Violin T. Chowdiah, Veena Sheshanna, Mysore Vasudevachar, Doreswamy Iyengar and Thitte Krishna Iyengar.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Gamaka is another classical music genre based on Carnatic music that is practised in Karnataka. Kannada Bhavageete is a genre of popular music that draws inspiration from the expressionist poetry of modern poets. The Mysore school of painting has produced painters like Sundarayya, Tanjavur Kondayya, B. Venkatappa and Keshavayya. Chitrakala Parishat is an organisation in Karnataka dedicated to promoting painting, mainly in the Mysore painting style.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Saree is the traditional dress of women in Karnataka. Women in Kodagu have a distinct style of wearing the saree, different from the rest of Karnataka. Dhoti, known as Panche in Karnataka, is the traditional attire of men. Shirt, Trousers and Salwar kameez are widely worn in Urban areas. Mysore Peta is the traditional headgear of southern Karnataka, while the pagadi or pataga (similar to the Rajasthani turban) is preferred in the northern areas of the state.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Rice and Ragi form the staple food in South Karnataka, whereas Jolada rotti, Sorghum is staple to North Karnataka. Bisi bele bath, Jolada rotti, Ragi mudde, Uppittu, Benne Dose, Masala Dose and Maddur Vade are some of the popular food items in Karnataka. Among sweets, Mysore Pak, Karadantu of Gokak and Amingad, Belgaavi Kunda and Dharwad pedha are popular. Apart from this, coastal Karnataka and Kodagu have distinctive cuisines of their own. Udupi cuisine of coastal Karnataka is popular all over India.",
"title": "Culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "As per the 2011 census, Karnataka had a literacy rate of 75.60%, with 82.85% of males and 68.13% of females in the state being literate.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The Indian Institute of Science and Manipal Academy of Higher Education were ranked within the top 10 universities of India by NIRF 2020. The state is home to some of the premier educational and research institutions of India such as the Indian Institute of Management – Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Technology – Dharwad the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences – Bangalore, the National Institute of Technology Karnataka – Surathkal and the National Law School of India University – Bangalore.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In March 2006, Karnataka had 54,529 primary schools with 252,875 teachers and 8.495 million students, and 9498 secondary schools with 92,287 teachers and 1.384 million students. There are three kinds of schools in the state, viz., government-run, private aided (financial aid is provided by the government) and private unaided (no financial aid is provided). The primary languages of instruction in most schools are Kannada and English.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The syllabus taught in the schools is either of KSEEB (SSLC) and Pre-University Couse (PUC) of the State Syllabus, the CBSE of the Central Syllabus, CISCE, IGCSE, IB, NIOS, etc., are all defined by the Department of Public Instruction of the Government of Karnataka. The state has two Sainik Schools – Kodagu Sainik School in Kodagu and Bijapur Sainik School in Bijapur.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "To maximise attendance in schools, the Karnataka Government has launched a mid-day meal scheme in government and aided schools in which free lunch is provided to the students.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Statewide board examinations are conducted at the end of secondary education. Students who qualify are allowed to pursue a two-year pre-university course, after which they become eligible to pursue under-graduate degrees.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "There are 481-degree colleges affiliated with one of the universities in the state, viz. Bangalore University, Rani Channamma University, Belagavi, Gulbarga University, Karnatak University, Kuvempu University, Mangalore University and Mysore University. In 1998, the engineering colleges in the state were brought under the newly formed Visvesvaraya Technological University headquartered in Belgaum, whereas the medical colleges are run under the jurisdiction of the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences headquartered in Bangalore. Some of these baccalaureate colleges are accredited with the status of a deemed university. There are 186 engineering, 39 medical and 41 dental colleges in the state. Udupi, Sringeri, Gokarna and Melkote are well-known places of Sanskrit and Vedic learning. In 2015 the Central Government decided to establish the first Indian Institute of Technology in Karnataka at Dharwad. Tulu and Konkani languages are taught as an optional subject in the twin districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Christ University, Jain University, CMR University, Dayananda Sagar University, PES University and REVA University are notable private universities in Karnataka.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "On 9 February 2022, Karnataka shut its schools for three days after the regional administration-backed schools imposed a hijab ban, leading to widespread protests and violence. Other universities in the state began enforcing prohibitions after Hindu students, supported by right-wing Hindu groups, argued that if hijabs were allowed in classrooms, they should wear saffron shawls. On 5 February 2022, the Karnataka state government advised colleges to guarantee that \"clothes which disturb equality, integrity, and public law and order should not be worn\" in apparent support of schools' ability to enforce a ban.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The era of Kannada newspapers started in the year 1843 when Hermann Mögling, a missionary from Basel Mission, published the first Kannada newspaper called Mangaluru Samachara in Mangalore. The first Kannada periodical, Mysuru Vrittanta Bodhini was started by Bhashyam Bhashyacharya in Mysore. Shortly after Indian independence in 1948, K. N. Guruswamy founded The Printers (Mysuru) Private Limited and began publishing two newspapers, Deccan Herald and Prajavani. Presently The Times of India and Vijaya Karnataka are the largest-selling English and Kannada newspapers respectively. A vast number of weekly, biweekly and monthly magazines are under publication in both Kannada and English. Udayavani, Kannadaprabha, Samyukta Karnataka, VarthaBharathi, Sanjevani, Eesanje, Hosa digantha, Karavali Ale are also some popular dailies published from Karnataka.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Doordarshan is the broadcaster of the Government of India and its channel DD Chandana is dedicated to Kannada. Prominent Kannada channels include Colors Kannada, Zee Kannada, Star Suvarna and Udaya TV.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Karnataka occupies a special place in the history of Indian radio. In 1935, Aakashvani, the first private radio station in India, was started by Prof. M.V. Gopalaswamy in Mysore. The popular radio station was taken over by the local municipality and later by All India Radio (AIR) and moved to Bangalore in 1955. Later in 1957, AIR adopted the original name of the radio station, Aakashavani as its own. Some of the popular programs aired by AIR Bangalore included Nisarga Sampada and Sasya Sanjeevini which were programs that taught science through songs, plays, and stories. These two programs became so popular that they were translated and broadcast in 18 different languages and the entire series was recorded on cassettes by the Government of Karnataka and distributed to thousands of schools across the state. Karnataka has witnessed a growth in FM radio channels, mainly in the cities of Bangalore, Mangalore and Mysore, which has become hugely popular.",
"title": "Media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Karnataka's smallest district, Kodagu, is a major contributor to Indian field hockey, producing numerous players who have represented India at the international level. The annual Kodava Hockey Festival is the largest hockey tournament in the world. Bangalore has hosted a WTA tennis event and, in 1997, it hosted the fourth National Games of India. The Sports Authority of India, the premier sports institute in the country, and the Nike Tennis Academy are also situated in Bangalore. Karnataka has been referred to as the cradle of Indian swimming because of its high standards in comparison to other states.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "One of the most popular sports in Karnataka is cricket. The state cricket team has won the Ranji Trophy seven times, second only to Mumbai in terms of success. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore regularly hosts international Cricket matches and is also the home of the National Cricket Academy, which was opened in 2000 to nurture potential international players. Many cricketers have represented India and in one international match held in the 1990s; players from Karnataka composed the majority of the national team. The Royal Challengers Bangalore, an Indian Premier League franchise, the Bengaluru Football Club, an Indian Super League franchise, the Bengaluru Yodhas, a Pro Wrestling League franchise, the Bengaluru Blasters, a Premier Badminton League franchise and the Bengaluru Bulls, a Pro Kabaddi League franchise are based in Bangalore. The Karnataka Premier League is an inter-regional Twenty20 cricket tournament played in the state.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "Notable sportsmen from Karnataka include B.S. Chandrasekhar, Roger Binny, E. A. S. Prasanna, Anil Kumble, Javagal Srinath, Rahul Dravid, Venkatesh Prasad, Robin Uthappa, Vinay Kumar, Gundappa Vishwanath, Syed Kirmani, Stuart Binny, K. L. Rahul, Mayank Agarwal, Manish Pandey, Karun Nair, Ashwini Ponnappa, Mahesh Bhupathi, Rohan Bopanna, Prakash Padukone who won the All England Badminton Championships in 1980 and Pankaj Advani who has won three world titles in cue sports by the age of 20 including the amateur World Snooker Championship in 2003 and the World Billiards Championship in 2005.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Bijapur district has produced some of the best-known road cyclists in the national circuit. Premalata Sureban was part of the Indian contingent at the Perlis Open '99 in Malaysia. In recognition of the talent of cyclists in the district, the state government laid down a cycling track at the B.R. Ambedkar Stadium at a cost of ₹4 million (US$50,000).",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "By virtue of its varied geography and long history, Karnataka hosts numerous spots of interest for tourists. There is an array of ancient sculptured temples, modern cities, scenic hill ranges, forests and beaches. Karnataka has been ranked as the fourth most popular destination for tourism among the states of India. Karnataka has the second highest number of nationally protected monuments in India, second only to Uttar Pradesh, in addition to 752 monuments protected by the State Directorate of Archaeology and Museums. Another 25,000 monuments are yet to receive protection.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "The districts of the Western Ghats and the southern districts of the state have popular eco-tourism locations including Kudremukh, Madikeri and Agumbe. Karnataka has 25 wildlife sanctuaries and five national parks. Popular among them are Bandipura National Park, Bannerghatta National Park and Nagarhole National Park. The ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire at Hampi and the monuments of Pattadakal are on the list of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites. The cave temples at Badami and the rock-cut temples at Aihole representing the Badami Chalukyan style of architecture are also popular tourist destinations. The Hoysala temples at Beluru and Halebidu, which were built with Chloritic schist (soapstone) are proposed UNESCO World Heritage sites. The Gol Gumbaz and Ibrahim Rauza are famous examples of the Deccan Sultanate style of architecture. The monolith of Gomateshwara Bahubali at Shravanabelagola is the tallest sculpted monolith in the world, attracting tens of thousands of pilgrims during the Mahamastakabhisheka festival.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The waterfalls of Karnataka and Kudremukh are considered by some to be among the \"1001 Natural Wonders of the World\". Jog Falls is India's tallest single-tiered waterfall with Gokak Falls, Unchalli Falls, Magod Falls, Abbey Falls and Shivanasamudra Falls among other popular waterfalls.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Several popular beaches dot the coastline, including Murudeshwara, Gokarna, Malpe and Karwar. In addition, Karnataka is home to several places of religious importance. Several Hindu temples including the famous Udupi Sri Krishna Matha, the Marikamba Temple at Sirsi, the Kollur Mookambika Temple, the Sri Manjunatha Temple at Dharmasthala, Kukke Subramanya Temple, Janardhana and Mahakali Temple at Ambalpadi, Sharadamba Temple at Shringeri attract pilgrims from all over India. Most of the holy sites of Lingayatism, like Kudalasangama and Basavana Bagewadi, are found in northern parts of the state. Shravanabelagola, Mudabidri and Karkala are famous for Jain history and monuments. Jainism had a stronghold in Karnataka in the early medieval period with Shravanabelagola as its most important centre. The Shettihalli Rosary Church near Shettihalli, an example of French colonial Gothic architecture, is a rare example of a Christian ruin, is a popular tourist site.",
"title": "Tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Karnataka has become a center of health care tourism and has the highest number of approved health systems and alternative therapies in India. Along with some ISO certified government-owned hospitals, private institutions which provide international-quality services, Hospitals in Karnataka treat around 8,000 health tourists every year.",
"title": "Tourism"
}
] |
Karnataka, formerly Mysore State, is a state in the southwestern region of India. It was formed as Mysore State on 1 November 1956, with the passage of the States Reorganisation Act, and renamed Karnataka in 1973. The state was part of the Carnatic region in British terminology. Its capital and largest city is Bengaluru (Bangalore). Karnataka is bordered by the Lakshadweep Sea to the west, Goa to the northwest, Maharashtra to the north, Telangana to the northeast, Andhra Pradesh to the east, Tamil Nadu to the southeast, and Kerala to the southwest. It is the only southern state to have land borders with all of the other four southern Indian sister states. The state covers an area of 191,791 km2 (74,051 sq mi), or 5.83 percent of the total geographical area of India. It is the sixth-largest Indian state by area. With 61,130,704 inhabitants at the 2011 census, Karnataka is the eighth-largest state by population, comprising 31 districts. Kannada, one of the classical languages of India, is the most widely spoken and official language of the state. Other minority languages spoken include Urdu, Konkani, Marathi, Tulu, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kodava and Beary. Karnataka also contains some of the only villages in India where Sanskrit is primarily spoken. Though several etymologies have been suggested for the name Karnataka, the generally accepted one is that Karnataka is derived from the Kannada words karu and nādu, meaning "elevated land". Karu Nadu may also be read as karu, meaning "black" and nadu, meaning "region", as a reference to the black cotton soil found in the Bayalu Seeme region of the state. The British used the word Carnatic, sometimes Karnatak, to describe both sides of peninsular India, south of the Krishna. With an antiquity that dates to the paleolithic, Karnataka has been home to some of the most powerful empires of ancient and medieval India. The philosophers and musical bards patronised by these empires launched socio-religious and literary movements which have endured to the present day. Karnataka has contributed significantly to both forms of Indian classical music, the Carnatic and Hindustani traditions. The economy of Karnataka is the fifth-largest of any Indian state with ₹20.5 trillion (US$260 billion) in gross domestic product and a per capita GDP of ₹305,000 (US$3,800). Karnataka has the fifteenth-highest ranking among Indian states in Human Development Index.
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2023-12-20T18:41:18Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnataka
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16,881 |
Kashrut
|
Kashrut (also kashruth or kashrus, כַּשְׁרוּת) is a set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jewish people are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Food that may be consumed is deemed kosher (/ˈkoʊʃər/ in English, Yiddish: כּשר), from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the term that in Sephardic or Modern Hebrew is pronounced kashér (כָּשֵׁר), meaning "fit" (in this context: "fit for consumption"). Food that may not be consumed, however, is deemed treif (/treɪf/ in English, Yiddish: טרײף), also spelled treyf (Yiddish: טריף).
Although the details of the laws of kashrut are numerous and complex, they rest on a few basic principles:
Every food that is considered kosher is also categorized as follows:
While any produce that grows from the earth, such as fruits, grains, vegetables and mushrooms, is always permissible, laws regarding the status of certain agricultural produce, especially that grown in the Land of Israel, such as tithes and produce of the Sabbatical year, impact their permissibility for consumption.
Most of the basic laws of kashrut are derived from the Torah's books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Their details and practical application, however, are set down in the Oral Torah (eventually codified in the Mishnah and Talmud) and elaborated on in the later rabbinical literature. Although the Torah does not state the rationale for most kashrut laws, some suggest that they are only tests of obedience, while others have suggested philosophical, practical and hygienic reasons.
Over the past century, many kashrut certification agencies have started to certify products, manufacturers, and restaurants as kosher, usually authorizing the use of a proprietary symbol or certificate, called a hechsher, to be displayed by the food establishment or on the product, which indicates that they are in compliance with the kosher laws. This labeling is useful for many people, including those whose religions expect adherence to a similar set of dietary laws, people with allergies to dairy foods, or vegans, who use the various kosher designations to determine whether a food contains meat or dairy-derived ingredients.
The laws of Kashrut are a major area covered in traditional rabbinic ordination; see Yeshiva § Jewish law and Semikhah § Varieties of ordination. And numerous scholarly and popular works exist on these topics, covering both practice and theory.
Jewish philosophy divides the 613 commandments (or mitzvot) into three groups—laws that have a rational explanation and would probably be enacted by most orderly societies (mishpatim), laws that are understood after being explained but would not be legislated without the Torah's command (eidot), and laws that do not have a rational explanation (chukim).
Some Jewish scholars say that kashrut should be categorized as laws for which there is no particular explanation since the human mind is not always capable of understanding divine intentions. In this line of thinking, the dietary laws were given as a demonstration of God's authority, and man must obey without asking why. Although Maimonides concurs that all the statutes of the Torah are decrees, he is of the view that whenever possible, one should seek out reasons for the Torah's commandments.
Some theologians have said that the laws of kashrut are symbolic in character: kosher animals represent virtues, while non-kosher animals represent vices. The 1st-century BCE Letter of Aristeas argues that the laws "have been given [...] to awake pious thoughts and to form the character". This view reappears in the work of the 19th-century Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.
The Torah prohibits "cooking the kid (goat, sheep, calf) in its mother's milk". While the Torah does not provide a reason, it has been suggested that the practice was perceived as cruel and insensitive.
Hasidic Judaism believes that everyday life is imbued with channels connecting with Divinity, the activation of which it sees as helping the Divine Presence to be drawn into the physical world; Hasidism argues that the food laws are related to the way such channels, termed 'sparks of holiness', interact with various animals. These 'sparks of holiness' are released whenever a Jew manipulates any object for a 'holy reason' (which includes eating); however, not all animal products are capable of releasing their 'sparks of holiness'. The Hasidic argument is that animals are imbued with signs that reveal the release of these sparks, and the signs are expressed in the biblical categorization of ritually 'clean' and ritually 'unclean'.
Although the reason for kashrut is that it is a decree from the Torah, there have been attempts to provide scientific support for the view that Jewish food laws have an incidental health benefit. One of the earliest is that of Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed.
In 1953, David Macht, an Orthodox Jew and proponent of the theory of biblical scientific foresight, conducted toxicity experiments on many kinds of animals and fish. His experiment involved lupin seedlings being supplied with extracts from the meat of various animals; Macht reported that in 100% of cases, extracts from ritually 'unclean' meat inhibited the seedling's growth more than that from ritually 'clean' meats.
At the same time, these explanations are controversial. Scholar Lester L. Grabbe, writing in the Oxford Bible Commentary on Leviticus, says "[a]n explanation now almost universally rejected is that the laws in this section have hygiene as their basis. Although some of the laws of ritual purity roughly correspond to modern ideas of physical cleanliness, many of them have little to do with hygiene. For example, there is no evidence that the 'unclean' animals are intrinsically bad to eat or to be avoided in a Mediterranean climate, as is sometimes asserted."
The laws of kashrut can be classified according to the origin of the prohibition (Biblical or rabbinical) and whether the prohibition concerns the food itself or a mixture of foods.
Biblically prohibited foods include:
Biblically prohibited mixtures include:
Rabbinically prohibited foods include:
Only meat from particular species is permissible. Mammals that both chew their cud (ruminate) and have cloven hooves can be kosher. Animals with one characteristic but not the other (the camel, the hyrax, and the hare because they have no cloven hooves, and the pig because it does not ruminate) are specifically excluded.
In 2008, a rabbinical ruling determined that giraffes and their milk are eligible to be considered kosher. The giraffe has both split hooves and chews its cud, characteristics of animals considered kosher. Findings from 2008 show that giraffe milk curdles, meeting kosher standards. Although kosher, the giraffe is not slaughtered today because the process would be very costly. Giraffes are difficult to restrain, and their use for food could cause the species to become endangered.
Non-kosher birds are listed outright in the Torah, but the exact zoological references are disputed and some references refer to families of birds (24 are mentioned). The Mishnah refers to four signs provided by the sages. First, a dores (predatory bird) is not kosher. Additionally, kosher birds possess three physical characteristics: an extra toe in the back (which does not join the other toes in supporting the leg), a zefek (crop), and a korkoban (gizzard) with a peelable lumen. However, individual Jews are barred from merely applying these regulations alone; an established tradition (masorah) is necessary to allow birds to be consumed, even if it can be substantiated that they meet all four criteria. The only exception to this is the turkey. There was a time when certain authorities considered the signs sufficient, so Jews started eating this bird without a masorah because it possesses all the signs (simanim) in Hebrew.
Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. Shellfish and other non-fish water fauna are not kosher. (See kosher species of fish.) Insects are not kosher, except for certain species of kosher locust. Any animal that eats other animals, whether they kill their food or eat carrion, is generally not kosher, as well as any animal that has been partially eaten by other animals.
Meat and milk (or derivatives) may not be mixed in the sense that meat and dairy products are not served at the same meal, served or cooked in the same utensils, or stored together.
Observant Jews have separate sets of dishes, and sometimes different kitchens, for meat and milk, and wait anywhere between one and six hours after eating meat before consuming milk products. The milchig and fleishig (literally "milky" and "meaty") utensils and dishes are the commonly referred-to Yiddish delineations between dairy and meat ones, respectively.
Shelomo Dov Goitein writes, "the dichotomy of the kitchen into a meat and a milk section, so basic in an observant Jewish household, is [...] never mentioned in the Geniza." Goitein believed that in the early Middle Ages Jewish families kept only one set of cutlery and cooking ware. According to David C. Kraemer, the practice of keeping separate sets of dishes developed only in the late 14th and 15th centuries. It is possible observant Jews before then waited overnight for the meat or dairy gravy absorbed in a pot's walls to become insignificant (lifgam) before using the pot for the other foodstuff (meat or dairy).
Mammals and fowl must be slaughtered by a trained individual (a shochet) using a special method of slaughter, shechita. Shechita slaughter severs the jugular vein, carotid artery, esophagus, and trachea in a single continuous cutting movement with an unserrated, sharp knife. Failure to meet any of these criteria renders the meat of the animal non-kosher.
The body of the slaughtered animal must be checked after slaughter to confirm that the animal had no medical condition or defect that would have caused it to die of its own accord within a year, which would make the meat unsuitable.
These conditions (treifot) include 70 different categories of injuries, diseases, and abnormalities whose presence renders the animal non-kosher.
It is forbidden to consume certain parts of the animal, such as certain fats (chelev) and the sciatic nerves from the legs, the process of excision being done by experts before the meat is sold.
As much blood as possible must be removed through the kashering process; this is usually done through soaking and salting the meat, but the liver, as it is rich in blood, is grilled over an open flame.
Fish (and kosher locusts, for those who follow the traditions permitting them) must be killed before being eaten, but no particular method has been specified in Jewish law. Legal aspects of ritual slaughter are governed not only by Jewish law but civil law as well.
Some believe that this ensures the animal dies instantly without unnecessary suffering, but many animal rights activists view the process as cruel, claiming that the animal may not lose consciousness immediately, and activists have called for it to be banned.
When an animal is ritually slaughtered (shechted) the raw meat is traditionally cut, salted, and rinsed, prior to cooking. Salting of raw meat draws out the blood that lodges on the inner surface of the meat. The salting is done with coarse grain salt, commonly referred to as kosher salt, after which the meat is laid over a grating or colander to allow for drainage, remaining so for the duration of time that it takes to walk one biblical mile (approximately 18–24 minutes). Afterwards, the residue of salt is rinsed away with water, and the meat cooked.
Meat that is roasted requires no prior salting, as fire causes a natural purging of blood.
Turei Zahav ("Taz"), a 17th-century commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, ruled that the pieces of meat can be "very thick" when salting. The Yemenite Jewish practice, however, follows Saadiah Gaon, who required that the meat not be larger than half a "rotal" (i.e. roughly 216 grams (7.6 oz)) when salting. This allows the effects of the salt to penetrate.
Some Orthodox Jewish communities require the additional stricture of submersing raw meat in boiling water prior to cooking it, a practice known as ḥaliṭah (Hebrew: חליטה), "blanching." This was believed to constrict the blood lodged within the meat, to prevent it from oozing out when the meat was eaten. The raw meat is left in the pot of boiling water for as long as it takes for the meat to whiten on its outer layer.
If someone wanted to use the water for soup after making ḥaliṭah in the same pot, they could simply scoop out the film, froth and scum that surface in the boiling water.
Ḥaliṭah is not required when roasting meat over a fire, as the fire constricts the blood.
Utensils used for non-kosher foods become non-kosher, and make even otherwise kosher food prepared with them non-kosher.
Some such utensils, depending on the material they are made from, can be made suitable for preparing kosher food again by immersion in boiling water or by the application of a blowtorch.
Food prepared in a manner that violates the Shabbat (Sabbath) may not be eaten; although in certain instances it is permitted after the Shabbat is over.
Passover has stricter dietary rules, the most important of which is the prohibition on eating leavened bread or derivatives of this, which are known as chametz. This prohibition is derived from Exodus 12:15.
Utensils used in preparing and serving chametz are also forbidden on Passover unless they have been ritually cleansed (kashered).
Observant Jews often keep separate sets of meat and dairy utensils for Passover use only. In addition, some groups follow various eating restrictions on Passover that go beyond the rules of kashrut, such as not eating kitniyot, gebrochts or garlic.
Biblical rules also control the use of agriculture produce, for example, with respect to their tithing, or when it is permitted to eat them or to harvest them, and what must be done to make them suitable for human consumption.
For produce grown in the Land of Israel a modified version of the biblical tithes must be applied, including Terumat HaMaaser, Maaser Rishon, Maaser Sheni, and Maasar Ani (untithed produce is called tevel); the fruit of the first three years of a tree's growth or replanting are forbidden for eating or any other use as orlah; produce grown in the Land of Israel on the seventh year obtains k'dushat shvi'it, and unless managed carefully is forbidden as a violation of the Shmita (Sabbatical Year).
Some rules of kashrut are subject to different rabbinical opinions. For example, many hold that the rule against eating chadash (new grain) before the 16th of the month Nisan does not apply outside the Land of Israel.
Although plants and minerals are nearly always kosher, vegetarian restaurants and producers of vegetarian foods are required to obtain a hechsher, certifying that a rabbinical organization has approved their products as being kosher, because the hechsher usually certifies that certain vegetables have been checked for insect infestation and steps have been taken to ensure that cooked food meets the requirements of bishul Yisrael. Vegetables such as spinach and cauliflower must be checked for insect infestation. The proper procedure for inspecting and cleaning varies by species, growing conditions, and views of individual rabbis.
A pareve food is one which is neither meat nor dairy. Fish fall into this category, as well as any food that is not animal-derived. Eggs are also considered pareve despite being an animal product.
Some processes convert a meat- or dairy-derived product into a pareve one. For example, rennet is sometimes made from stomach linings, yet is acceptable for making kosher cheese. Gelatins derived from kosher animal sources (which were ritually slaughtered) are also pareve. Other gelatin-like products from non-animal sources such as agar agar and carrageenan are pareve by nature. Fish gelatin, like all kosher fish products, is pareve.
Jewish law generally requires that bread be kept pareve (i.e., not kneaded with meat or dairy products nor made on meat or dairy equipment).
Kashrut has procedures by which equipment can be cleaned of its previous non-kosher or meat/dairy use, but those may be inadequate for vegetarians, those with allergies, or adherents to other religious laws.
For example, dairy manufacturing equipment can be cleaned well enough that the rabbis grant pareve status to products manufactured with it but someone with a strong allergic sensitivity to dairy products might still react to the dairy residue. This is why some products that are legitimately pareve carry "milk" warnings.
For cannabis grown in Israel, the plants must observe shmittah, but this does not apply to cannabis from elsewhere. At least one brand of cannabis edibles is certified to follow the laws of kashrut.
Although it is not a food product, some tobacco receives a year-long kosher for Passover certification. This year-long certification means that the tobacco is certified also for Passover where different restrictions may be in place. Tobacco may, for example, come into contact with some chametz grains that are strictly forbidden during Passover and the certification is a guarantee that it is free from this type of contamination.
In Israel, this certification is given by a private kashrut rabbinic group Beit Yosef, but the Chief Rabbinate has objected to granting of any certification by rabbis because of health risks from tobacco.
With the advent of genetic engineering, a whole new type of food has been brought into the world, and scholars in both academia and Judaic faith have differing viewpoints on whether these new strains of foods are to be considered kosher or not. The first genetically modified animal approved by the FDA for human consumption is the AquAdvantage salmon and, while salmon is normally an acceptably kosher food, this modified organism has a gene from a non-kosher organism.
In 2015, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly released a document regarding genetically modified organisms, stating that modification of gene sequences via the introduction of foreign DNA in order to convey a specific capability in the new organism is allowable, that entirely new species should not be intentionally created, and that the health implications of genetically modified foods must be considered on an individual basis.
Some put forth that this intermixing of species is against the teachings of the Talmud and thus against Jewish Law and non-kosher. Others argue that the one in sixty parts law of kashrut is of significance, and that the foreign gene accounts for less than 1/60 of the animal and thus the modified salmon is kosher.
Certain foods must be prepared in whole or in part by Jews. This includes grape wine, certain cooked foods (bishul akum), cheese (g'vinat akum), and according to some also butter (chem'at akum), dairy products (Hebrew: חלב ישראל chalav Yisrael "milk of Israel"), and bread (Pas Yisroel).
Although reading the label of food products can identify obviously non-kosher ingredients, some countries allow manufacturers to omit identification of certain ingredients. Such "hidden" ingredients may include lubricants and flavorings, among other additives; in some cases, for instance, the use of natural flavorings, these ingredients are more likely to be derived from non-kosher substances. Furthermore, certain products, such as fish, have a high rate of mislabeling, which may result in a non-kosher fish being sold in a package labeled as a species of kosher fish.
Producers of foods and food additives can contact Jewish religious authorities to have their products certified as kosher: this involves a visit to the manufacturing facilities by an individual rabbi or a committee from a rabbinic organization, who will inspect the production methods and contents and, if everything is sufficiently kosher a certificate would be issued.
Manufacturers sometimes identify the products that have received such certification by adding particular graphical symbols to the label. These symbols are known in Judaism as hechsherim. Due to differences in kashrut standards held by different organizations, the hechsheirim of certain Jewish authorities may at times be considered invalid by other Jewish authorities. The certification marks of the various rabbis and organisations are too numerous to list, but one of the most commonly used in the United States of America is that of the Union of Orthodox Congregations, who use a U inside a circle ("O-U"), symbolising the initials of Orthodox Union. In Britain, commonly used symbols are the "KLBD" logo of the London Beth Din and the "MK" logo of the Manchester Beth Din. A single K is sometimes used as a symbol for kosher, but since many countries do not allow letters to be trademarked (the method by which other symbols are protected from misuse), it only indicates that the company producing the product claims that it is kosher.
Many of the certification symbols are accompanied by additional letters or words to indicate the category of the product, according to Jewish law; the categorization may conflict with legal classifications, especially in the case of food that Jewish law regards as dairy, but legal classification does not.
In many cases constant supervision is required because, for various reasons such as changes in manufacturing processes, products that once were kosher may cease to be so. For example, a kosher lubricating oil may be replaced by one containing tallow, which many rabbinic authorities view as non-kosher. Such changes are often coordinated with the supervising rabbi or supervising organization to ensure that new packaging does not suggest any hechsher or kashrut. In some cases, however, existing stocks of pre-printed labels with the hechsher may continue to be used on the now non-kosher product. An active grapevine among the Jewish community discusses which products are now questionable, as well as products which have become kosher but whose labels have yet to carry the hechsher. Some newspapers and periodicals also discuss kashrut products.
Products labeled kosher-style are non-kosher products that have characteristics of kosher foods, such as all-beef hot dogs, or are flavored or prepared in a manner consistent with Ashkenazi practices, like dill pickles. The designation usually refers to delicatessen items.
Food producers often look to expand their markets or marketing potential, and offering kosher food has become a way to do that. The uniqueness of kosher food was advertised as early as 1849. In 1911 Procter & Gamble became the first company to advertise one of their products, Crisco, as kosher. Over the next two decades, companies such as Lender's Bagels, Maxwell House, Manischewitz, and Empire evolved and gave the kosher market more shelf-space. In the 1960s, Hebrew National hotdogs launched a "we answer to a higher authority" campaign to appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. From that point on, "kosher" became a symbol for both quality and value. The kosher market quickly expanded, and with it more opportunities for kosher products. Menachem Lubinsky, founder of the Kosherfest trade fair, estimates as many as 14 million kosher consumers and $40 billion in sales of kosher products in the U.S.
In 2014 the Israeli Defense Forces decided to allow female kosher supervisors to work in its kitchens on military bases, and the first women kosher inspectors were certified in Israel.
Advertising standards laws in many jurisdictions prohibit the use of the phrase kosher in a product's labeling unless the producer can show that the product conforms to Jewish dietary laws; however, different jurisdictions often define the legal qualifications for conforming to Jewish dietary laws differently. For example, in some places the law may require that a rabbi certify the kashrut nature, in others the rules of kosher are fully defined in law, and in others still it is sufficient that the manufacturer only believes that the product complies with Jewish dietary regulations. In several cases, laws restricting the use of the term kosher have later been determined to be illegal religious interference.
In the United States, the cost of certification for mass-produced items is typically minuscule and is usually more than offset by the advantages of being certified. In 1975 The New York Times estimated the cost per item for obtaining kosher certification at 6.5 millionths of a cent ($0.000000065) per item for a General Foods frozen-food item. According to a 2005 report by Burns & McDonnell, most U.S. national certifying agencies are non-profit, only charging for supervision and on-site work, for which the on-site supervisor "typically makes less per visit than an auto mechanic does per hour". However, re-engineering an existing manufacturing process can be costly. Certification usually leads to increased revenues by opening up additional markets to Jews who keep kosher, Muslims who keep halal, Seventh-day Adventists who keep the main laws of Kosher Diet, vegetarians, and the lactose-intolerant who wish to avoid dairy products (products that are reliably certified as pareve meet this criterion). The Orthodox Union, one of the largest kashrut organizations in the United States, claims that "when positioned next to a competing non-kosher brand, a kosher product will do better by 20%".
In some European Jewish communities, kosher supervision of meat includes a "tax" used to fund Jewish education in the community, which makes kosher meat more expensive than the cost of supervision alone would imply.
Many Jews partially observe kashrut, by abstaining from pork or shellfish or by not drinking milk with meat dishes. Some keep kosher at home but eat in non-kosher restaurants. In 2012, one analysis of the specialty food market in North America estimated that only 15% of kosher consumers were Jewish. Kosher meat is regularly consumed by Muslims when halal is not available. Muslims, Hindus, and people with allergies to dairy foods often consider the kosher-pareve designation as an assurance that a food contains no animal-derived ingredients, including milk and all of its derivatives. However, since kosher-pareve foods may contain honey, eggs, or fish, vegans cannot rely on the certification.
About a sixth of American Jews or 0.3% of the American population fully keep kosher, and many more of them do not strictly follow all of the rules but still abstain from some prohibited foods, especially pork. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Christian denomination, preaches a health message which expects adherence to the kosher dietary laws.
Surveys conducted in 2013 and 2020 found that 22% of American Jews by religion claimed to keep kosher in their homes. Pork consumption in particular seems to be a bigger taboo than other non-Kosher eating practices among Jews, with 41% claiming to at least abstain from eating pork. American Jews are generally less strict about Kosher laws when compared to Israeli Jews. Nearly three times as many Israeli Jews reported that they commit to keeping kosher in their homes and 84% do not eat pork.
"Kosher style" allows for variation in adherence to kashrut, reflecting different practices within the Jewish community. For some, kosher style implies abstinence from non-kosher animals, like pork and shellfish, and the avoidance of mixing meat and dairy in meals. These individuals may consume meat from animals that are kosher but not necessarily slaughtered according to kashrut standards.
The notion of "kosher style" serves individuals and communities navigating between strict religious observance and cultural identification with Jewish culinary traditions. Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, suggests that "kosher-style" represents a balancing act between tradition and assimilation, providing a sense of Jewish identity through food without strict adherence to kashrut.
This flexible practice emerged in the 1920s amongst Jews assimilating into American society, who sought connection to their heritage without fully observing dietary laws. The term is broad and encompasses foods that could be kosher, like chicken noodle soup or pareve meals (neither meat nor dairy), even if they don't meet halakhic standards. Diner points out the term is “oxymoronic,” creating an illusion of kashrut where the true emphasis is on a style of cuisine rather than compliance with religious dietary laws.
Over time, the meaning of "kosher style" has evolved and expanded, reflecting changes within Jewish communities and broader society. In contemporary practice, "kosher style" is often encountered at social events and gatherings, where meals might exclude certain non-kosher items but not adhere strictly to kashrut. The exact definition may vary between communities and individuals, reflecting diverse interpretations and practices related to Jewish dietary laws. The term also relates to products marketed as "kosher style," prompting some regions to establish legislation to clarify labeling and prevent consumer misunderstanding. For instance, kosher-style pickles might be produced without kosher certification or supervision but are associated with Jewish culinary tradition.
In Ancient Hebrew the word kosher (Hebrew: כשר) means be advantageous, proper, suitable, or succeed, according to the Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. In Modern Hebrew it generally refers to kashrut but it can also sometimes mean "proper". For example, the Babylonian Talmud uses kosher in the sense of "virtuous" when referring to Darius I as a "kosher king"; Darius, a Persian king (reigned 522–486 BCE), fostered the building of the Second Temple. In colloquial English, kosher often means "legitimate", "acceptable", "permissible", "genuine", or "authentic". The word kosher can also form part of some common product names.
Sometimes kosher is used as an abbreviation of koshering, meaning the process for making something kosher; for example, kosher salt is a form of salt with irregularly shaped crystals, making it particularly suitable for preparing meat according to the rules of kashrut, because the increased surface area of the crystals absorbs blood more effectively. In this case the type of salt refers to kosher style salt. Salt may also be kosher certified salt, or both. Certified kosher salt follows kashrut guidelines. Sometimes the term "coarse kosher salt" is used to designate salt that is both kosher style and kosher certified. The term "fine kosher salt" is sometimes used for salt that is certified kosher but not kosher style.
Kosher can occur as a synonym for Jewish tradition; for example, a kosher dill pickle is simply a pickle made in the traditional manner of Jewish New York City pickle-makers, using a generous addition of garlic to the brine, and is not necessarily compliant with the traditional Jewish food laws.
Mehadrin is a term most commonly used with the meaning of enhanced or stricter kashrut rules. Its etymology is still debated, but its initial halachic use related specifically to lighting candles on Hanukkah. Later it became widely used in regard to dietary laws, and ended up loosely covering almost every aspect of Jewish observance (see mehadrin bus lines).
Badatz is the Hebrew acronym of Beth Din Tsedek and is used as a name for organisations which supervise the production of kosher foods. They typically only certify mehadrin-level products, but are not the only agencies specialised in applying enhanced mehadrin rules, since there are non-badatz agencies also doing so.
A treef (Surinamese Dutch, derived from Sranan Tongo trefu) is a food taboo. In Suriname certain groups of people have long adhered to belief in treef, especially among people of African descent. The consumption of certain foods is prohibited, in the belief that it could cause major diseases, particularly leprosy. These prohibitions can vary individually, but it is inextricably related to conditions in the family. A treef is inherited from the father's side, but it can be revealed in a dream, often by a woman. In addition, a woman must take into account special food taboos during pregnancy. There is great importance attached to the treef; if a child observes the treef of his father, and yet experiences a skin condition, this is seen as a strong indication that the child was begotten by the woman with another man. Finally treef also be acquired later in life by wearing certain charms that compel you to abstain from certain foods.
The word is derived from Hebrew, due to influence of Sephardi Jews who came to Suriname in the 17th century. This is also the source of Sranan kaseri 'ritually clean, kosher'.
Although the term kosher relates mainly to food, it sometimes occurs in other contexts. Some Orthodox retailers sell kosher cell phones—stripped-down devices with limited features.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kashrut (also kashruth or kashrus, כַּשְׁרוּת) is a set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jewish people are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Food that may be consumed is deemed kosher (/ˈkoʊʃər/ in English, Yiddish: כּשר), from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the term that in Sephardic or Modern Hebrew is pronounced kashér (כָּשֵׁר), meaning \"fit\" (in this context: \"fit for consumption\"). Food that may not be consumed, however, is deemed treif (/treɪf/ in English, Yiddish: טרײף), also spelled treyf (Yiddish: טריף).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Although the details of the laws of kashrut are numerous and complex, they rest on a few basic principles:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Every food that is considered kosher is also categorized as follows:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "While any produce that grows from the earth, such as fruits, grains, vegetables and mushrooms, is always permissible, laws regarding the status of certain agricultural produce, especially that grown in the Land of Israel, such as tithes and produce of the Sabbatical year, impact their permissibility for consumption.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Most of the basic laws of kashrut are derived from the Torah's books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Their details and practical application, however, are set down in the Oral Torah (eventually codified in the Mishnah and Talmud) and elaborated on in the later rabbinical literature. Although the Torah does not state the rationale for most kashrut laws, some suggest that they are only tests of obedience, while others have suggested philosophical, practical and hygienic reasons.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Over the past century, many kashrut certification agencies have started to certify products, manufacturers, and restaurants as kosher, usually authorizing the use of a proprietary symbol or certificate, called a hechsher, to be displayed by the food establishment or on the product, which indicates that they are in compliance with the kosher laws. This labeling is useful for many people, including those whose religions expect adherence to a similar set of dietary laws, people with allergies to dairy foods, or vegans, who use the various kosher designations to determine whether a food contains meat or dairy-derived ingredients.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The laws of Kashrut are a major area covered in traditional rabbinic ordination; see Yeshiva § Jewish law and Semikhah § Varieties of ordination. And numerous scholarly and popular works exist on these topics, covering both practice and theory.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Jewish philosophy divides the 613 commandments (or mitzvot) into three groups—laws that have a rational explanation and would probably be enacted by most orderly societies (mishpatim), laws that are understood after being explained but would not be legislated without the Torah's command (eidot), and laws that do not have a rational explanation (chukim).",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Some Jewish scholars say that kashrut should be categorized as laws for which there is no particular explanation since the human mind is not always capable of understanding divine intentions. In this line of thinking, the dietary laws were given as a demonstration of God's authority, and man must obey without asking why. Although Maimonides concurs that all the statutes of the Torah are decrees, he is of the view that whenever possible, one should seek out reasons for the Torah's commandments.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Some theologians have said that the laws of kashrut are symbolic in character: kosher animals represent virtues, while non-kosher animals represent vices. The 1st-century BCE Letter of Aristeas argues that the laws \"have been given [...] to awake pious thoughts and to form the character\". This view reappears in the work of the 19th-century Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Torah prohibits \"cooking the kid (goat, sheep, calf) in its mother's milk\". While the Torah does not provide a reason, it has been suggested that the practice was perceived as cruel and insensitive.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hasidic Judaism believes that everyday life is imbued with channels connecting with Divinity, the activation of which it sees as helping the Divine Presence to be drawn into the physical world; Hasidism argues that the food laws are related to the way such channels, termed 'sparks of holiness', interact with various animals. These 'sparks of holiness' are released whenever a Jew manipulates any object for a 'holy reason' (which includes eating); however, not all animal products are capable of releasing their 'sparks of holiness'. The Hasidic argument is that animals are imbued with signs that reveal the release of these sparks, and the signs are expressed in the biblical categorization of ritually 'clean' and ritually 'unclean'.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Although the reason for kashrut is that it is a decree from the Torah, there have been attempts to provide scientific support for the view that Jewish food laws have an incidental health benefit. One of the earliest is that of Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1953, David Macht, an Orthodox Jew and proponent of the theory of biblical scientific foresight, conducted toxicity experiments on many kinds of animals and fish. His experiment involved lupin seedlings being supplied with extracts from the meat of various animals; Macht reported that in 100% of cases, extracts from ritually 'unclean' meat inhibited the seedling's growth more than that from ritually 'clean' meats.",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "At the same time, these explanations are controversial. Scholar Lester L. Grabbe, writing in the Oxford Bible Commentary on Leviticus, says \"[a]n explanation now almost universally rejected is that the laws in this section have hygiene as their basis. Although some of the laws of ritual purity roughly correspond to modern ideas of physical cleanliness, many of them have little to do with hygiene. For example, there is no evidence that the 'unclean' animals are intrinsically bad to eat or to be avoided in a Mediterranean climate, as is sometimes asserted.\"",
"title": "Explanations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The laws of kashrut can be classified according to the origin of the prohibition (Biblical or rabbinical) and whether the prohibition concerns the food itself or a mixture of foods.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Biblically prohibited foods include:",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Biblically prohibited mixtures include:",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Rabbinically prohibited foods include:",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Only meat from particular species is permissible. Mammals that both chew their cud (ruminate) and have cloven hooves can be kosher. Animals with one characteristic but not the other (the camel, the hyrax, and the hare because they have no cloven hooves, and the pig because it does not ruminate) are specifically excluded.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2008, a rabbinical ruling determined that giraffes and their milk are eligible to be considered kosher. The giraffe has both split hooves and chews its cud, characteristics of animals considered kosher. Findings from 2008 show that giraffe milk curdles, meeting kosher standards. Although kosher, the giraffe is not slaughtered today because the process would be very costly. Giraffes are difficult to restrain, and their use for food could cause the species to become endangered.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Non-kosher birds are listed outright in the Torah, but the exact zoological references are disputed and some references refer to families of birds (24 are mentioned). The Mishnah refers to four signs provided by the sages. First, a dores (predatory bird) is not kosher. Additionally, kosher birds possess three physical characteristics: an extra toe in the back (which does not join the other toes in supporting the leg), a zefek (crop), and a korkoban (gizzard) with a peelable lumen. However, individual Jews are barred from merely applying these regulations alone; an established tradition (masorah) is necessary to allow birds to be consumed, even if it can be substantiated that they meet all four criteria. The only exception to this is the turkey. There was a time when certain authorities considered the signs sufficient, so Jews started eating this bird without a masorah because it possesses all the signs (simanim) in Hebrew.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. Shellfish and other non-fish water fauna are not kosher. (See kosher species of fish.) Insects are not kosher, except for certain species of kosher locust. Any animal that eats other animals, whether they kill their food or eat carrion, is generally not kosher, as well as any animal that has been partially eaten by other animals.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Meat and milk (or derivatives) may not be mixed in the sense that meat and dairy products are not served at the same meal, served or cooked in the same utensils, or stored together.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Observant Jews have separate sets of dishes, and sometimes different kitchens, for meat and milk, and wait anywhere between one and six hours after eating meat before consuming milk products. The milchig and fleishig (literally \"milky\" and \"meaty\") utensils and dishes are the commonly referred-to Yiddish delineations between dairy and meat ones, respectively.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Shelomo Dov Goitein writes, \"the dichotomy of the kitchen into a meat and a milk section, so basic in an observant Jewish household, is [...] never mentioned in the Geniza.\" Goitein believed that in the early Middle Ages Jewish families kept only one set of cutlery and cooking ware. According to David C. Kraemer, the practice of keeping separate sets of dishes developed only in the late 14th and 15th centuries. It is possible observant Jews before then waited overnight for the meat or dairy gravy absorbed in a pot's walls to become insignificant (lifgam) before using the pot for the other foodstuff (meat or dairy).",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Mammals and fowl must be slaughtered by a trained individual (a shochet) using a special method of slaughter, shechita. Shechita slaughter severs the jugular vein, carotid artery, esophagus, and trachea in a single continuous cutting movement with an unserrated, sharp knife. Failure to meet any of these criteria renders the meat of the animal non-kosher.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The body of the slaughtered animal must be checked after slaughter to confirm that the animal had no medical condition or defect that would have caused it to die of its own accord within a year, which would make the meat unsuitable.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "These conditions (treifot) include 70 different categories of injuries, diseases, and abnormalities whose presence renders the animal non-kosher.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "It is forbidden to consume certain parts of the animal, such as certain fats (chelev) and the sciatic nerves from the legs, the process of excision being done by experts before the meat is sold.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "As much blood as possible must be removed through the kashering process; this is usually done through soaking and salting the meat, but the liver, as it is rich in blood, is grilled over an open flame.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Fish (and kosher locusts, for those who follow the traditions permitting them) must be killed before being eaten, but no particular method has been specified in Jewish law. Legal aspects of ritual slaughter are governed not only by Jewish law but civil law as well.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Some believe that this ensures the animal dies instantly without unnecessary suffering, but many animal rights activists view the process as cruel, claiming that the animal may not lose consciousness immediately, and activists have called for it to be banned.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "When an animal is ritually slaughtered (shechted) the raw meat is traditionally cut, salted, and rinsed, prior to cooking. Salting of raw meat draws out the blood that lodges on the inner surface of the meat. The salting is done with coarse grain salt, commonly referred to as kosher salt, after which the meat is laid over a grating or colander to allow for drainage, remaining so for the duration of time that it takes to walk one biblical mile (approximately 18–24 minutes). Afterwards, the residue of salt is rinsed away with water, and the meat cooked.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Meat that is roasted requires no prior salting, as fire causes a natural purging of blood.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Turei Zahav (\"Taz\"), a 17th-century commentary on the Shulchan Arukh, ruled that the pieces of meat can be \"very thick\" when salting. The Yemenite Jewish practice, however, follows Saadiah Gaon, who required that the meat not be larger than half a \"rotal\" (i.e. roughly 216 grams (7.6 oz)) when salting. This allows the effects of the salt to penetrate.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Some Orthodox Jewish communities require the additional stricture of submersing raw meat in boiling water prior to cooking it, a practice known as ḥaliṭah (Hebrew: חליטה), \"blanching.\" This was believed to constrict the blood lodged within the meat, to prevent it from oozing out when the meat was eaten. The raw meat is left in the pot of boiling water for as long as it takes for the meat to whiten on its outer layer.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "If someone wanted to use the water for soup after making ḥaliṭah in the same pot, they could simply scoop out the film, froth and scum that surface in the boiling water.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Ḥaliṭah is not required when roasting meat over a fire, as the fire constricts the blood.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Utensils used for non-kosher foods become non-kosher, and make even otherwise kosher food prepared with them non-kosher.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Some such utensils, depending on the material they are made from, can be made suitable for preparing kosher food again by immersion in boiling water or by the application of a blowtorch.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Food prepared in a manner that violates the Shabbat (Sabbath) may not be eaten; although in certain instances it is permitted after the Shabbat is over.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Passover has stricter dietary rules, the most important of which is the prohibition on eating leavened bread or derivatives of this, which are known as chametz. This prohibition is derived from Exodus 12:15.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Utensils used in preparing and serving chametz are also forbidden on Passover unless they have been ritually cleansed (kashered).",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Observant Jews often keep separate sets of meat and dairy utensils for Passover use only. In addition, some groups follow various eating restrictions on Passover that go beyond the rules of kashrut, such as not eating kitniyot, gebrochts or garlic.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Biblical rules also control the use of agriculture produce, for example, with respect to their tithing, or when it is permitted to eat them or to harvest them, and what must be done to make them suitable for human consumption.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "For produce grown in the Land of Israel a modified version of the biblical tithes must be applied, including Terumat HaMaaser, Maaser Rishon, Maaser Sheni, and Maasar Ani (untithed produce is called tevel); the fruit of the first three years of a tree's growth or replanting are forbidden for eating or any other use as orlah; produce grown in the Land of Israel on the seventh year obtains k'dushat shvi'it, and unless managed carefully is forbidden as a violation of the Shmita (Sabbatical Year).",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Some rules of kashrut are subject to different rabbinical opinions. For example, many hold that the rule against eating chadash (new grain) before the 16th of the month Nisan does not apply outside the Land of Israel.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Although plants and minerals are nearly always kosher, vegetarian restaurants and producers of vegetarian foods are required to obtain a hechsher, certifying that a rabbinical organization has approved their products as being kosher, because the hechsher usually certifies that certain vegetables have been checked for insect infestation and steps have been taken to ensure that cooked food meets the requirements of bishul Yisrael. Vegetables such as spinach and cauliflower must be checked for insect infestation. The proper procedure for inspecting and cleaning varies by species, growing conditions, and views of individual rabbis.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "A pareve food is one which is neither meat nor dairy. Fish fall into this category, as well as any food that is not animal-derived. Eggs are also considered pareve despite being an animal product.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Some processes convert a meat- or dairy-derived product into a pareve one. For example, rennet is sometimes made from stomach linings, yet is acceptable for making kosher cheese. Gelatins derived from kosher animal sources (which were ritually slaughtered) are also pareve. Other gelatin-like products from non-animal sources such as agar agar and carrageenan are pareve by nature. Fish gelatin, like all kosher fish products, is pareve.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Jewish law generally requires that bread be kept pareve (i.e., not kneaded with meat or dairy products nor made on meat or dairy equipment).",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Kashrut has procedures by which equipment can be cleaned of its previous non-kosher or meat/dairy use, but those may be inadequate for vegetarians, those with allergies, or adherents to other religious laws.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "For example, dairy manufacturing equipment can be cleaned well enough that the rabbis grant pareve status to products manufactured with it but someone with a strong allergic sensitivity to dairy products might still react to the dairy residue. This is why some products that are legitimately pareve carry \"milk\" warnings.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "For cannabis grown in Israel, the plants must observe shmittah, but this does not apply to cannabis from elsewhere. At least one brand of cannabis edibles is certified to follow the laws of kashrut.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Although it is not a food product, some tobacco receives a year-long kosher for Passover certification. This year-long certification means that the tobacco is certified also for Passover where different restrictions may be in place. Tobacco may, for example, come into contact with some chametz grains that are strictly forbidden during Passover and the certification is a guarantee that it is free from this type of contamination.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In Israel, this certification is given by a private kashrut rabbinic group Beit Yosef, but the Chief Rabbinate has objected to granting of any certification by rabbis because of health risks from tobacco.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "With the advent of genetic engineering, a whole new type of food has been brought into the world, and scholars in both academia and Judaic faith have differing viewpoints on whether these new strains of foods are to be considered kosher or not. The first genetically modified animal approved by the FDA for human consumption is the AquAdvantage salmon and, while salmon is normally an acceptably kosher food, this modified organism has a gene from a non-kosher organism.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 2015, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly released a document regarding genetically modified organisms, stating that modification of gene sequences via the introduction of foreign DNA in order to convey a specific capability in the new organism is allowable, that entirely new species should not be intentionally created, and that the health implications of genetically modified foods must be considered on an individual basis.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Some put forth that this intermixing of species is against the teachings of the Talmud and thus against Jewish Law and non-kosher. Others argue that the one in sixty parts law of kashrut is of significance, and that the foreign gene accounts for less than 1/60 of the animal and thus the modified salmon is kosher.",
"title": "Rules"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Certain foods must be prepared in whole or in part by Jews. This includes grape wine, certain cooked foods (bishul akum), cheese (g'vinat akum), and according to some also butter (chem'at akum), dairy products (Hebrew: חלב ישראל chalav Yisrael \"milk of Israel\"), and bread (Pas Yisroel).",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Although reading the label of food products can identify obviously non-kosher ingredients, some countries allow manufacturers to omit identification of certain ingredients. Such \"hidden\" ingredients may include lubricants and flavorings, among other additives; in some cases, for instance, the use of natural flavorings, these ingredients are more likely to be derived from non-kosher substances. Furthermore, certain products, such as fish, have a high rate of mislabeling, which may result in a non-kosher fish being sold in a package labeled as a species of kosher fish.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Producers of foods and food additives can contact Jewish religious authorities to have their products certified as kosher: this involves a visit to the manufacturing facilities by an individual rabbi or a committee from a rabbinic organization, who will inspect the production methods and contents and, if everything is sufficiently kosher a certificate would be issued.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Manufacturers sometimes identify the products that have received such certification by adding particular graphical symbols to the label. These symbols are known in Judaism as hechsherim. Due to differences in kashrut standards held by different organizations, the hechsheirim of certain Jewish authorities may at times be considered invalid by other Jewish authorities. The certification marks of the various rabbis and organisations are too numerous to list, but one of the most commonly used in the United States of America is that of the Union of Orthodox Congregations, who use a U inside a circle (\"O-U\"), symbolising the initials of Orthodox Union. In Britain, commonly used symbols are the \"KLBD\" logo of the London Beth Din and the \"MK\" logo of the Manchester Beth Din. A single K is sometimes used as a symbol for kosher, but since many countries do not allow letters to be trademarked (the method by which other symbols are protected from misuse), it only indicates that the company producing the product claims that it is kosher.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Many of the certification symbols are accompanied by additional letters or words to indicate the category of the product, according to Jewish law; the categorization may conflict with legal classifications, especially in the case of food that Jewish law regards as dairy, but legal classification does not.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In many cases constant supervision is required because, for various reasons such as changes in manufacturing processes, products that once were kosher may cease to be so. For example, a kosher lubricating oil may be replaced by one containing tallow, which many rabbinic authorities view as non-kosher. Such changes are often coordinated with the supervising rabbi or supervising organization to ensure that new packaging does not suggest any hechsher or kashrut. In some cases, however, existing stocks of pre-printed labels with the hechsher may continue to be used on the now non-kosher product. An active grapevine among the Jewish community discusses which products are now questionable, as well as products which have become kosher but whose labels have yet to carry the hechsher. Some newspapers and periodicals also discuss kashrut products.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Products labeled kosher-style are non-kosher products that have characteristics of kosher foods, such as all-beef hot dogs, or are flavored or prepared in a manner consistent with Ashkenazi practices, like dill pickles. The designation usually refers to delicatessen items.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Food producers often look to expand their markets or marketing potential, and offering kosher food has become a way to do that. The uniqueness of kosher food was advertised as early as 1849. In 1911 Procter & Gamble became the first company to advertise one of their products, Crisco, as kosher. Over the next two decades, companies such as Lender's Bagels, Maxwell House, Manischewitz, and Empire evolved and gave the kosher market more shelf-space. In the 1960s, Hebrew National hotdogs launched a \"we answer to a higher authority\" campaign to appeal to Jews and non-Jews alike. From that point on, \"kosher\" became a symbol for both quality and value. The kosher market quickly expanded, and with it more opportunities for kosher products. Menachem Lubinsky, founder of the Kosherfest trade fair, estimates as many as 14 million kosher consumers and $40 billion in sales of kosher products in the U.S.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 2014 the Israeli Defense Forces decided to allow female kosher supervisors to work in its kitchens on military bases, and the first women kosher inspectors were certified in Israel.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Advertising standards laws in many jurisdictions prohibit the use of the phrase kosher in a product's labeling unless the producer can show that the product conforms to Jewish dietary laws; however, different jurisdictions often define the legal qualifications for conforming to Jewish dietary laws differently. For example, in some places the law may require that a rabbi certify the kashrut nature, in others the rules of kosher are fully defined in law, and in others still it is sufficient that the manufacturer only believes that the product complies with Jewish dietary regulations. In several cases, laws restricting the use of the term kosher have later been determined to be illegal religious interference.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In the United States, the cost of certification for mass-produced items is typically minuscule and is usually more than offset by the advantages of being certified. In 1975 The New York Times estimated the cost per item for obtaining kosher certification at 6.5 millionths of a cent ($0.000000065) per item for a General Foods frozen-food item. According to a 2005 report by Burns & McDonnell, most U.S. national certifying agencies are non-profit, only charging for supervision and on-site work, for which the on-site supervisor \"typically makes less per visit than an auto mechanic does per hour\". However, re-engineering an existing manufacturing process can be costly. Certification usually leads to increased revenues by opening up additional markets to Jews who keep kosher, Muslims who keep halal, Seventh-day Adventists who keep the main laws of Kosher Diet, vegetarians, and the lactose-intolerant who wish to avoid dairy products (products that are reliably certified as pareve meet this criterion). The Orthodox Union, one of the largest kashrut organizations in the United States, claims that \"when positioned next to a competing non-kosher brand, a kosher product will do better by 20%\".",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In some European Jewish communities, kosher supervision of meat includes a \"tax\" used to fund Jewish education in the community, which makes kosher meat more expensive than the cost of supervision alone would imply.",
"title": "Supervision and marketing"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Many Jews partially observe kashrut, by abstaining from pork or shellfish or by not drinking milk with meat dishes. Some keep kosher at home but eat in non-kosher restaurants. In 2012, one analysis of the specialty food market in North America estimated that only 15% of kosher consumers were Jewish. Kosher meat is regularly consumed by Muslims when halal is not available. Muslims, Hindus, and people with allergies to dairy foods often consider the kosher-pareve designation as an assurance that a food contains no animal-derived ingredients, including milk and all of its derivatives. However, since kosher-pareve foods may contain honey, eggs, or fish, vegans cannot rely on the certification.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "About a sixth of American Jews or 0.3% of the American population fully keep kosher, and many more of them do not strictly follow all of the rules but still abstain from some prohibited foods, especially pork. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, a Christian denomination, preaches a health message which expects adherence to the kosher dietary laws.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Surveys conducted in 2013 and 2020 found that 22% of American Jews by religion claimed to keep kosher in their homes. Pork consumption in particular seems to be a bigger taboo than other non-Kosher eating practices among Jews, with 41% claiming to at least abstain from eating pork. American Jews are generally less strict about Kosher laws when compared to Israeli Jews. Nearly three times as many Israeli Jews reported that they commit to keeping kosher in their homes and 84% do not eat pork.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "\"Kosher style\" allows for variation in adherence to kashrut, reflecting different practices within the Jewish community. For some, kosher style implies abstinence from non-kosher animals, like pork and shellfish, and the avoidance of mixing meat and dairy in meals. These individuals may consume meat from animals that are kosher but not necessarily slaughtered according to kashrut standards.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The notion of \"kosher style\" serves individuals and communities navigating between strict religious observance and cultural identification with Jewish culinary traditions. Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, suggests that \"kosher-style\" represents a balancing act between tradition and assimilation, providing a sense of Jewish identity through food without strict adherence to kashrut.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "This flexible practice emerged in the 1920s amongst Jews assimilating into American society, who sought connection to their heritage without fully observing dietary laws. The term is broad and encompasses foods that could be kosher, like chicken noodle soup or pareve meals (neither meat nor dairy), even if they don't meet halakhic standards. Diner points out the term is “oxymoronic,” creating an illusion of kashrut where the true emphasis is on a style of cuisine rather than compliance with religious dietary laws.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Over time, the meaning of \"kosher style\" has evolved and expanded, reflecting changes within Jewish communities and broader society. In contemporary practice, \"kosher style\" is often encountered at social events and gatherings, where meals might exclude certain non-kosher items but not adhere strictly to kashrut. The exact definition may vary between communities and individuals, reflecting diverse interpretations and practices related to Jewish dietary laws. The term also relates to products marketed as \"kosher style,\" prompting some regions to establish legislation to clarify labeling and prevent consumer misunderstanding. For instance, kosher-style pickles might be produced without kosher certification or supervision but are associated with Jewish culinary tradition.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In Ancient Hebrew the word kosher (Hebrew: כשר) means be advantageous, proper, suitable, or succeed, according to the Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon. In Modern Hebrew it generally refers to kashrut but it can also sometimes mean \"proper\". For example, the Babylonian Talmud uses kosher in the sense of \"virtuous\" when referring to Darius I as a \"kosher king\"; Darius, a Persian king (reigned 522–486 BCE), fostered the building of the Second Temple. In colloquial English, kosher often means \"legitimate\", \"acceptable\", \"permissible\", \"genuine\", or \"authentic\". The word kosher can also form part of some common product names.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Sometimes kosher is used as an abbreviation of koshering, meaning the process for making something kosher; for example, kosher salt is a form of salt with irregularly shaped crystals, making it particularly suitable for preparing meat according to the rules of kashrut, because the increased surface area of the crystals absorbs blood more effectively. In this case the type of salt refers to kosher style salt. Salt may also be kosher certified salt, or both. Certified kosher salt follows kashrut guidelines. Sometimes the term \"coarse kosher salt\" is used to designate salt that is both kosher style and kosher certified. The term \"fine kosher salt\" is sometimes used for salt that is certified kosher but not kosher style.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "Kosher can occur as a synonym for Jewish tradition; for example, a kosher dill pickle is simply a pickle made in the traditional manner of Jewish New York City pickle-makers, using a generous addition of garlic to the brine, and is not necessarily compliant with the traditional Jewish food laws.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Mehadrin is a term most commonly used with the meaning of enhanced or stricter kashrut rules. Its etymology is still debated, but its initial halachic use related specifically to lighting candles on Hanukkah. Later it became widely used in regard to dietary laws, and ended up loosely covering almost every aspect of Jewish observance (see mehadrin bus lines).",
"title": "Strictness degrees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "Badatz is the Hebrew acronym of Beth Din Tsedek and is used as a name for organisations which supervise the production of kosher foods. They typically only certify mehadrin-level products, but are not the only agencies specialised in applying enhanced mehadrin rules, since there are non-badatz agencies also doing so.",
"title": "Strictness degrees"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "A treef (Surinamese Dutch, derived from Sranan Tongo trefu) is a food taboo. In Suriname certain groups of people have long adhered to belief in treef, especially among people of African descent. The consumption of certain foods is prohibited, in the belief that it could cause major diseases, particularly leprosy. These prohibitions can vary individually, but it is inextricably related to conditions in the family. A treef is inherited from the father's side, but it can be revealed in a dream, often by a woman. In addition, a woman must take into account special food taboos during pregnancy. There is great importance attached to the treef; if a child observes the treef of his father, and yet experiences a skin condition, this is seen as a strong indication that the child was begotten by the woman with another man. Finally treef also be acquired later in life by wearing certain charms that compel you to abstain from certain foods.",
"title": "Suriname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The word is derived from Hebrew, due to influence of Sephardi Jews who came to Suriname in the 17th century. This is also the source of Sranan kaseri 'ritually clean, kosher'.",
"title": "Suriname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Although the term kosher relates mainly to food, it sometimes occurs in other contexts. Some Orthodox retailers sell kosher cell phones—stripped-down devices with limited features.",
"title": "Other uses"
}
] |
Kashrut is a set of dietary laws dealing with the foods that Jewish people are permitted to eat and how those foods must be prepared according to Jewish law. Food that may be consumed is deemed kosher, from the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the term that in Sephardic or Modern Hebrew is pronounced kashér (כָּשֵׁר), meaning "fit". Food that may not be consumed, however, is deemed treif, also spelled treyf. Although the details of the laws of kashrut are numerous and complex, they rest on a few basic principles: Only certain types of mammals, birds and fish meeting specific criteria are kosher; the consumption of the flesh of any animals that do not meet these criteria, such as pork, frogs, and shellfish, is forbidden except for locusts, which are the only kosher invertebrate.
Kosher mammals and birds must be slaughtered according to a process known as shechita; blood may never be consumed and must be removed from meat by a process of salting and soaking in water for the meat to be permissible for use.
Meat and meat derivatives may never be mixed with milk and milk derivatives: separate equipment for the storage and preparation of meat-based and dairy-based foods must be used. Every food that is considered kosher is also categorized as follows: "Meat" products are those that contain kosher meat, such as beef, lamb or venison, kosher poultry such as chicken, goose, duck or turkey, or derivatives of meat, such as animal gelatin; non-animal products that were processed on equipment used for meat or meat-derived products must also be considered as meat
"Dairy" products contain milk or any derivatives such as butter or cheese; non-dairy products that were processed on equipment used for milk or milk-derived products must also be considered as milk
Pareve products contain neither meat, milk nor their respective derivatives; they include foods such as kosher fish, eggs from permitted birds, grains, produce and other edible vegetation. They remain pareve if they are not mixed with or processed using equipment that is used for any meat or dairy products. While any produce that grows from the earth, such as fruits, grains, vegetables and mushrooms, is always permissible, laws regarding the status of certain agricultural produce, especially that grown in the Land of Israel, such as tithes and produce of the Sabbatical year, impact their permissibility for consumption. Most of the basic laws of kashrut are derived from the Torah's books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Their details and practical application, however, are set down in the Oral Torah and elaborated on in the later rabbinical literature. Although the Torah does not state the rationale for most kashrut laws, some suggest that they are only tests of obedience, while others have suggested philosophical, practical and hygienic reasons. Over the past century, many kashrut certification agencies have started to certify products, manufacturers, and restaurants as kosher, usually authorizing the use of a proprietary symbol or certificate, called a hechsher, to be displayed by the food establishment or on the product, which indicates that they are in compliance with the kosher laws. This labeling is useful for many people, including those whose religions expect adherence to a similar set of dietary laws, people with allergies to dairy foods, or vegans, who use the various kosher designations to determine whether a food contains meat or dairy-derived ingredients. The laws of Kashrut are a major area covered in traditional rabbinic ordination; see Yeshiva § Jewish law and Semikhah § Varieties of ordination. And numerous scholarly and popular works exist on these topics, covering both practice and theory.
|
2001-11-08T00:36:20Z
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2023-12-30T11:01:39Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashrut
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16,882 |
KLM
|
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, legally Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V. ([ˈkoːnɪŋkləkə ˈlʏxtfaːrt ˈmaːtsxɑpɛi ˌɛnˈveː], lit. 'Royal Aviation Company Plc.'), is the flag carrier of the Netherlands. KLM is headquartered in Amstelveen, with its hub at nearby Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. It is a subsidiary of the Air France–KLM group and a member of the SkyTeam airline alliance. Founded in 1919, KLM is the oldest operating airline in the world, and has 35,488 employees with a fleet of 110 (excluding subsidiaries) as of 2021. KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to 145 destinations.
In 1919, a young aviator lieutenant named Albert Plesman sponsored the ELTA aviation exhibition in Amsterdam. Attendance at the exhibition was over half a million, and after it closed, several Dutch commercial interests intended to establish a Dutch airline, which Plesman was nominated to head. In September 1919, Queen Wilhelmina awarded the yet-to-be-founded KNLM its "Royal" ("Koninklijke") predicate. On 7 October 1919, eight Dutch businessmen, including Frits Fentener van Vlissingen, founded KLM as one of the first commercial airline companies. Plesman became its first administrator and director.
The first KNLM flight took place on 17 May 1920. KNLM's first pilot, Jerry Shaw, flew from Croydon Airport, London, to Amsterdam. The flight was flown using a leased Aircraft Transport and Travel de Havilland DH-16, registration G-EALU, which was carrying two British journalists and some newspapers. In 1920, KLM carried 440 passengers and 22 tons of freight. In April 1921, after a winter hiatus, KLM resumed its services using its pilots, and Fokker F.II and Fokker F.III aircraft. In 1921, KLM started scheduled services.
KLM's first intercontinental experimental flight took off on 1 October 1924. The final destination was Jakarta (then called 'Batavia'), Java, in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia); the flight used a Fokker F.VII with registration H-NACC and was piloted by Jan Thomassen à Thuessink van der Hoop. In 1927, Baltimore millionaire Van Lear Black, who had heard about the 1924 flight, chartered H-NADP to do the same flight, which departed June 15 and went successfully (16 days), and flew back to much rejoicing. This inspired KLM to make a second test flight, which left on October 1, returning successfully with much experience gained. In September 1929, regular scheduled services between Amsterdam and Batavia commenced. Until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, this was the world's longest-distance scheduled service by airplane. By 1926, it was offering flights to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Bremen, Copenhagen, and Malmö, using primarily Fokker F.II and Fokker F.III aircraft.
In 1930, KLM carried 15,143 passengers. The Douglas DC-2 was introduced on the Batavia service in 1934. The first experimental transatlantic KLM flight was between Amsterdam and Curaçao in December 1934 using the Fokker F.XVIII "Snip".
In July 1935 the KLM had three major international passenger flight crashes in one week. The "Kwikstaart" crashed in Amsterdam on 14 July, the "Maraboe" in Bushir and on 20 July and the “Gaai” crashed in San Giacomo. The week of 14 to 20 July 1935 is known as the "black week". In these three crashes KLM lost three airplanes and lost crew in two crashes. With an earlierer crash in April of the "Leeuwerik", KLM had lost in 1935 around 15% of its pilots. As a result there was a shortage of crew members and airplanes. The Amsterdam—Milan flight service was as a result taken over by Deutsche Lufthansa.
The first of the airline's Douglas DC-3 aircraft were delivered in 1936; these replaced the DC-2s on the service via Batavia to Sydney. KLM was the first airline to serve Manchester's new Ringway airport, starting June 1938. KLM was the only civilian airline to receive the Douglas DC-5; the airline used two of them in the West Indies and sold two to the East Indies government, and is thus the only airline to have operated all Douglas 'DC' models other than the DC-1.
The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 restricted KLM's operations, with flights over France and Germany prohibited, and many of its aircraft painted in over-all orange to limit the potential for confusion with military aircraft. European routes were limited to services to Scandinavia, Belgium and the UK, with flights to Lisbon (bypassing both British and French airspace) starting in April 1940.
When Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, several KLM aircraft—mostly DC-3s and a few DC-2s—were en route to or from the Far East, or were operating services in Europe. Five DC-3s and one DC-2 were taken to Britain. During the war, these aircraft and crew members flew scheduled passenger flights between Bristol and Lisbon under BOAC flight numbers and registration.
On 3 March 1942, Douglas DC-3 PH-ALP "Pelikaan", then registered as PK-AFV, was shot down over Western Australia by Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service Mitsubishi A6M Zeros during the Attack on Broome while carrying a package of diamonds. The DC-3 crash landed at Carnot Bay, 80 kilometers from Broome. Pelikaan was subsequently strafed by the Zeros that had shot it down, killing three passengers and the flight engineer. Diamonds worth an estimated 150,000–300,000 Australian pound were stolen from the wreckage of the aircraft, and nobody has been convicted of the crime.
Douglas DC-3 PH-ALI "Ibis", then registered as G-AGBB, was attacked by the Luftwaffe on 15 November 1942, 19 April 1943, and finally shot down on 1 June 1943 as BOAC Flight 777, killing all passengers and crew.
Some KLM aircraft and their crews ended up in the Australia-Dutch East Indies region, where they helped transport refugees from Japanese aggression in that area.
Although operations paused in Europe, KLM continued to fly and expand in the Caribbean.
After the end of the Second World War in August 1945, KLM immediately started to rebuild its network. Since the Dutch East Indies were in a state of revolt, Plesman's priority was to re-establish KLM's route to Batavia. This service was reinstated by the end of 1945. Domestic and European flights resumed in September 1945, initially with a fleet of Douglas DC-3s and Douglas DC-4s. On 21 May 1946, KLM was the first continental European airline to start scheduled transatlantic flights between Amsterdam and New York City using Douglas DC-4 aircraft. By 1948, KLM had reconstructed its network and services to Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean resumed.
Long-range, pressurized Lockheed Constellations and Douglas DC-6s joined KLM's fleet in the late 1940s; the Convair 240 short-range pressurized twin-engine airliner began European flights for the company in late 1948.
During the immediate post-war period, the Dutch government expressed interest in gaining a majority stake in KLM, thus partially nationalizing it. Plesman wanted KLM to remain a private company under private control; he allowed the Dutch government to acquire a minority stake in the airline. In 1950, KLM carried 356,069 passengers. The expansion of the network continued in the 1950s with the addition of several destinations in western North America. KLM's fleet expanded with the addition of new versions of the Lockheed Constellation and Lockheed Electra, of which KLM was the first European airline to fly.
On 31 December 1953, the founder and president of KLM, Albert Plesman, died at the age of 64. He was succeeded as president by Fons Aler. After Plesman's death, the company and other airlines entered a difficult economic period. The conversion to jet aircraft placed a further financial burden on KLM. The Netherlands government increased its ownership of the company to two-thirds, thus partly nationalizing it. The board of directors remained under the control of private shareholders.
On 25 July 1957, the airline introduced its flight simulator for the Douglas DC-7C – the last KLM aircraft with piston engines – which opened the transpolar route from Amsterdam via Anchorage to Tokyo on 1 November 1958. Each crew flying the transpolar route over the Arctic was equipped with a winter survival kit, including a 7.62 mm selective-fire AR-10 carbine for use against polar bears, in the event the plane was forced down onto the polar ice.
The four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount 800 was introduced on European routes in 1957. Beginning in September 1959, KLM introduced the four-engine turboprop Lockheed L-188 Electra onto some of its European and Middle Eastern routes. In March 1960, the airline introduced the first Douglas DC-8 jet into its fleet. In 1961, KLM reported its first year of losses. In 1961, the airline's president Fons Aler was succeeded by Ernst van der Beugel. This change of leadership, however, did not lead to a reversal of KLM's financial difficulties. Van der Beugel resigned as president in 1963 due to health reasons. Horatius Albarda was appointed to succeed Ernst van der Beugel as president of KLM in 1963. Alberda initiated a reorganization of the company, which led to the reduction of staff and air services. In 1965, Alberda died in an air crash and was succeeded as president by Dr. Gerrit van der Wal. Van der Wal forged an agreement with the Dutch government that KLM would be once again run as a private company. By 1966, the stake of the Dutch government in KLM was reduced to a minority stake of 49.5%. In 1966, KLM introduced the Douglas DC-9 on European and Middle East routes.
The new terminal buildings at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol opened in April 1967, and in 1968 the stretched Douglas DC-8-63 ("Super DC-8") entered service. With 244 seats, the Super DC-8 was the largest airliner in scheduled passenger service at the time, although its size was surpassed by that of the Boeing 747 first flown in 1969. On March 6, 1967, KLM ordered the 747 as its first Boeing aircraft, which marked the beginning of its use of widebody aircraft and an improved relationship between the airline and Boeing since the 1939 crash of a Boeing 307 Stratoliner carrying KLM representatives on a demonstration flight. To negotiate for lower unit prices and form a maintenance pool for its 747 fleet, KLM formed the KSS maintenance consortium in 1969 with Scandinavian Airlines and Swissair. KLM was the first airline to put the higher-gross-weight Boeing 747-200B, powered by Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines, into service on February 14, 1971. In March 1971, KLM opened its current headquarters in Amstelveen. In 1972, it purchased the first of several McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft—McDonnell Douglas's response to the 747.
In 1973, Sergio Orlandini was appointed to succeed Gerrit van der Wal as president of KLM. At the time, KLM, as well as other airlines, had to deal with overcapacity. Orlandini proposed to convert KLM 747s to "combis" that could carry a combination of passengers and freight in a mixed configuration on the main deck of the aircraft. In November 1975, the first of these seven Boeing 747-200BM Combi aircraft were added to the KLM fleet. The airline previously operated DC-8 passenger and freight combi aircraft as well and later operated Boeing 747-400 combi aircraft.
The 1973 oil crisis, which caused difficult economic conditions, led KLM to seek government assistance in arranging debt refinancing. The airline issued additional shares of stock to the government in return for its money. In the late 1970s, the government's stake had again increased to a majority of 78%, effectively re-nationalizing it. The company management remained under the control of private stakeholders.
In 1980, KLM carried 9,715,069 passengers. In 1983, it reached an agreement with Boeing to upgrade ten of its Boeing 747-200 aircraft (Three 747-200Bs and seven 747-200Ms) with the stretched-upper-deck modification. The work started in 1984 at the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, and finished in 1986. The converted aircraft were called Boeing 747-200SUD or 747-300, which the airline operated in addition to three newly built Boeing 747-300s manufactured from the ground up. In 1983, KLM took delivery of the first of ten Airbus A310 passenger jets. Sergio Orlandini retired in 1987 and was succeeded as president of KLM by Jan de Soet. In 1986, the Dutch government's shareholding in KLM was reduced to 54.8 percent. It was expected that this share would be further reduced during the decade. The Boeing 747-400 was introduced into KLM's fleet in June 1989.
With the liberalization of the European market, KLM started developing its hub at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol by feeding its network with traffic from affiliated airlines. As part of its development of a worldwide network, KLM acquired a 20% stake in Northwest Airlines in July 1989. In 1990, KLM carried 16,000,000 passengers. KLM president Jan de Soet retired at the end of 1990 and was succeeded in 1991 by Pieter Bouw. In December 1991, KLM was the first European airline to introduce a frequent flyer loyalty program, which was called Flying Dutchman.
In January 1993, the United States Department of Transportation granted KLM and Northwest Airlines anti-trust immunity, which allowed them to intensify their partnership. As of September 1993, the airlines operated their flights between the United States and Europe as part of a joint venture. In March 1994, KLM and Northwest Airlines introduced World Business Class on intercontinental routes. KLM's stake in Northwest Airlines was increased to 25% in 1994.
KLM introduced the Boeing 767-300ER in July 1995. In January 1996, KLM acquired a 26% share in Kenya Airways, the flag-carrier airline of Kenya. In 1997, Pieter Bouw resigned as president of KLM and was succeeded by Leo van Wijk. In August 1998, KLM repurchased all regular shares from the Dutch government to make KLM a private company. On 1 November 1999, KLM founded AirCares, a communication and fundraising platform supporting worthy causes and focusing on underprivileged children.
KLM renewed its intercontinental fleets by replacing the Boeing 767s, Boeing 747-300s, and eventually, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11s with Boeing 777-200ERs and Airbus A330-200s. Some 747s were withdrawn from service first. The MD-11s remained in service until October 2014. The first Boeing 777 was received on 25 October 2003, while the first Airbus A330-200 was introduced on 25 August 2005.
On 30 September 2003, Air France and KLM agreed to a merger plan in which Air France and KLM would become subsidiaries of a holding company called Air France–KLM. Both airlines would retain their own brands; both Charles de Gaulle Airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol would become key hubs. In February 2004, the European Commission and United States Department of Justice approved the proposed merger of the airlines. In April 2004, an exchange offer in which KLM shareholders exchanged their KLM shares for Air France shares took place. Since 5 May 2004, Air France–KLM has been listed on the Euronext exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam and New York. In September 2004, the merger was completed by creation of the Air France–KLM holding company. The merger resulted in the world's largest airline group and should have led to an estimated annual cost-saving of between €400 million and €500 million.
It did not appear that KLM's longstanding joint venture with Northwest Airlines—which merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008—was affected by the merger with Air France. KLM and Northwest joined the SkyTeam alliance in September 2004. Also in 2004, senior management came under fire for providing itself with controversial bonuses after the merger with Air France, while 4,500 jobs were lost at KLM. After external pressure, management gave up on these bonuses.
In March 2007, KLM started to use the Amadeus reservation system, along with partner Kenya Airways. After 10 years as president of the airline, Leo van Wijk resigned from his position and was succeeded by Peter Hartman.
Beginning in September 2010, KLM integrated the passenger division of Martinair into KLM, transferring all personnel and routes. By November 2011, Martinair consisted of only the cargo and maintenance division. In March 2011, KLM and InselAir reached an agreement for mutual cooperation on InselAir destinations, thus expanding its passenger services. Beginning 27 March 2011, KLM passengers could fly to all InselAir destinations through InselAir's hubs in Curaçao and Sint Maarten. This cooperation was extended to a code share agreement in 2012. In early 2018, the cooperation with Inselair was terminated, including any interlining agreements, after Inselair found itself in financial difficulties which forced the airline to sell off part of its fleet and cancel some of its routes.
On 20 February 2013, KLM announced that Peter Hartman would resign as president and CEO of KLM on 1 July 2013. He was succeeded by Camiel Eurlings. Hartman remained employed by the company until he retired on 1 January 2014. On 15 October 2014, KLM announced that Eurlings, in joint consultation with the supervisory board, had decided to immediately resign as president and CEO. As of this date, he was succeeded by Pieter Elbers. KLM received the award for "Best Airline Staff Service" in Europe at the World Airline Awards 2013. This award represents the rating for an airline's performance across both airport staff and cabin staff combined. It is the second consecutive year that KLM won this award; in 2012 it was awarded with this title as well. On 19 June 2012, KLM made the first transatlantic flight fueled partly by sustainable biofuels to Rio de Janeiro. This was the longest distance any aircraft had flown on bio fuels.
In 2019, KLM celebrated its centennial, as it was founded in 1919. Since it is the oldest airline still operating under its original name, it was the first airline to achieve this feat.
Being heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, KLM cut at least 6,000 jobs in total. It also said that the decisions of the government to have all the passengers and crew COVID-19 tested before flying will have an impact on its flights. On December 16, 2021, Air France-KLM announced an order for 100 Airbus A320neos to be divided between Transavia and KLM. In July 2022, KLM was forced to cut their summer schedule due to disruption at airports across Europe.
Key business and operating results of KLM are shown below (as at year ending 31 December):
As of July 2022, KLM's corporate leader is its president and chief executive officer (CEO) Marjan Rintel, who succeeded Pieter Elbers. The president and CEO is part of the larger Executive Committee, which manages KLM and consists of the statutory managing directors and executive vice-presidents of KLM's business units that are represented in the Executive Committee. The supervision and management of KLM are structured in accordance with the two-tier model; the Board of Managing Directors is supervised by a separate and independent Supervisory Board. The Supervisory Board also supervises the general performance of KLM. The Board of Managing Directors is formed by the four Managing Directors, including the CEO. Nine Supervisory Directors compose the Supervisory Board.
KLM's head office is located in Amstelveen, on a 6.5-hectare (16-acre) site near Schiphol Airport. The airline's current headquarters was built between 1968 and 1970. Before the opening of the new headquarters, the airline's head office was on the property of Schiphol Airport in Haarlemmermeer.
Companies in which KLM has a stake include:
Subsidiaries, associates, and joint ventures of KLM in the past include:
KLM also worked closely with ALM Antillean Airlines in the Caribbean in order to provide air service for the Dutch controlled islands in the region with KLM aircraft such as the Douglas DC-8 and McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 being operated by KLM flight crews on behalf of ALM.
KLM Asia (Chinese: 荷蘭亞洲航空公司; pinyin: Hélán Yàzhōu Hángkōng Gōngsī) is a wholly owned subsidiary registered in Taiwan (Republic of China). The subsidiary, which also acts as a shadow airline for both countries, was established in 1995 to allow KLM to continue operating flights to Taipei without compromising the mainline KLM's traffic rights for destinations in the People's Republic of China. Aircraft operated by the subsidiary retain their Dutch registration and the basic KLM livery but receive several modifications: the flags of both the Netherlands and European Union are removed while the Dutch Crown logo is replaced with the KLM Asia wordmark.
The fleet of aircraft operated by the subsidiary consists of seven Boeing 777-200ER and two Boeing 777-300ER aircraft as of March 2020. KLM Asia initially operated the Amsterdam-Bangkok-Taipei route with Boeing 747-400 Combi and Boeing 747-400 aircraft. Since March 2012, it has operated the revised Amsterdam-Taipei-Manila route with Boeing 777-200ER/-300ER aircraft.
KLM Asia aircraft are also occasionally used to service other destinations in the wider KLM network. Despite this scenario, no destinations in Mainland China are serviced by KLM Asia aircraft, with the exception being Hong Kong, a special administrative region of the mainland.
Dirk Roosenburg designed the KLM logo at its establishment in 1919; he intertwined the letter K, L, and M, and gave them wings and a crown. The crown was depicted to denote KLM's royal status, which was granted at KLM's establishment. The logo became known as the "vinklogo" in reference to the common chaffinch. The KLM logo was largely redesigned in 1961 by F.H.K. Henrion. The crown, redesigned using a line, four blue circles and a cross, was retained. In 1991, the logo was further revised by Chris Ludlow of Henrion, Ludlow & Schmidt. In addition to its main logo, KLM displays its alliance status in its branding, including "Worldwide Reliability" with Northwest Airlines (1993–2002) and the SkyTeam alliance (2004–present).
KLM has utilized several major liveries since its founding, with numerous variations on each. Initially, many aircraft featured a bare-metal fuselage with a stripe above the windows bearing the phrase "The Flying Dutchman". The rudder was divided into three segments and painted to match the Dutch flag. Later aircraft types sometimes bore a white upper fuselage, and additional detail striping and titling. In the mid-1950s, the livery was changed to feature a split cheatline in two shades of blue on a white upper fuselage and angled blue stripes on the vertical stabilizer. The tail stripes were later enlarged and made horizontal, and the then-new crown logo was placed in a white circle. The final major variation of this livery saw the vertical stabilizer painted completely white with the crown logo in the center. All versions of this livery had small "KLM Royal Dutch Airlines" titles, first in red, and later in blue.
Since 1971, the KLM livery has primarily featured a bright blue fuselage, with variations on the striping and details. Originally a wide, dark blue cheatline covered the windows and was separated from the light grey lower fuselage by a thin white stripe. The KLM logo was placed centrally on the white tail and the front of the fuselage. In December 2002, KLM introduced an updated livery in which the white strip was removed and the dark-blue cheatline was significantly narrowed. The bright blue colour was retained and now covers most of the fuselage. The KLM logo was placed more centrally on the fuselage while its position on the tail and the tail design remained the same. In 2014, KLM modified its livery with a swooping cheatline that wraps around the entire forward fuselage. The livery was first introduced on Embraer 190s.
In April 2010, KLM introduced new uniforms for its female cabin attendants, ground attendants and pilots at KLM and KLM Cityhopper. The new uniform was designed by Dutch couturier Mart Visser. It retains the KLM blue colour that was introduced in 1971 and adds a touch of orange—the national colour of the Netherlands.
KLM has used several slogans for marketing throughout its operational history:
KLM has an extensive presence on social media platforms and also runs a blog. Customers can make inquiries through these channels. The airline also uses these networks to inform customers of KLM news, marketing campaigns and promotions.
The airline's use of social media platforms to reach customers peaked when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010, causing widespread disruption to air traffic. Customers used the social networks to contact the airline, which used them to provide information about the situation. Following the increased use of social media, KLM created a centralized, public social media website named the Social Media Hub in October 2010.
KLM has developed several services based on these social platforms, including:
In June 2013, KLM launched its own 3D strategy game "Aviation Empire" for iOS and Android platforms. The game allows users to experience airline management. Players manage KLM from its establishment until the present; they can invest in a fleet, build a network with international destinations and develop airports. The game combines the digital world with the real world by enabling the unlocking of airports by GPS check-ins.
KLM started KLM AirCares, a program that aids underprivileged children in developing countries to which KLM flies, in 1999. The airline collects money and airmiles from passengers. In 2012, new applications for support from the program were suspended because it needed an overhaul.
KLM and its partners serve 163 destinations in 70 countries on five continents from their hub at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Codeshare agreements bring the total amount of destinations available via KLM to 826.
KLM has codeshare agreements with the following airlines:
KLM's first of 8 Boeing 787-10 aircraft was delivered on 28 June 2019; it featured 100th anniversary markings.
On 19 June 2013, KLM ordered 7 Airbus A350-900s. In June 2019, Air France–KLM announced that KLM will not take up any of the group's ordered A350s, because of fleet rationalization purposes.
CEO Ben Smith has announced at Air France's Investor Day (5 November 2019) in Paris that "in the near future" KLM will only use the 777 and 787 as their long-haul fleet, retiring their 13 A330's.
In December 2021, Air France-KLM ordered 100 Airbus A320neo family aircraft to replace KLM and Transavia’s Boeing 737 Next Generation and Air France’s Airbus A320’s.
On 25 September 2023, Air France KLM announced that they had signed an agreement with Airbus for a total of 50 Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000 aircraft, with an option for 40 further aircraft. The type is set to serve intercontinental flights from 2026, replacing its fleet of Boeing 777-200ERs, Airbus A330-200s and Airbus A330-300s.
KLM has several aircraft painted in special liveries; they include:
KLM has three cabin classes for international long-haul routes; World Business Class, Premium Comfort and Economy. Part of the Economy cabin has a higher seat pitch and is sold as Economy Comfort. Personal screens with audio-video on-demand, satellite telephone, SMS, and e-mail services are available in all cabins on all long-haul aircraft. European short-haul and medium-haul flights have Economy seats in the rear cabin, and Economy Comfort and Europe Business in the forward cabin.
World Business Class is KLM's long-haul business class product. Seats in the older World Business Class are 20 inches (51 cm) wide and have a 60-inch (150 cm) pitch. Seats can be reclined into a 170-degree angled flat bed with a length of 75 inches (190 cm). Seats are equipped with a 10.4-inch (26 cm) personal entertainment system with audio and video on demand in the armrest, privacy canopy, massage function and laptop power ports. World Business Class seating is in a 2–2–2 abreast arrangement on all Airbus A330s.
In March 2013, KLM introduced a new World Business Class seat to the long-haul fleet. Dutch designer Hella Jongerius designed the new cabin. The diamond-type seat is manufactured by B/E Aerospace and is currently installed on all Airbus A330s and Boeing 777s. The seats were also refurbished on former KLM Boeing 747-400s between 2013 and 2014. The new seats are fully flat and offer 17-inch (43 cm)-high definition personal entertainment systems. When fully flat, the bed is about 2 metres (6.6 ft) long. The cabin features a cradle-to-cradle carpet made from old uniforms woven in an intricate pattern, which is combined with new pillows and curtains with a similar design.
A completely new design of Business Class seat was introduced with the launch of KLM's Boeing 787; this aircraft's business class seats are based on the Zodiac Cirrus platform used by Air France. The new seats lie fully flat, with a 1-2-1 layout so every passenger has direct aisle access, a large side-storage area and 16-inch (41 cm) HD video screen.
The tableware and cutlery for business class in-flight service was designed by Marcel Wanders. Dutch fashion stylists Viktor & Rolf designed amenity kits for World Business Class passengers. A new design will be introduced each year and the color of the kits will change every six months. The kit contains socks, eye mask, toothbrush, toothpaste, earplugs and Viktor & Rolf lip balm.
In 2022, KLM announced they would retrofit Boeing 777 aircraft in their fleet (notably, the 777-300 and 777-200) with seats in a 1-2-1 reverse herringbone configuration while installing Premium Comfort seats. These new seats will feature a "door" for extra privacy.
Europe Business Class is KLM's and KLM Cityhopper's short-haul business-class. Europe Business Class seats are 17-inch (43 cm) wide and have an average pitch of 33 inches (84 cm). Middle seats in rows of three are blocked to increase passengers' personal space. Europe Business Class seats feature extra legroom and recline further than regular Economy Class seats. In-seat power is available on all Boeing 737 aircraft's. Europe Business Class has no personal entertainment. Seating is arranged 3–3 abreast with the middle seat blocked on the Boeing 737 aircraft, and a 2–2 abreast arrangement on the Embraer E-Jet family and Embraer E-Jet E2 aircraft.
In 2022, KLM announced they would retrofit their long haul fleet to include Premium Comfort. Premium Comfort will be a new cabin in front of Economy Comfort, with between 21 and 28 new seats featuring a 13" touch screen, a movable leg- and footrest, 7.8 inches recline (20 cm) and up to 6.7 inches (17 cm) more pitch than Economy seats. Passengers in Premium Comfort can also enjoy improved food and beverage service, as well as SkyPriority benefits.
Economy Comfort is part of the economy class cabin offered on all KLM and KLM Cityhopper flights and provides passengers with more leg room and recline. Economy Comfort seats on long-haul flights have 4 inches (10 cm) more pitch than Economy Class, a 35–36-inch (89–91 cm) pitch and recline up to 7 inches (18 cm); double the recline of Economy. Economy Comfort seats on short-haul flights have 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) more pitch, totaling 33.5–34.5-inch (85–88 cm), and can recline up to 5 inches (13 cm) (40%) further. Except for the increased pitch and recline, seating and service in Economy Comfort is the same as in Economy Class. Economy Comfort is located in the front of the Economy Class; passengers can exit the aircraft before Economy passengers.
Economy Comfort seats can be reserved by Economy Class passengers. The service is free for passengers with a full-fare ticket, for Flying Blue Platinum members and Delta Air Lines SkyMiles Platinum or Diamond members. Discounts apply for Flying Blue Silver or Gold members, SkyTeam Elite Plus members and Delta SkyMiles members.
The Economy Class seats on long-haul flights have a 31-to-32-inch (79–81 cm) pitch and are 17.5 inches (44 cm) wide. All seats are equipped with adjustable winged headrests, a 9-inch (23 cm) PTV with AVOD, and a personal handset satellite telephone that can be used with a credit card. Economy Class seats in Airbus A330-300 aircraft are also equipped with in-seat power. The Economy Class seats on short-haul flights have a 30-to-31-inch (76–79 cm) pitch and are 17 inches (43 cm) wide. The Economy Class seats on short-haul flights do not feature any personal entertainment. The long-haul Economy Class seating is in a 3–4–3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 747-400, Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and on Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, a 3-3-3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 787-9 aircraft, and a 2–4–2 abreast arrangement on the Airbus A330 aircraft. The short-haul Economy Class seating is in a 3–3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 737 aircraft and a 2–2 abreast arrangement on the Embraer 175 and 190 aircraft, and the seats on these aircraft are 17 inches (43 cm) wide.
KLM's in-flight entertainment system is available in all classes on all widebody aircraft's; it provides all passengers with Audio/Video on Demand (AVOD). The system includes interactive entertainment including movies, television programs, music, games, and language courses. About 80 movies including recent releases, classics and world cinema are available in several languages. The selection is changed every month. The in-flight entertainment system can be used to send SMS text messages and emails to the ground. Panasonic's 3000i system is installed on all Boeing 747-400, Boeing 777-200ER, and on most of the Airbus A330-200 aircraft. All Airbus A330-300 and Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, and some Airbus A330-200 aircraft are fitted with the Panasonic eX2 in-flight entertainment system.
KLM provides a selection of international newspapers to its passengers on long-haul flights; on short-haul flights they are offered only to Europe Business Class passengers. A selection of international magazines is available for World Business Class passengers on long-haul flights. All passengers are provided with KLM's in-flight magazine, the Holland Herald. On board flights to China, South Korea and Japan, the airline offers in-flight magazines EuroSky (China and Japan), in either Chinese or Japanese, and Wings of Europe (South Korea) in Korean. On 29 May 2013, KLM and Air France launched a pilot scheme to test in-flight WiFi internet access. Each airline equipped one Boeing 777-300ER in its fleet with WiFi, which passengers can use with their WiFi-enabled devices. Wireless service was available after the aircraft reached 20,000 feet (6,100 m) in altitude.
World Business Class passengers are served a three-course meal. Each year KLM partners with a leading Dutch chef to develop the dishes that are served on board. Passengers in Europe Business Class are served either a cold meal, a hot main course, or a three-course meal depending on the duration of the flight. All chicken served in World and Europe Business Class meets the standards of the Dutch Beter Leven Keurmerk (Better Life Quality Mark). KLM partnered with Dutch designer Marcel Wanders to design the tableware of World and European Business Class.
Economy Class passengers on long-haul flights are served a hot meal and a snack, and second hot meal or breakfast, depending on the duration of the flight. On short-haul flights, passengers are served sandwiches or a choice of sweet or savoury snack, depending on the duration and time of the day. If the flight is at least two hours long, "stroopwafel" cookies are served before the descent. Most alcoholic beverages are free-of-charge for all passengers. After a successful trial period, KLM introduced à la carte meals in Economy Class on 14 September 2011; Dutch, Japanese, Italian, cold delicacies, and Indonesian meals are offered.
Special meals, include children's, vegetarian, medical, and religious meals, can be requested in each class up to 24 or 36 hours before departure. On flights to India, China, South Korea, and Japan, KLM offers authentic Asian meals in all classes. Meals served on KLM flights departing from Amsterdam are provided by KLM Catering Services.
In September 2016, KLM launched the world's first in-flight draft beer under the partnership with Heineken. The new service made its premiere aboard a flight to Curaçao in the airline's World Business Class cabin.
Since the 1950s, KLM has presented its World Business Class passengers with a Delft blue miniature traditional Dutch house. These miniatures are reproductions of real Dutch houses and are filled with Dutch genever. Initially the houses were filled with Bols liqueur, which in 1986 was changed to Bols young genever.
In 1952, KLM started to give the houses to its First Class passengers. With the elimination of First Class in 1993, the houses were handed out to all Business Class passengers. The impetus for these houses was a rule aimed at curtailing a previously widespread practise of offering incentives to passengers by limiting the value of gifts given by airlines to US$0.75. KLM did not bill the Delft Blue houses as a gift, but as a last drink on the house, which was served in the house.
Every year, a new house is presented on 7 October, the anniversary of KLM's founding in 1919. The number on the last-presented house thus represents the number of years KLM has been in operation. Special edition houses—the Royal Palace of Amsterdam and the 17th century Cheese Weighing House De Waag in Gouda—are offered to special guests, such as VIPs and honeymoon couples.
KLM offers various check-in methods to its passengers, who can check in for their flights at self-service check-in kiosks at the airport, via the Internet, or a mobile telephone or tablet. At destinations where these facilities are not available, check-in is by an airline representative at the counter. Electronic boarding passes can be received on a mobile device while boarding passes can be printed at airport kiosks.
Since 4 July 2008 KLM, in cooperation with Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, has been offering self-service baggage drop-off to its passengers. The project started with a trial that included one drop-off point. The number of these points has gradually increased; as of 8 February 2012 there are 12 of them. KLM passengers can now drop off their bags themselves. Before they are allowed to do that they are being checked by a KLM employee.
In November 2012, KLM started a pilot scheme at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to test self-service boarding. Passengers boarded the aircraft without any interference of a gate agent by scanning their boarding passes, which opened a gate. KLM partner airline Air France ran the same pilot at its hub at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. The pilot ran until March 2013, which was followed by an evaluation.
KLM is the first airline to offer self-service transfer kiosks on its European and intercontinental routes for passengers connecting through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The kiosks enable connecting passengers to view flight details of connecting flights, to change seat assignments or upgrade to a more comfortable seat. When a passenger misses a connecting flight, details about alternative flights can be viewed on the kiosk and a new boarding pass can be printed. Passengers who are entitled to coupons for a beverage, meal, the use of a telephone, or a travel discount can have these printed at the kiosk.
Air France-KLM's frequent flyer program, Flying Blue, awards miles based on the distance traveled, ticket fare and class of service. As well as KLM and Air France, other airlines that adopted the Flying Blue programme include Transavia, Aircalin, and TAROM. Membership in the program is free. When flying, members earn Experience Points (XP) and Award Miles.
Experience Points are used to determine membership level and remain valid until the end of the qualification period, which lasts for 1 year from counting from the member's first flight. XP can be earned with KLM, Air France, Transavia, Aircalin, TAROM, and other SkyTeam partners. The Flying Blue programme is divided into four tiers: Explorer, Silver (SkyTeam Elite), Gold (SkyTeam Elite Plus) and Platinum (SkyTeam Elite Plus). The membership tier depends on the number of Experience Points earned and is recalculated each qualification period. Flying Blue privileges are additive by membership tier; higher tiers include all benefits listed for prior tiers. There is an additional fifth tier, Platinum for Life, which can be obtained after 10 consecutive years of Platinum membership. After the Platinum for Life status is obtained, re-qualification is not required.
Award Miles can be exchanged for rewards and expire after 24 months without flying. Award Miles can be earned on flights with SkyTeam member airlines as well as on other Flying Blue partners including Air Corsica, Air Mauritius, airBaltic, Aircalin, Bangkok Airways, Chalair Aviation, China Southern Airlines, Copa Airlines, Gol Transportes Aéreos, Japan Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Transavia, Twin Jet, WestJet and Winair. Award Miles are redeemable for free tickets, upgrades to a more expensive seating class, extra baggage allowance, wifi on board, and lounge access. They can also be donated to various charities, or can be spent in the Flying Blue Store.
In June 2022, Brim Financial from Canada announce they will launch an Air France-KLM co-branded credit card. Target to expand their customer base into the Canadian market.
The Tenerife disaster, which occurred on 27 March 1977, remains the accident with the highest number of airliner passenger fatalities, as well as the most recent fatal and notable incident involving a KLM aircraft. 583 people died when a KLM Boeing 747-200B attempted to take off without clearance, and collided with a taxiing Pan Am Boeing 747-100 at Los Rodeos Airport on the Canary Island of Tenerife, Spain. No one on the KLM 747 survived (14 crew, 234 passengers were killed) while 61 of the 396 passengers and crew on the Pan Am aircraft survived. Pilot error from the KLM aircraft was the primary cause. Owing to a communication misunderstanding, the KLM captain thought he had clearance for takeoff. Another cause was dense fog, meaning the KLM flight crew was unable to see the Pan Am aircraft on the runway until immediately prior to the collision. The accident had a lasting influence on the industry, particularly in the area of communication. An increased emphasis was placed on using standardized phraseology in air traffic control (ATC) communication by both controllers and pilots alike, thereby reducing the chance for misunderstandings. As part of these changes, the word "takeoff" was removed from general usage, and is only spoken by ATC when clearing an aircraft to take off.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, legally Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V. ([ˈkoːnɪŋkləkə ˈlʏxtfaːrt ˈmaːtsxɑpɛi ˌɛnˈveː], lit. 'Royal Aviation Company Plc.'), is the flag carrier of the Netherlands. KLM is headquartered in Amstelveen, with its hub at nearby Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. It is a subsidiary of the Air France–KLM group and a member of the SkyTeam airline alliance. Founded in 1919, KLM is the oldest operating airline in the world, and has 35,488 employees with a fleet of 110 (excluding subsidiaries) as of 2021. KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to 145 destinations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 1919, a young aviator lieutenant named Albert Plesman sponsored the ELTA aviation exhibition in Amsterdam. Attendance at the exhibition was over half a million, and after it closed, several Dutch commercial interests intended to establish a Dutch airline, which Plesman was nominated to head. In September 1919, Queen Wilhelmina awarded the yet-to-be-founded KNLM its \"Royal\" (\"Koninklijke\") predicate. On 7 October 1919, eight Dutch businessmen, including Frits Fentener van Vlissingen, founded KLM as one of the first commercial airline companies. Plesman became its first administrator and director.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The first KNLM flight took place on 17 May 1920. KNLM's first pilot, Jerry Shaw, flew from Croydon Airport, London, to Amsterdam. The flight was flown using a leased Aircraft Transport and Travel de Havilland DH-16, registration G-EALU, which was carrying two British journalists and some newspapers. In 1920, KLM carried 440 passengers and 22 tons of freight. In April 1921, after a winter hiatus, KLM resumed its services using its pilots, and Fokker F.II and Fokker F.III aircraft. In 1921, KLM started scheduled services.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "KLM's first intercontinental experimental flight took off on 1 October 1924. The final destination was Jakarta (then called 'Batavia'), Java, in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia); the flight used a Fokker F.VII with registration H-NACC and was piloted by Jan Thomassen à Thuessink van der Hoop. In 1927, Baltimore millionaire Van Lear Black, who had heard about the 1924 flight, chartered H-NADP to do the same flight, which departed June 15 and went successfully (16 days), and flew back to much rejoicing. This inspired KLM to make a second test flight, which left on October 1, returning successfully with much experience gained. In September 1929, regular scheduled services between Amsterdam and Batavia commenced. Until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, this was the world's longest-distance scheduled service by airplane. By 1926, it was offering flights to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Bremen, Copenhagen, and Malmö, using primarily Fokker F.II and Fokker F.III aircraft.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In 1930, KLM carried 15,143 passengers. The Douglas DC-2 was introduced on the Batavia service in 1934. The first experimental transatlantic KLM flight was between Amsterdam and Curaçao in December 1934 using the Fokker F.XVIII \"Snip\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In July 1935 the KLM had three major international passenger flight crashes in one week. The \"Kwikstaart\" crashed in Amsterdam on 14 July, the \"Maraboe\" in Bushir and on 20 July and the “Gaai” crashed in San Giacomo. The week of 14 to 20 July 1935 is known as the \"black week\". In these three crashes KLM lost three airplanes and lost crew in two crashes. With an earlierer crash in April of the \"Leeuwerik\", KLM had lost in 1935 around 15% of its pilots. As a result there was a shortage of crew members and airplanes. The Amsterdam—Milan flight service was as a result taken over by Deutsche Lufthansa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The first of the airline's Douglas DC-3 aircraft were delivered in 1936; these replaced the DC-2s on the service via Batavia to Sydney. KLM was the first airline to serve Manchester's new Ringway airport, starting June 1938. KLM was the only civilian airline to receive the Douglas DC-5; the airline used two of them in the West Indies and sold two to the East Indies government, and is thus the only airline to have operated all Douglas 'DC' models other than the DC-1.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 restricted KLM's operations, with flights over France and Germany prohibited, and many of its aircraft painted in over-all orange to limit the potential for confusion with military aircraft. European routes were limited to services to Scandinavia, Belgium and the UK, with flights to Lisbon (bypassing both British and French airspace) starting in April 1940.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "When Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, several KLM aircraft—mostly DC-3s and a few DC-2s—were en route to or from the Far East, or were operating services in Europe. Five DC-3s and one DC-2 were taken to Britain. During the war, these aircraft and crew members flew scheduled passenger flights between Bristol and Lisbon under BOAC flight numbers and registration.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 3 March 1942, Douglas DC-3 PH-ALP \"Pelikaan\", then registered as PK-AFV, was shot down over Western Australia by Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service Mitsubishi A6M Zeros during the Attack on Broome while carrying a package of diamonds. The DC-3 crash landed at Carnot Bay, 80 kilometers from Broome. Pelikaan was subsequently strafed by the Zeros that had shot it down, killing three passengers and the flight engineer. Diamonds worth an estimated 150,000–300,000 Australian pound were stolen from the wreckage of the aircraft, and nobody has been convicted of the crime.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Douglas DC-3 PH-ALI \"Ibis\", then registered as G-AGBB, was attacked by the Luftwaffe on 15 November 1942, 19 April 1943, and finally shot down on 1 June 1943 as BOAC Flight 777, killing all passengers and crew.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Some KLM aircraft and their crews ended up in the Australia-Dutch East Indies region, where they helped transport refugees from Japanese aggression in that area.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Although operations paused in Europe, KLM continued to fly and expand in the Caribbean.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After the end of the Second World War in August 1945, KLM immediately started to rebuild its network. Since the Dutch East Indies were in a state of revolt, Plesman's priority was to re-establish KLM's route to Batavia. This service was reinstated by the end of 1945. Domestic and European flights resumed in September 1945, initially with a fleet of Douglas DC-3s and Douglas DC-4s. On 21 May 1946, KLM was the first continental European airline to start scheduled transatlantic flights between Amsterdam and New York City using Douglas DC-4 aircraft. By 1948, KLM had reconstructed its network and services to Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean resumed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Long-range, pressurized Lockheed Constellations and Douglas DC-6s joined KLM's fleet in the late 1940s; the Convair 240 short-range pressurized twin-engine airliner began European flights for the company in late 1948.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "During the immediate post-war period, the Dutch government expressed interest in gaining a majority stake in KLM, thus partially nationalizing it. Plesman wanted KLM to remain a private company under private control; he allowed the Dutch government to acquire a minority stake in the airline. In 1950, KLM carried 356,069 passengers. The expansion of the network continued in the 1950s with the addition of several destinations in western North America. KLM's fleet expanded with the addition of new versions of the Lockheed Constellation and Lockheed Electra, of which KLM was the first European airline to fly.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 31 December 1953, the founder and president of KLM, Albert Plesman, died at the age of 64. He was succeeded as president by Fons Aler. After Plesman's death, the company and other airlines entered a difficult economic period. The conversion to jet aircraft placed a further financial burden on KLM. The Netherlands government increased its ownership of the company to two-thirds, thus partly nationalizing it. The board of directors remained under the control of private shareholders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 25 July 1957, the airline introduced its flight simulator for the Douglas DC-7C – the last KLM aircraft with piston engines – which opened the transpolar route from Amsterdam via Anchorage to Tokyo on 1 November 1958. Each crew flying the transpolar route over the Arctic was equipped with a winter survival kit, including a 7.62 mm selective-fire AR-10 carbine for use against polar bears, in the event the plane was forced down onto the polar ice.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The four-engine turboprop Vickers Viscount 800 was introduced on European routes in 1957. Beginning in September 1959, KLM introduced the four-engine turboprop Lockheed L-188 Electra onto some of its European and Middle Eastern routes. In March 1960, the airline introduced the first Douglas DC-8 jet into its fleet. In 1961, KLM reported its first year of losses. In 1961, the airline's president Fons Aler was succeeded by Ernst van der Beugel. This change of leadership, however, did not lead to a reversal of KLM's financial difficulties. Van der Beugel resigned as president in 1963 due to health reasons. Horatius Albarda was appointed to succeed Ernst van der Beugel as president of KLM in 1963. Alberda initiated a reorganization of the company, which led to the reduction of staff and air services. In 1965, Alberda died in an air crash and was succeeded as president by Dr. Gerrit van der Wal. Van der Wal forged an agreement with the Dutch government that KLM would be once again run as a private company. By 1966, the stake of the Dutch government in KLM was reduced to a minority stake of 49.5%. In 1966, KLM introduced the Douglas DC-9 on European and Middle East routes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The new terminal buildings at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol opened in April 1967, and in 1968 the stretched Douglas DC-8-63 (\"Super DC-8\") entered service. With 244 seats, the Super DC-8 was the largest airliner in scheduled passenger service at the time, although its size was surpassed by that of the Boeing 747 first flown in 1969. On March 6, 1967, KLM ordered the 747 as its first Boeing aircraft, which marked the beginning of its use of widebody aircraft and an improved relationship between the airline and Boeing since the 1939 crash of a Boeing 307 Stratoliner carrying KLM representatives on a demonstration flight. To negotiate for lower unit prices and form a maintenance pool for its 747 fleet, KLM formed the KSS maintenance consortium in 1969 with Scandinavian Airlines and Swissair. KLM was the first airline to put the higher-gross-weight Boeing 747-200B, powered by Pratt & Whitney JT9D engines, into service on February 14, 1971. In March 1971, KLM opened its current headquarters in Amstelveen. In 1972, it purchased the first of several McDonnell Douglas DC-10 aircraft—McDonnell Douglas's response to the 747.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1973, Sergio Orlandini was appointed to succeed Gerrit van der Wal as president of KLM. At the time, KLM, as well as other airlines, had to deal with overcapacity. Orlandini proposed to convert KLM 747s to \"combis\" that could carry a combination of passengers and freight in a mixed configuration on the main deck of the aircraft. In November 1975, the first of these seven Boeing 747-200BM Combi aircraft were added to the KLM fleet. The airline previously operated DC-8 passenger and freight combi aircraft as well and later operated Boeing 747-400 combi aircraft.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The 1973 oil crisis, which caused difficult economic conditions, led KLM to seek government assistance in arranging debt refinancing. The airline issued additional shares of stock to the government in return for its money. In the late 1970s, the government's stake had again increased to a majority of 78%, effectively re-nationalizing it. The company management remained under the control of private stakeholders.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1980, KLM carried 9,715,069 passengers. In 1983, it reached an agreement with Boeing to upgrade ten of its Boeing 747-200 aircraft (Three 747-200Bs and seven 747-200Ms) with the stretched-upper-deck modification. The work started in 1984 at the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, and finished in 1986. The converted aircraft were called Boeing 747-200SUD or 747-300, which the airline operated in addition to three newly built Boeing 747-300s manufactured from the ground up. In 1983, KLM took delivery of the first of ten Airbus A310 passenger jets. Sergio Orlandini retired in 1987 and was succeeded as president of KLM by Jan de Soet. In 1986, the Dutch government's shareholding in KLM was reduced to 54.8 percent. It was expected that this share would be further reduced during the decade. The Boeing 747-400 was introduced into KLM's fleet in June 1989.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "With the liberalization of the European market, KLM started developing its hub at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol by feeding its network with traffic from affiliated airlines. As part of its development of a worldwide network, KLM acquired a 20% stake in Northwest Airlines in July 1989. In 1990, KLM carried 16,000,000 passengers. KLM president Jan de Soet retired at the end of 1990 and was succeeded in 1991 by Pieter Bouw. In December 1991, KLM was the first European airline to introduce a frequent flyer loyalty program, which was called Flying Dutchman.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In January 1993, the United States Department of Transportation granted KLM and Northwest Airlines anti-trust immunity, which allowed them to intensify their partnership. As of September 1993, the airlines operated their flights between the United States and Europe as part of a joint venture. In March 1994, KLM and Northwest Airlines introduced World Business Class on intercontinental routes. KLM's stake in Northwest Airlines was increased to 25% in 1994.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "KLM introduced the Boeing 767-300ER in July 1995. In January 1996, KLM acquired a 26% share in Kenya Airways, the flag-carrier airline of Kenya. In 1997, Pieter Bouw resigned as president of KLM and was succeeded by Leo van Wijk. In August 1998, KLM repurchased all regular shares from the Dutch government to make KLM a private company. On 1 November 1999, KLM founded AirCares, a communication and fundraising platform supporting worthy causes and focusing on underprivileged children.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "KLM renewed its intercontinental fleets by replacing the Boeing 767s, Boeing 747-300s, and eventually, the McDonnell Douglas MD-11s with Boeing 777-200ERs and Airbus A330-200s. Some 747s were withdrawn from service first. The MD-11s remained in service until October 2014. The first Boeing 777 was received on 25 October 2003, while the first Airbus A330-200 was introduced on 25 August 2005.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On 30 September 2003, Air France and KLM agreed to a merger plan in which Air France and KLM would become subsidiaries of a holding company called Air France–KLM. Both airlines would retain their own brands; both Charles de Gaulle Airport and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol would become key hubs. In February 2004, the European Commission and United States Department of Justice approved the proposed merger of the airlines. In April 2004, an exchange offer in which KLM shareholders exchanged their KLM shares for Air France shares took place. Since 5 May 2004, Air France–KLM has been listed on the Euronext exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam and New York. In September 2004, the merger was completed by creation of the Air France–KLM holding company. The merger resulted in the world's largest airline group and should have led to an estimated annual cost-saving of between €400 million and €500 million.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "It did not appear that KLM's longstanding joint venture with Northwest Airlines—which merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008—was affected by the merger with Air France. KLM and Northwest joined the SkyTeam alliance in September 2004. Also in 2004, senior management came under fire for providing itself with controversial bonuses after the merger with Air France, while 4,500 jobs were lost at KLM. After external pressure, management gave up on these bonuses.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In March 2007, KLM started to use the Amadeus reservation system, along with partner Kenya Airways. After 10 years as president of the airline, Leo van Wijk resigned from his position and was succeeded by Peter Hartman.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Beginning in September 2010, KLM integrated the passenger division of Martinair into KLM, transferring all personnel and routes. By November 2011, Martinair consisted of only the cargo and maintenance division. In March 2011, KLM and InselAir reached an agreement for mutual cooperation on InselAir destinations, thus expanding its passenger services. Beginning 27 March 2011, KLM passengers could fly to all InselAir destinations through InselAir's hubs in Curaçao and Sint Maarten. This cooperation was extended to a code share agreement in 2012. In early 2018, the cooperation with Inselair was terminated, including any interlining agreements, after Inselair found itself in financial difficulties which forced the airline to sell off part of its fleet and cancel some of its routes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "On 20 February 2013, KLM announced that Peter Hartman would resign as president and CEO of KLM on 1 July 2013. He was succeeded by Camiel Eurlings. Hartman remained employed by the company until he retired on 1 January 2014. On 15 October 2014, KLM announced that Eurlings, in joint consultation with the supervisory board, had decided to immediately resign as president and CEO. As of this date, he was succeeded by Pieter Elbers. KLM received the award for \"Best Airline Staff Service\" in Europe at the World Airline Awards 2013. This award represents the rating for an airline's performance across both airport staff and cabin staff combined. It is the second consecutive year that KLM won this award; in 2012 it was awarded with this title as well. On 19 June 2012, KLM made the first transatlantic flight fueled partly by sustainable biofuels to Rio de Janeiro. This was the longest distance any aircraft had flown on bio fuels.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2019, KLM celebrated its centennial, as it was founded in 1919. Since it is the oldest airline still operating under its original name, it was the first airline to achieve this feat.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Being heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, KLM cut at least 6,000 jobs in total. It also said that the decisions of the government to have all the passengers and crew COVID-19 tested before flying will have an impact on its flights. On December 16, 2021, Air France-KLM announced an order for 100 Airbus A320neos to be divided between Transavia and KLM. In July 2022, KLM was forced to cut their summer schedule due to disruption at airports across Europe.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Key business and operating results of KLM are shown below (as at year ending 31 December):",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "As of July 2022, KLM's corporate leader is its president and chief executive officer (CEO) Marjan Rintel, who succeeded Pieter Elbers. The president and CEO is part of the larger Executive Committee, which manages KLM and consists of the statutory managing directors and executive vice-presidents of KLM's business units that are represented in the Executive Committee. The supervision and management of KLM are structured in accordance with the two-tier model; the Board of Managing Directors is supervised by a separate and independent Supervisory Board. The Supervisory Board also supervises the general performance of KLM. The Board of Managing Directors is formed by the four Managing Directors, including the CEO. Nine Supervisory Directors compose the Supervisory Board.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "KLM's head office is located in Amstelveen, on a 6.5-hectare (16-acre) site near Schiphol Airport. The airline's current headquarters was built between 1968 and 1970. Before the opening of the new headquarters, the airline's head office was on the property of Schiphol Airport in Haarlemmermeer.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Companies in which KLM has a stake include:",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Subsidiaries, associates, and joint ventures of KLM in the past include:",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "KLM also worked closely with ALM Antillean Airlines in the Caribbean in order to provide air service for the Dutch controlled islands in the region with KLM aircraft such as the Douglas DC-8 and McDonnell Douglas DC-9-30 being operated by KLM flight crews on behalf of ALM.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "KLM Asia (Chinese: 荷蘭亞洲航空公司; pinyin: Hélán Yàzhōu Hángkōng Gōngsī) is a wholly owned subsidiary registered in Taiwan (Republic of China). The subsidiary, which also acts as a shadow airline for both countries, was established in 1995 to allow KLM to continue operating flights to Taipei without compromising the mainline KLM's traffic rights for destinations in the People's Republic of China. Aircraft operated by the subsidiary retain their Dutch registration and the basic KLM livery but receive several modifications: the flags of both the Netherlands and European Union are removed while the Dutch Crown logo is replaced with the KLM Asia wordmark.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The fleet of aircraft operated by the subsidiary consists of seven Boeing 777-200ER and two Boeing 777-300ER aircraft as of March 2020. KLM Asia initially operated the Amsterdam-Bangkok-Taipei route with Boeing 747-400 Combi and Boeing 747-400 aircraft. Since March 2012, it has operated the revised Amsterdam-Taipei-Manila route with Boeing 777-200ER/-300ER aircraft.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "KLM Asia aircraft are also occasionally used to service other destinations in the wider KLM network. Despite this scenario, no destinations in Mainland China are serviced by KLM Asia aircraft, with the exception being Hong Kong, a special administrative region of the mainland.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Dirk Roosenburg designed the KLM logo at its establishment in 1919; he intertwined the letter K, L, and M, and gave them wings and a crown. The crown was depicted to denote KLM's royal status, which was granted at KLM's establishment. The logo became known as the \"vinklogo\" in reference to the common chaffinch. The KLM logo was largely redesigned in 1961 by F.H.K. Henrion. The crown, redesigned using a line, four blue circles and a cross, was retained. In 1991, the logo was further revised by Chris Ludlow of Henrion, Ludlow & Schmidt. In addition to its main logo, KLM displays its alliance status in its branding, including \"Worldwide Reliability\" with Northwest Airlines (1993–2002) and the SkyTeam alliance (2004–present).",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "KLM has utilized several major liveries since its founding, with numerous variations on each. Initially, many aircraft featured a bare-metal fuselage with a stripe above the windows bearing the phrase \"The Flying Dutchman\". The rudder was divided into three segments and painted to match the Dutch flag. Later aircraft types sometimes bore a white upper fuselage, and additional detail striping and titling. In the mid-1950s, the livery was changed to feature a split cheatline in two shades of blue on a white upper fuselage and angled blue stripes on the vertical stabilizer. The tail stripes were later enlarged and made horizontal, and the then-new crown logo was placed in a white circle. The final major variation of this livery saw the vertical stabilizer painted completely white with the crown logo in the center. All versions of this livery had small \"KLM Royal Dutch Airlines\" titles, first in red, and later in blue.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Since 1971, the KLM livery has primarily featured a bright blue fuselage, with variations on the striping and details. Originally a wide, dark blue cheatline covered the windows and was separated from the light grey lower fuselage by a thin white stripe. The KLM logo was placed centrally on the white tail and the front of the fuselage. In December 2002, KLM introduced an updated livery in which the white strip was removed and the dark-blue cheatline was significantly narrowed. The bright blue colour was retained and now covers most of the fuselage. The KLM logo was placed more centrally on the fuselage while its position on the tail and the tail design remained the same. In 2014, KLM modified its livery with a swooping cheatline that wraps around the entire forward fuselage. The livery was first introduced on Embraer 190s.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In April 2010, KLM introduced new uniforms for its female cabin attendants, ground attendants and pilots at KLM and KLM Cityhopper. The new uniform was designed by Dutch couturier Mart Visser. It retains the KLM blue colour that was introduced in 1971 and adds a touch of orange—the national colour of the Netherlands.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "KLM has used several slogans for marketing throughout its operational history:",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "KLM has an extensive presence on social media platforms and also runs a blog. Customers can make inquiries through these channels. The airline also uses these networks to inform customers of KLM news, marketing campaigns and promotions.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The airline's use of social media platforms to reach customers peaked when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010, causing widespread disruption to air traffic. Customers used the social networks to contact the airline, which used them to provide information about the situation. Following the increased use of social media, KLM created a centralized, public social media website named the Social Media Hub in October 2010.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "KLM has developed several services based on these social platforms, including:",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In June 2013, KLM launched its own 3D strategy game \"Aviation Empire\" for iOS and Android platforms. The game allows users to experience airline management. Players manage KLM from its establishment until the present; they can invest in a fleet, build a network with international destinations and develop airports. The game combines the digital world with the real world by enabling the unlocking of airports by GPS check-ins.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "KLM started KLM AirCares, a program that aids underprivileged children in developing countries to which KLM flies, in 1999. The airline collects money and airmiles from passengers. In 2012, new applications for support from the program were suspended because it needed an overhaul.",
"title": "Corporate affairs and identity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "KLM and its partners serve 163 destinations in 70 countries on five continents from their hub at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. Codeshare agreements bring the total amount of destinations available via KLM to 826.",
"title": "Destinations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "KLM has codeshare agreements with the following airlines:",
"title": "Destinations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "KLM's first of 8 Boeing 787-10 aircraft was delivered on 28 June 2019; it featured 100th anniversary markings.",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "On 19 June 2013, KLM ordered 7 Airbus A350-900s. In June 2019, Air France–KLM announced that KLM will not take up any of the group's ordered A350s, because of fleet rationalization purposes.",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "CEO Ben Smith has announced at Air France's Investor Day (5 November 2019) in Paris that \"in the near future\" KLM will only use the 777 and 787 as their long-haul fleet, retiring their 13 A330's.",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In December 2021, Air France-KLM ordered 100 Airbus A320neo family aircraft to replace KLM and Transavia’s Boeing 737 Next Generation and Air France’s Airbus A320’s.",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "On 25 September 2023, Air France KLM announced that they had signed an agreement with Airbus for a total of 50 Airbus A350-900 and A350-1000 aircraft, with an option for 40 further aircraft. The type is set to serve intercontinental flights from 2026, replacing its fleet of Boeing 777-200ERs, Airbus A330-200s and Airbus A330-300s.",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "KLM has several aircraft painted in special liveries; they include:",
"title": "Fleet"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "KLM has three cabin classes for international long-haul routes; World Business Class, Premium Comfort and Economy. Part of the Economy cabin has a higher seat pitch and is sold as Economy Comfort. Personal screens with audio-video on-demand, satellite telephone, SMS, and e-mail services are available in all cabins on all long-haul aircraft. European short-haul and medium-haul flights have Economy seats in the rear cabin, and Economy Comfort and Europe Business in the forward cabin.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "World Business Class is KLM's long-haul business class product. Seats in the older World Business Class are 20 inches (51 cm) wide and have a 60-inch (150 cm) pitch. Seats can be reclined into a 170-degree angled flat bed with a length of 75 inches (190 cm). Seats are equipped with a 10.4-inch (26 cm) personal entertainment system with audio and video on demand in the armrest, privacy canopy, massage function and laptop power ports. World Business Class seating is in a 2–2–2 abreast arrangement on all Airbus A330s.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In March 2013, KLM introduced a new World Business Class seat to the long-haul fleet. Dutch designer Hella Jongerius designed the new cabin. The diamond-type seat is manufactured by B/E Aerospace and is currently installed on all Airbus A330s and Boeing 777s. The seats were also refurbished on former KLM Boeing 747-400s between 2013 and 2014. The new seats are fully flat and offer 17-inch (43 cm)-high definition personal entertainment systems. When fully flat, the bed is about 2 metres (6.6 ft) long. The cabin features a cradle-to-cradle carpet made from old uniforms woven in an intricate pattern, which is combined with new pillows and curtains with a similar design.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "A completely new design of Business Class seat was introduced with the launch of KLM's Boeing 787; this aircraft's business class seats are based on the Zodiac Cirrus platform used by Air France. The new seats lie fully flat, with a 1-2-1 layout so every passenger has direct aisle access, a large side-storage area and 16-inch (41 cm) HD video screen.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The tableware and cutlery for business class in-flight service was designed by Marcel Wanders. Dutch fashion stylists Viktor & Rolf designed amenity kits for World Business Class passengers. A new design will be introduced each year and the color of the kits will change every six months. The kit contains socks, eye mask, toothbrush, toothpaste, earplugs and Viktor & Rolf lip balm.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 2022, KLM announced they would retrofit Boeing 777 aircraft in their fleet (notably, the 777-300 and 777-200) with seats in a 1-2-1 reverse herringbone configuration while installing Premium Comfort seats. These new seats will feature a \"door\" for extra privacy.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Europe Business Class is KLM's and KLM Cityhopper's short-haul business-class. Europe Business Class seats are 17-inch (43 cm) wide and have an average pitch of 33 inches (84 cm). Middle seats in rows of three are blocked to increase passengers' personal space. Europe Business Class seats feature extra legroom and recline further than regular Economy Class seats. In-seat power is available on all Boeing 737 aircraft's. Europe Business Class has no personal entertainment. Seating is arranged 3–3 abreast with the middle seat blocked on the Boeing 737 aircraft, and a 2–2 abreast arrangement on the Embraer E-Jet family and Embraer E-Jet E2 aircraft.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In 2022, KLM announced they would retrofit their long haul fleet to include Premium Comfort. Premium Comfort will be a new cabin in front of Economy Comfort, with between 21 and 28 new seats featuring a 13\" touch screen, a movable leg- and footrest, 7.8 inches recline (20 cm) and up to 6.7 inches (17 cm) more pitch than Economy seats. Passengers in Premium Comfort can also enjoy improved food and beverage service, as well as SkyPriority benefits.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Economy Comfort is part of the economy class cabin offered on all KLM and KLM Cityhopper flights and provides passengers with more leg room and recline. Economy Comfort seats on long-haul flights have 4 inches (10 cm) more pitch than Economy Class, a 35–36-inch (89–91 cm) pitch and recline up to 7 inches (18 cm); double the recline of Economy. Economy Comfort seats on short-haul flights have 3.5 inches (8.9 cm) more pitch, totaling 33.5–34.5-inch (85–88 cm), and can recline up to 5 inches (13 cm) (40%) further. Except for the increased pitch and recline, seating and service in Economy Comfort is the same as in Economy Class. Economy Comfort is located in the front of the Economy Class; passengers can exit the aircraft before Economy passengers.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Economy Comfort seats can be reserved by Economy Class passengers. The service is free for passengers with a full-fare ticket, for Flying Blue Platinum members and Delta Air Lines SkyMiles Platinum or Diamond members. Discounts apply for Flying Blue Silver or Gold members, SkyTeam Elite Plus members and Delta SkyMiles members.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Economy Class seats on long-haul flights have a 31-to-32-inch (79–81 cm) pitch and are 17.5 inches (44 cm) wide. All seats are equipped with adjustable winged headrests, a 9-inch (23 cm) PTV with AVOD, and a personal handset satellite telephone that can be used with a credit card. Economy Class seats in Airbus A330-300 aircraft are also equipped with in-seat power. The Economy Class seats on short-haul flights have a 30-to-31-inch (76–79 cm) pitch and are 17 inches (43 cm) wide. The Economy Class seats on short-haul flights do not feature any personal entertainment. The long-haul Economy Class seating is in a 3–4–3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 747-400, Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and on Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, a 3-3-3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 787-9 aircraft, and a 2–4–2 abreast arrangement on the Airbus A330 aircraft. The short-haul Economy Class seating is in a 3–3 abreast arrangement on the Boeing 737 aircraft and a 2–2 abreast arrangement on the Embraer 175 and 190 aircraft, and the seats on these aircraft are 17 inches (43 cm) wide.",
"title": "Cabin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "KLM's in-flight entertainment system is available in all classes on all widebody aircraft's; it provides all passengers with Audio/Video on Demand (AVOD). The system includes interactive entertainment including movies, television programs, music, games, and language courses. About 80 movies including recent releases, classics and world cinema are available in several languages. The selection is changed every month. The in-flight entertainment system can be used to send SMS text messages and emails to the ground. Panasonic's 3000i system is installed on all Boeing 747-400, Boeing 777-200ER, and on most of the Airbus A330-200 aircraft. All Airbus A330-300 and Boeing 777-300ER aircraft, and some Airbus A330-200 aircraft are fitted with the Panasonic eX2 in-flight entertainment system.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "KLM provides a selection of international newspapers to its passengers on long-haul flights; on short-haul flights they are offered only to Europe Business Class passengers. A selection of international magazines is available for World Business Class passengers on long-haul flights. All passengers are provided with KLM's in-flight magazine, the Holland Herald. On board flights to China, South Korea and Japan, the airline offers in-flight magazines EuroSky (China and Japan), in either Chinese or Japanese, and Wings of Europe (South Korea) in Korean. On 29 May 2013, KLM and Air France launched a pilot scheme to test in-flight WiFi internet access. Each airline equipped one Boeing 777-300ER in its fleet with WiFi, which passengers can use with their WiFi-enabled devices. Wireless service was available after the aircraft reached 20,000 feet (6,100 m) in altitude.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "World Business Class passengers are served a three-course meal. Each year KLM partners with a leading Dutch chef to develop the dishes that are served on board. Passengers in Europe Business Class are served either a cold meal, a hot main course, or a three-course meal depending on the duration of the flight. All chicken served in World and Europe Business Class meets the standards of the Dutch Beter Leven Keurmerk (Better Life Quality Mark). KLM partnered with Dutch designer Marcel Wanders to design the tableware of World and European Business Class.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Economy Class passengers on long-haul flights are served a hot meal and a snack, and second hot meal or breakfast, depending on the duration of the flight. On short-haul flights, passengers are served sandwiches or a choice of sweet or savoury snack, depending on the duration and time of the day. If the flight is at least two hours long, \"stroopwafel\" cookies are served before the descent. Most alcoholic beverages are free-of-charge for all passengers. After a successful trial period, KLM introduced à la carte meals in Economy Class on 14 September 2011; Dutch, Japanese, Italian, cold delicacies, and Indonesian meals are offered.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Special meals, include children's, vegetarian, medical, and religious meals, can be requested in each class up to 24 or 36 hours before departure. On flights to India, China, South Korea, and Japan, KLM offers authentic Asian meals in all classes. Meals served on KLM flights departing from Amsterdam are provided by KLM Catering Services.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In September 2016, KLM launched the world's first in-flight draft beer under the partnership with Heineken. The new service made its premiere aboard a flight to Curaçao in the airline's World Business Class cabin.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Since the 1950s, KLM has presented its World Business Class passengers with a Delft blue miniature traditional Dutch house. These miniatures are reproductions of real Dutch houses and are filled with Dutch genever. Initially the houses were filled with Bols liqueur, which in 1986 was changed to Bols young genever.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "In 1952, KLM started to give the houses to its First Class passengers. With the elimination of First Class in 1993, the houses were handed out to all Business Class passengers. The impetus for these houses was a rule aimed at curtailing a previously widespread practise of offering incentives to passengers by limiting the value of gifts given by airlines to US$0.75. KLM did not bill the Delft Blue houses as a gift, but as a last drink on the house, which was served in the house.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Every year, a new house is presented on 7 October, the anniversary of KLM's founding in 1919. The number on the last-presented house thus represents the number of years KLM has been in operation. Special edition houses—the Royal Palace of Amsterdam and the 17th century Cheese Weighing House De Waag in Gouda—are offered to special guests, such as VIPs and honeymoon couples.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "KLM offers various check-in methods to its passengers, who can check in for their flights at self-service check-in kiosks at the airport, via the Internet, or a mobile telephone or tablet. At destinations where these facilities are not available, check-in is by an airline representative at the counter. Electronic boarding passes can be received on a mobile device while boarding passes can be printed at airport kiosks.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "Since 4 July 2008 KLM, in cooperation with Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, has been offering self-service baggage drop-off to its passengers. The project started with a trial that included one drop-off point. The number of these points has gradually increased; as of 8 February 2012 there are 12 of them. KLM passengers can now drop off their bags themselves. Before they are allowed to do that they are being checked by a KLM employee.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In November 2012, KLM started a pilot scheme at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to test self-service boarding. Passengers boarded the aircraft without any interference of a gate agent by scanning their boarding passes, which opened a gate. KLM partner airline Air France ran the same pilot at its hub at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. The pilot ran until March 2013, which was followed by an evaluation.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "KLM is the first airline to offer self-service transfer kiosks on its European and intercontinental routes for passengers connecting through Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The kiosks enable connecting passengers to view flight details of connecting flights, to change seat assignments or upgrade to a more comfortable seat. When a passenger misses a connecting flight, details about alternative flights can be viewed on the kiosk and a new boarding pass can be printed. Passengers who are entitled to coupons for a beverage, meal, the use of a telephone, or a travel discount can have these printed at the kiosk.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Air France-KLM's frequent flyer program, Flying Blue, awards miles based on the distance traveled, ticket fare and class of service. As well as KLM and Air France, other airlines that adopted the Flying Blue programme include Transavia, Aircalin, and TAROM. Membership in the program is free. When flying, members earn Experience Points (XP) and Award Miles.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Experience Points are used to determine membership level and remain valid until the end of the qualification period, which lasts for 1 year from counting from the member's first flight. XP can be earned with KLM, Air France, Transavia, Aircalin, TAROM, and other SkyTeam partners. The Flying Blue programme is divided into four tiers: Explorer, Silver (SkyTeam Elite), Gold (SkyTeam Elite Plus) and Platinum (SkyTeam Elite Plus). The membership tier depends on the number of Experience Points earned and is recalculated each qualification period. Flying Blue privileges are additive by membership tier; higher tiers include all benefits listed for prior tiers. There is an additional fifth tier, Platinum for Life, which can be obtained after 10 consecutive years of Platinum membership. After the Platinum for Life status is obtained, re-qualification is not required.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Award Miles can be exchanged for rewards and expire after 24 months without flying. Award Miles can be earned on flights with SkyTeam member airlines as well as on other Flying Blue partners including Air Corsica, Air Mauritius, airBaltic, Aircalin, Bangkok Airways, Chalair Aviation, China Southern Airlines, Copa Airlines, Gol Transportes Aéreos, Japan Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Qantas, Transavia, Twin Jet, WestJet and Winair. Award Miles are redeemable for free tickets, upgrades to a more expensive seating class, extra baggage allowance, wifi on board, and lounge access. They can also be donated to various charities, or can be spent in the Flying Blue Store.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "In June 2022, Brim Financial from Canada announce they will launch an Air France-KLM co-branded credit card. Target to expand their customer base into the Canadian market.",
"title": "Services"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The Tenerife disaster, which occurred on 27 March 1977, remains the accident with the highest number of airliner passenger fatalities, as well as the most recent fatal and notable incident involving a KLM aircraft. 583 people died when a KLM Boeing 747-200B attempted to take off without clearance, and collided with a taxiing Pan Am Boeing 747-100 at Los Rodeos Airport on the Canary Island of Tenerife, Spain. No one on the KLM 747 survived (14 crew, 234 passengers were killed) while 61 of the 396 passengers and crew on the Pan Am aircraft survived. Pilot error from the KLM aircraft was the primary cause. Owing to a communication misunderstanding, the KLM captain thought he had clearance for takeoff. Another cause was dense fog, meaning the KLM flight crew was unable to see the Pan Am aircraft on the runway until immediately prior to the collision. The accident had a lasting influence on the industry, particularly in the area of communication. An increased emphasis was placed on using standardized phraseology in air traffic control (ATC) communication by both controllers and pilots alike, thereby reducing the chance for misunderstandings. As part of these changes, the word \"takeoff\" was removed from general usage, and is only spoken by ATC when clearing an aircraft to take off.",
"title": "Accidents and incidents"
}
] |
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, legally Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V., is the flag carrier of the Netherlands. KLM is headquartered in Amstelveen, with its hub at nearby Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. It is a subsidiary of the Air France–KLM group and a member of the SkyTeam airline alliance. Founded in 1919, KLM is the oldest operating airline in the world, and has 35,488 employees with a fleet of 110 as of 2021. KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to 145 destinations.
|
2001-10-02T10:02:18Z
|
2023-12-24T19:31:12Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLM
|
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Kansas City Royals
|
The Kansas City Royals are an American professional baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. The team was founded as an expansion franchise in 1969, and has played in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014. Outside of a dominant 10-year stretch between 1976 and 1985, and a brief, albeit dominant, resurgence from 2014 to 2015, the Royals have combined for a bottom-ten all time winning percentage in MLB history.
The name "Royals" pays homage to the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899, as well as the identical names of two former Negro league baseball teams that played in the first half of the 20th century (one was a semi-pro team based in Kansas City in the 1910s and 1920s that toured the Midwest and the other was a California Winter League team based in Los Angeles in the 1940s that was managed by Chet Brewer and included Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson on its roster). The Los Angeles team had personnel connections to the Monarchs but could not use the Monarchs name. The name also fits into something of a theme for other professional sports franchises in the city, including the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League.
In 1968, the team held a name-the-team contest that received more than 17,000 entries. Sanford Porte, a bridge engineer from the suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, was named the winner for his “Royals” entry. His reason had nothing to do with royalty. “Kansas City’s new baseball team should be called the Royals because of Missouri’s billion-dollar livestock income, Kansas City’s position as the nation’s leading stocker and feeder market and the nationally known American Royal parade and pageant,” Porte wrote. The team's board voted 6–1 on the name, with the only opposition coming from team owner Ewing Kauffman, who eventually changed his vote and said the name had grown on him.
Entering the American League in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots, the club was founded by Kansas City businessman Ewing Kauffman. The franchise was established following the actions of Stuart Symington, then-U.S. Senator from Missouri, who demanded a new franchise for the city after the Athletics (Kansas City's previous major league team that played from 1955 to 1967) moved to Oakland, California in 1968. Since April 10, 1973, the Royals have played at Kauffman Stadium, formerly known as Royals Stadium.
The new team quickly became a powerhouse, appearing in the playoffs seven times from 1976 to 1985, winning one World Series championship and another AL pennant, led by stars such as Amos Otis, Hal McRae, John Mayberry, George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, and Bret Saberhagen. The team remained competitive throughout the early 1990s, but then had only one winning season from 1995 to 2012. For 28 consecutive seasons (1986–2013), the Royals did not qualify to play in the MLB postseason, one of the longest postseason droughts during baseball's current wild-card era. The team broke this streak in 2014 by securing the franchise's first wild card berth and advancing to the 2014 World Series, where they lost to the San Francisco Giants in seven games. The Royals, led by players like Salvador Perez, Alex Gordon, Johnny Cueto, Danny Duffy, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and an elite group of bullpen pitchers, followed this up by winning the team's first AL Central division title in 2015 and defeating the New York Mets in five games in the 2015 World Series to win their second World Series championship.
Through 2023, the Royals have an all time win–loss record of 4,122–4,547 (.475). Entering the 2023 season, the team is valued at US$1.2 billion, placing them 27th out of MLB's 30 teams. As of 2019, the team is owned by majority owner John Sherman, amongst many other Kansas City business owners and entrepreneurs.
When the Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland after the 1967 season, Kansas City was left without major league baseball or, for the first time since 1883, professional baseball at all. The team was led by Charlie Finley, who explored many elaborate relocation plans and essentially shunned Kansas City before the team even relocated. An enraged Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri threatened to introduce legislation removing baseball's antitrust exemption unless Kansas City was granted a team in the next round of expansion. Major League Baseball complied with a hasty round of expansion at the 1967 winter meetings. Kansas City was awarded one of four teams to begin play in 1971. However, Symington was not satisfied with having Kansas City wait three years for baseball to return, and pressured MLB to allow the new teams to start play in 1969. Symington's intervention may have contributed to the financial collapse of the Royals' companion expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, who had to begin play in 1969 before they were ready (the league required new franchises to enter in pairs to preserve symmetry for scheduling purposes).
Pharmaceutical executive Ewing Kauffman won the bidding for the new Kansas City team. He conducted a contest to determine the best and most appropriate name for the new franchise. Sanford Porte from Overland Park, Kansas submitted the name Royals, in recognition of Missouri's billion-dollar livestock industry. His suggestion was that the American Royal best exemplified Kansas City through its pageantry and parade, so the new team should be named the Royals. The name was selected out of 17,000 submissions and the Royals Board voted 6–1 to adopt the name. The one dissenting vote was Kauffman's. He eventually changed his mind after the name grew on him. (Some sources say it was in honor of the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro leagues team.) The team's logo, a crown atop a shield with the letters "KC" inside the shield, was created by Shannon Manning, an artist at Hallmark Cards, based in Kansas City.
The Royals began play in 1969 in Kansas City, Missouri. In their inaugural game, on April 8, 1969, the Royals defeated the Minnesota Twins 4–3 in 12 innings. The Royals went 69–93 in their first season, highlighted by Lou Piniella, who won the AL Rookie of the Year Award.
The team was quickly built through a number of trades engineered by its first General Manager, Cedric Tallis, who picked up center fielder Amos Otis, who became the team's first star, first baseman John Mayberry, who provided power, second baseman Cookie Rojas, shortstop Fred Patek, and designated hitter Hal McRae. The Royals also invested in a strong farm system and developed future star pitchers Paul Splittorff, Dennis Leonard, and Steve Busby, infielders George Brett and Frank White, and outfielder Al Cowens. Under these young players, the Royals built a core set up for future success.
In 1971, the Royals had their first winning season, with manager Bob Lemon leading them to a second-place finish. In 1973, under manager Jack McKeon, the Royals adopted their iconic "powder blue" road uniforms and moved from Municipal Stadium to the brand-new Royals Stadium (now known as Kauffman Stadium).
The 1973 All-Star Game was hosted at Royals Stadium, with Otis and Mayberry in the AL starting lineup. The event was previously held at Municipal Stadium in 1960, when the Athletics were based in Kansas City.
Manager Whitey Herzog replaced McKeon in 1975, and the Royals quickly became the dominant franchise in the American League's Western Division. After a second-place, 91 win season, they won three straight division championships from 1976 to 1978, including the franchise's only 100-win season in 1977. However, the Royals lost to the New York Yankees in three straight American League Championship Series encounters.
After the Royals finished in second place in 1979, Herzog was fired and replaced by Jim Frey. Under Frey and a legendary .390 season from George Brett, the Royals rebounded in 1980 and advanced to the ALCS, where they again faced the Yankees. The Royals vanquished the Yankees in a three-game sweep punctuated by Brett's home run off of Yankees' star relief pitcher Goose Gossage. After reaching their first World Series, the Royals fell to the Philadelphia Phillies in six games. Game 6 was also significant because it remains the most-watched game in World Series history with a television audience of 54.9 million viewers.
In July 1983, while the Royals were headed for a second-place finish behind the Chicago White Sox another chapter in the team's rivalry with the New York Yankees occurred. In what has come to be known as "the Pine Tar Incident", umpires discovered illegal placement of pine tar (more than 18 inches up the handle) on third baseman George Brett's bat after he had hit a two-run home run off Gossage that put the Royals up 5–4 in the top of the 9th. After Yankee Manager Billy Martin came out of the dugout to talk to home plate umpire Tim McClelland, McClelland and the other umpires mulled over the bat (measuring it over home plate, touching it, etc.). McClelland then pointed to Brett in the dugout and gave the "out" sign, disallowing the home run. Enraged, Brett stormed out of the dugout toward McClelland and Martin, and McClelland ejected Brett. The homer was later reinstated by AL President Lee MacPhail, and the Royals won the game after it was resumed several weeks later.
The 1983 season was also notable for some transitional changes in the Royals organization. First, owner Ewing Kauffman sold 49% of his interest to Memphis developer Avron Fogelman. Second, John Schuerholz was named general manager. Schuerholz soon bolstered the farm system with pitchers Bud Black, Danny Jackson, Mark Gubicza, David Cone, and Bret Saberhagen, as well as hitters such as Kevin Seitzer.
Thanks to the sudden and surprising maturation (specifically, in pitching) of most of the aforementioned players, the Royals won their fifth division championship in 1984, relying on Brett's bat and the young pitching staff of Saberhagen, Gubicza, Charlie Leibrandt, Black and Jackson. The Royals were then swept by the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series. The Tigers went on to win the World Series.
In the 1985 regular season the Royals topped the Western Division for the sixth time in ten years, led by Bret Saberhagen's Cy Young Award-winning performance and George Brett's self-described best "all around year." Throughout the ensuing playoffs, the Royals came back from 2–0 and 3–1 deficits, but managed to win the Series. In game three, with KC down 2 games to 0, George Brett homered twice and doubled off the fence in right field to put Kansas City back into the series. With the Royals down three games to one in the American League Championship Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, the Royals eventually rallied to win the series 4–3.
In the 1985 World Series (nicknamed the "I-70 Series" because the two teams are both located in the state of Missouri and connected by Interstate 70) against the cross-state St. Louis Cardinals, the Royals again fell behind, three games to one. After Danny Jackson pitched the Royals to a 6–1 win in game five, the Cardinals and Royals headed back to Kansas City for game six. Facing elimination, the Royals trailed 1–0 in the bottom of the 9th inning, when Jorge Orta led off, hitting a bouncing ground ball to Cardinals 1st basemen Jack Clark, who flipped the ball back to pitcher Todd Worrell at first base. The ball beat Orta to the bag, but umpire Don Denkinger called him safe, and following a dropped popup by Clark and a passed ball, The Royals rallied to score two runs, winning on a walk-off single from pinch hitter Dane Iorg to send the series to game seven. In game seven Bret Saberhagen shutout the Cardinals as Kansas City dominated the Cardinals 11–0, clinching their first title in franchise history.
The Royals maintained a reputation as one of the American League West's top teams throughout the late 1980s. The club posted a winning record in three of the four seasons following its 1985 World Series championship, while developing young stars such as Bo Jackson, Tom Gordon, and Kevin Seitzer. The Royals finished the 1989 season with a 92–70 record (third-best in the major leagues) but did not qualify for the playoffs, finishing second in their division behind the eventual World Series champion Oakland Athletics.
At the end of the 1989 season, the team boasted a powerhouse pitching rotation, including the AL Cy Young Award-winner Bret Saberhagen (who set franchise record 23 wins that year), two-time All-Star Mark Gubicza (a 15-game winner in 1989) and 1989 AL Rookie of the Year runner-up Tom Gordon (who won 17 games that year). But the organization felt it was still missing a few necessary pieces to give its divisional rival Oakland Athletics a run for their money. So prior to the 1990 season, the Royals acquired Mark Davis, the 1989 National League Cy Young Award-winner and league leader in saves, signing him to a 4-year, $13 million contract (the largest annual salary in baseball history at the time). The Royals also signed starting pitcher Storm Davis, who was coming off a career-high 19-game win season (third-best in the AL), to a three-year $6 million contract. Despite the promising off-season moves, the team suffered critical bullpen injuries while both newly signed Davises experienced lackluster seasons in 1990. The Royals concluded the season with a 75–86 record, in second-to-last place in the AL West (and with the worst franchise record since 1970). Bo Jackson—the team's potential future franchise player—suffered a devastating hip injury while playing football in the off-season, so the Royals waived him during spring training in 1991.
Though the team dropped out of contention from 1990 to 1992, the Royals still could generally be counted on to post winning records through the strike-shortened 1994 season. With no playoff appearances despite the winning records during this era, many of the team's highlights instead centered around the end of George Brett's career, such as his third and final batting title in 1990—which made him the first player to win batting titles in three different decades—and his 3,000th hit.
In 1994, the Royals moved from the AL West to the newly created AL Central along with the Chicago White Sox and Minnesota Twins, joined by the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers from the AL East. The Brewers left for the NL Central in 1998, replaced by the Detroit Tigers that moved from the AL East.
At the start of the 1990s, the Royals had been hit with a double-whammy when General Manager John Schuerholz departed in 1990 and team owner Ewing Kauffman died in 1993. Shortly before Kauffman's death, he set up an unprecedented complex succession plan to keep the team in Kansas City. The team was donated at his death to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and Affiliated Trusts with operating decisions of the team decided by a five-member group chaired by Wal-Mart executive David Glass. According to the plan the Royals had six years to find a local owner for the team before opening ownership to an outside bidder. The new owners would be required to say they would keep the team in Kansas City. Kauffman had feared that new owners would move it noting, "No one would want to buy a baseball team that consistently loses millions of dollars and had little prospect of making money because it was in a small city." If no owner could be found the Kauffman restrictions were to end on January 1, 2002, and the team was to be sold to the highest bidder. In 1999, New York City lawyer and minor league baseball owner Miles Prentice, vowing not to move the team, bid $75 million for the team. This was the minimum amount Kauffman had stipulated the team could be sold for. MLB rejected Prentice's first bid without specifying any reason. In a final round of bids on March 13, 2000, the Foundation voted to accept Glass' bid of $96 million, rejecting Prentice's revised bid of $115 million.
During the interregnum under Foundation ownership, the team declined. In the 1994 season, the Royals reduced payroll by trading pitcher David Cone and outfielder Brian McRae, then continued their salary dump in the 1995 season. The team payroll, which had previously remained among the league's highest, was sliced in half from $40.5 million in 1994 (fourth-highest in the major leagues) to $18.5 million in 1996 (second-lowest in the major leagues).
As attendance slid and the average MLB salary continued to rise, rather than pay higher salaries or lose their players to free agency, the Royals traded their remaining stars such as Kevin Appier, Johnny Damon and Jermaine Dye. By 1999, the team's payroll had fallen again to $16.5 million. Making matters worse, most of the younger players that the Royals received in exchange for these All-Stars proved of little value, setting the stage for an extended downward spiral. Indeed, the Royals set a franchise-low with a .398 winning percentage (64–97 record) in 1999, and lost 97 games again in 2001.
In the middle of this era, in 1997, the Royals declined the opportunity to switch to the National League as part of a realignment plan to introduce the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays as expansion teams. The Milwaukee Brewers made the switch instead.
In 2002, the Royals set a new team record for futility, losing 100 games for the first time in franchise history. They fired manager Tony Muser, and he was replaced by Tony Peña.
The 2003 season saw a temporary end to the losing, when manager Tony Peña, in his first full season with the club, guided the team to its first winning record (83–79) since 1994 and finished in third place in the AL Central. He was named the American League Manager of the Year for his efforts and shortstop Ángel Berroa was named AL Rookie of the Year.
From the 2004 season through the 2012 season, the Royals posted nine consecutive losing records, the longest streak in team history. In six of those seasons, the team finished in last place in the American League Central, and in eight of those nine seasons the team lost at least 90 games. The worst seasons came in 2004–2006, when the Royals lost at least 100 games each year and set the franchise's all-time record for losses (56–106 in 2005).
Picked by many to win their division in 2004 after faring well in the free agent market, the Royals got off to a disappointing start and by late June were back in a rebuilding mode, releasing veteran reliever Curtis Leskanic and trading veteran reliever Jason Grimsley and superstar center fielder Carlos Beltrán for prospects, all within a week of each other.
The team subsequently fell apart completely, losing 104 games and breaking the franchise record set just two years earlier. The Royals did, however, see promising seasons from two rookies, center fielder David DeJesus and starting pitcher Zack Greinke. The team continued a youth movement in 2005, but finished with a 56–106 record (.346), a full 43 games out of first place, marking the third time in four seasons that the team reestablished the mark for worst record in franchise history. The season also saw the Royals lose 19 games in a row, a franchise record. During the season manager Tony Peña quit and was replaced by interim manager Bob Schaefer until the Indians' bench coach Buddy Bell was chosen as the next manager. Looking for a quick turnaround, general manager Allard Baird signed several veteran players prior to the 2006 season, including Doug Mientkiewicz, Mark Grudzielanek, Joe Mays and Scott Elarton. Nevertheless, the Royals struggled through another 100-loss season in 2006, becoming just the eleventh team in major league history to lose 100 games in three straight seasons. During the season Baird was fired as GM and replaced by Dayton Moore.
Kansas City entered the 2007 season looking to rebound from four out of five seasons ending with at least 100 losses. The Royals outbid the Cubs and Blue Jays for free agent righty Gil Meche, signing him to a five-year, $55 million contract, the largest contract in Royals history. Reliever Octavio Dotel also inked a one-year, $5 million contract. The team also added several new prospects, including Alex Gordon and Billy Butler. Among Dayton Moore's first acts as General Manager was instating a new motto for the team: "True. Blue. Tradition." In June 2007, the Royals had their first winning month since July 2003 and followed it up with a winning July. The Royals finished the season 69–93, but 2007 marked the club's first season with fewer than 100 losses since 2003. Manager Buddy Bell resigned following the 2007 season.
The Royals hired Trey Hillman, formerly the manager of the Nippon Ham Fighters and a minor league manager with the New York Yankees, to be the 15th manager in franchise history. The 2008 season began with the release of fan-favorite Mike Sweeney and the trade of Ángel Berroa to the Dodgers. Through 13 games in 2008, the Royals were 8–5 and in first place in the AL Central, a vast improvement over their start from the previous season. However, by the All-Star break, the Royals were again in losing territory, with their record buoyed only by a 13–5 record in interleague play, the best in the American League. The team finished the season in fourth place in the division with a 75–87 record.
Prior to the 2009 season, the Royals renovated Kauffman Stadium, and after the season began, the Royals ended April at the top of the AL Central, both of which raised excitement levels among fans. However, the team faded as the season progressed and finished the year with a final record of 65–97, in a tie for fourth place in the AL Central. The season was highlighted by starter Zack Greinke, who did not allow an earned run in the first 24 innings of the season, went on to finish the year with a Major League-leading 2.16 earned run average, and won the American League Cy Young Award. Greinke joined Bret Saberhagen (in 1985 and 1989) and David Cone (in 1994) as only the third player in Royals history to receive the award.
The Royals began the 2010 season with a rocky start, and after the team's record fell to 12–23, manager Trey Hillman was fired. Former Milwaukee Brewers skipper Ned Yost took over as the 16th manager in franchise history, At the end of the 2010 season, the Royals finished with a 67–95 record, in last place in the division for the sixth time in seven years. The Royals also set a dubious franchise record during the season, allowing 42 runs in a three-day span from July 25 to 27. The Royals began 2011 with a hot start, compiling 10–4 record after 14 games, but success faded as the season progressed. The Royals last had a .500 record at 22–22, and by the All-Star break, the Royals had a record of 37–54, the worst in the American League. Almost all of the Royals' bullpen was made up of 2011 minor league call ups, in addition to the infielders Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Johnny Giavotella, and catchers Salvador Pérez and Manny Piña. Hosmer won the AL Rookie of the Month award in July and September and finished the season with 19 home runs. Moustakas collected a fifteen-game hitting streak, which tied the longest such streak by a Royals rookie. The Royals finished the 2011 season with a 71–91 record, in fourth place in the AL Central. The 2012 team saw more of the same, as they improved by one game to 72–90, but finished one spot better in the division.
The 2012 Major League Baseball All-Star Game was hosted by the Royals at Kauffman Stadium on July 10, 2012 (in addition to the 2012 Home Run Derby, All-Star Futures Game and Taco Bell All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game during the All-Star break), which the National League won 8–0. The 2012 season marked the third time the "Midsummer Classic" was held in Kansas City.
On December 10, 2012, in an attempt to strengthen the pitching staff (which was among the worst in baseball in 2012), the Royals traded for Rays pitchers James Shields and Wade Davis, giving Tampa top prospects Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, Mike Montgomery, and Patrick Leonard in return. This trade helped catalyze a return to winning records.
For most of the 2013 season, the Royals hovered near .500. The team also did not commit an error in its first seven games (for 64+2⁄3 innings) for the first time in team history. On September 22, the Royals won their 82nd game of the season to clinch the franchise's first winning season since 2003. The Royals finished the season 86–76 and in third place in the AL Central, securing the team's best winning percentage since 1994.
The 2014 season was even more successful, featuring a return to the postseason for the first time in 29 years, and what would unfold as a historic playoff run from the Wild Card all the way to the 2014 World Series.
Anchored by the "HDH" trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland, the bullpen became one of the most dominant in MLB history.
Entering the 2014 season, the Royals had the longest playoff drought of any team in the four main American professional sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA). On July 21, 2014, the Royals had a losing record (48–50) and were eight games behind the Detroit Tigers in the AL Central standings. But spurred by a 22–5 record from July 22 to August 19 coinciding with a mediocre 12–15 stretch by the Tigers, the team surged into first place in the AL Central. The Royals reached the top of the division standings on August 11, after winning their eighth game in a row. This marked the latest date the Royals had led their division since August 29, 2003. The team retained its division lead for a month, before falling out of first-place permanently on September 12. They finished the 2014 regular season with a record 89–73, still the most wins for the Royals since 1989. Though the team finished one game behind Detroit in the AL Central, the Royals secured their first-ever wild card berth.
After qualifying for the postseason, the Royals embarked on a record-setting eight-game winning streak. They hosted the Oakland Athletics in the 2014 American League Wild Card Game and won 9–8 on a Salvador Pérez walk-off single in the 12th inning, having earlier rallied back from a 7–3 deficit in the eighth. The Royals then swept the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the 2014 American League Division Series. In Game 1 of the ALDS, the score was 2–2 going into the 11th inning, when Mike Moustakas hit a game-winning solo home run. The next day, Kansas City beat the Angels 4–1 in another extra-innings affair, in the process setting an MLB postseason record of three straight extra-inning wins. The Royals then completed the sweep at home, winning 8–3 in game three and advancing to the 2014 American League Championship Series against the Baltimore Orioles.
In the opening game of the ALCS on October 11, 2014, the Royals defeated the Orioles 8–6, with two home runs in the 10th inning. Thus, in eight extra innings over five postseason games in 2014, they succeeded in hitting four homers in extra innings, more than any team in the history of Major League Baseball. In the second ALCS game, the Royals again beat the Orioles 6–4, behind Lorenzo Cain's four hits, including an RBI single. After game three, the ALCS was delayed one day due to rainy weather, when the Royals hosted the Orioles at Kauffman Stadium on October 14, 2014. Pitcher Jeremy Guthrie allowed only one run as KC beat the Orioles 2–1, taking a 3–0 lead in the series. In game four, the Royals completed the sweep of the Orioles with another 2–1 win to advance to the World Series for the first time since 1985. The win marked the team's eighth consecutive postseason win in one year, breaking a major league record previously held by the Colorado Rockies in 2007 and Cincinnati Reds in 1976. It also marked the Royals' 11th win in a row overall in postseason play, dating back to the franchise's final three wins of the 1985 Series, the third-longest multi-year postseason streak in baseball history.
The Royals faced the San Francisco Giants in the 2014 World Series. They had home-field advantage, due to the American League's win in the 2014 All-Star Game.
After setting an AL record by winning eight straight games to reach the World Series, the Royals opened the series by losing 7–1 in the first game against starter Madison Bumgarner. The Royals bounced back with a 7–2 win in game two to tie the series at 1–1. The Royals won game three in San Francisco 3–2 to take the series lead for the first time. In game four, the Royals lost 11–4, which tied the series with the Giants. In game five, they lost 5–0 to the Giants against starter Madison Bumgarner. In game six, the Royals beat the Giants 10–0. In game seven, the Royals started Jeremy Guthrie against Giants pitcher Tim Hudson. Guthrie lasted 3+1⁄3 innings before he was replaced by Kelvin Herrera, who himself lasted 2+2⁄3 innings. He was then replaced by Wade Davis, who pitched in two innings. Closer Greg Holland ended the game. On the Giants side, Hudson lasted only 1+2⁄3 innings before he was replaced by Jeremy Affeldt, who was later replaced by Madison Bumgarner. The Royals lost game seven, 3–2, with the tying run (Alex Gordon) on third base in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, when Salvador Pérez fouled out to Pablo Sandoval to end the game and the series.
After earning a wild card entry to the playoffs in 2014, in 2015, the Royals won the franchise's first division title since 1985 and first Central division title ever. The Royals went on to win the 2015 World Series – the first championship for the Royals since 1985 – beating the New York Mets four games to one.
The Royals entered the 2015 All-Star break with the best record in the American League at 52–34. The team continued its momentum into the second half of the season, and on July 26, Royals management traded three prospects Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb Archived April 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, and Cody Reed for 2014 All-Star pitcher Johnny Cueto to help bolster its starting pitching rotation, as well as trading two pitchers to the Oakland Athletics for super-utility player Ben Zobrist. The team ended the regular season with a record of 95–67, the best in the entire American League, and the organization's best record since 1980.
The Royals faced the Houston Astros in the ALDS. Down 2–1 in the series and trailing 6–2 in the 8th inning of Game 4, the Royals rallied for 5 runs en route to a 9–6 win before Cueto's gem in Game 5 powered the Royals to a second consecutive ALCS. The Royals defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 6, to win the 2015 ALCS and earn a trip to face the New York Mets in the 2015 World Series.
The Royals beat the New York Mets 4 games to 1 to become the 2015 World Series champions. It was the Royals' first World Series title since 1985. The series win was sealed after the Royals beat the Mets 7–2 in the 12th inning of Game 5. The Royals rallied in the 9th inning down 2–0 to tie the score 2–2, forcing the game into extra innings. The five-run 12th inning was initiated by a Salvador Pérez single, with Jarrod Dyson pinch-running for him. This was followed by a single from Christian Colon and doubles from both Alcides Escobar and Lorenzo Cain, scoring runs from Jarrod Dyson, Colon, Paulo Orlando (who reached base on an error by Daniel Murphy), Escobar and Ben Zobrist (who was intentionally walked). Wade Davis, who hadn't allowed a run yet that postseason, closed out the game with a flawless 12th, allowing one hit and striking out Wilmer Flores to end the game and win the World Series for the Royals. Upon conclusion of the final game, catcher Salvador Perez was named World Series MVP.
The Royals followed up their World Series victory with an underachieving, injury-riddled campaign in 2016. The Royals had an inconsistent season in which they ultimately finished 81–81, third place in the division and out of playoff contention. This season is notable for the debut of future star Whit Merrifield. The 2017 season marked the end of the World Series core: pitcher Yordano Ventura was killed in a car accident on January 22, and the Royals wore patches that said 'ACE 30' on their jerseys for the 2017 season to honor him; Wade Davis was traded in the offseason. In 2017, the Royals finished similarly to 2016 at 80–82, third place in the division, and missed the playoffs for a second consecutive year. Stars Lorenzo Cain and Eric Hosmer became free agents after the season and signed contracts with the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres, respectively. However, through both of these years the Royals were one of the most successful teams in the league at challenging umpire calls via instant replay thanks to the work of replay coordinator Bill Duplissea.
Although Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain left in free agency, the Royals were able to re-sign Mike Moustakas and Alcides Escobar. In 2018, the team started a new rebuild, trading Moustakas mid-season for prospects, and giving playing time to young players like Adalberto Mondesi, Ryan O'Hearn, and Brad Keller. Despite this, the team finished with only 58 wins, the team's lowest win total since 2005. The 2018 season also marked the emergence of Whit Merrifield as a star, as he led MLB in hits (192) and stolen bases (45).
On June 3, 2019, the Royals selected Bobby Witt Jr. with the second pick in the MLB draft. Widely considered one of the top prospects in baseball, Witt is regarded as one of the biggest prospects to be drafted by Kansas City since Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas.
On August 30, 2019, it was announced that John Sherman, a minority owner of the Cleveland Indians, had agreed to purchase the team from David Glass for a reported amount of $1 billion. In September, manager Ned Yost announced that he would retire at the end of the season after ten seasons and a franchise-record 746 wins. The Royals finished the 2019 season one game better than 2018, at 59–103. Whit Merrifield once again led the league in hits, while Jorge Soler led the American League with 48 home runs and three Royals players paced the league in triples (Mondesi, Merrifield and Hunter Dozier, with 10 apiece). On October 31, 2019, the Royals announced the hiring of former St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny to replace Ned Yost. In 2020, the season was shortened to 60 games because of the COVID-19 pandemic; the Royals finished with a 26–34 record (a .433 winning percentage), good for fourth place in the AL Central. Overall in 2021, the Royals finished with a 74–88 record (a .457 winning percentage), landing in fourth place in the AL Central but seeing improvement over both 2019 and 2020, as catcher Salvador Pérez led MLB in both home runs and runs batted in and Bobby Witt Jr. continued to emerge as one of the top prospects in Minor League Baseball.
Beginning with the 2022 season, Dayton Moore was promoted to the team's President of Baseball Operations and J. J. Picollo began his tenure as general manager. Moore was fired by the end of the season. The Royals spent 2022 blending their roster with several rookies (including Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez, and Vinnie Pasquantino among others), often fielding lineups with six or more rookies on a given night. The team finished in fourth place of the AL Central with a 65–97 record, and Mike Matheny was fired after their season finale in Cleveland.
Team owner John Sherman announced in November 2022 that the team plans to leave Kauffman Stadium prior to the end of their lease which expires at the end of the 2030 MLB season. The team announced in June 2023 that the two final sites under consideration for the stadium district are the East Village neighborhood and North Kansas City. The team plans to open the new stadium by the start of the 2027 or 2028 MLB season.
The Royals' home uniform remained almost unchanged from its first season. The original design featured blue arm and neck piping, along with "Royals" in blue and in script lettering. The road uniform was inverted from the home uniform, with "Kansas City" written in blue, in script lettering and in an arch arrangement. For the 1971 season the "Kansas City" on the road uniforms were changed to block lettering, while both uniforms added a roundel containing the team logo on the left sleeve. The blue cap with "KC" stitched in front was also introduced and remains in use today.
The Royals switched to pullover uniforms for the 1973 season. While the home uniform did not deviate much from its original design, the road uniform changed to a powder blue base and white letters. Names were added in the 1978 season.
The Royals returned to wearing buttoned uniforms for the 1983 season. The most notable change came on the powder blue uniform, where "Royals" in script replaced "Kansas City". Both uniforms added numbers on the left chest.
For the 1992 season, the Royals resumed wearing grey uniforms on the road, but the uniforms retained the "Royals" script and letters in blue with white trim. In 1994 a blue alternate uniform was introduced, with "Royals" script and letters in white. The following season, the road uniforms were tweaked to feature "Kansas City" in block letters, while neck piping was removed. A grey cap with blue brim and "KC" in blue was also used for a few games.
Before the 2002 season, the Royals added black to the color scheme, and this was also reflected on the team's uniforms. Initially, the home uniforms were only updated to remove blue piping and include black drop shadows, but in 2003, the Royals went with sleeveless uniforms with blue undershirts. The grey uniforms also removed the sleeves and piping, and were paired with black undershirts and a black cap with blue brim. Letters were also given black drop shadows. The Royals also went with a black alternate uniform, featuring blue piping and "Royals" written in blue with white trim. The sleeve patch was updated without the roundel on the home and blue alternate uniforms, while a new "Royals" roundel logo was placed on the grey undershirt and black alternates. The logo removed the "R" from the shield, enlarged the "KC" and added black drop shadows, and the crown was changed to black.
In 2006, black was eliminated from the uniforms, and the Royals returned to wearing sleeved uniforms with arm piping. The crown on the "KC" shield logo reverted back to gold, but the black drop shadows were not removed until 2019. The road uniforms brought back the "Kansas City" script, albeit written diagonally, with a slight adjustment in size prior to the 2012 season. For a few games in 2006, the black uniforms were used, albeit with the "Kansas City" script, before it was retired. In 2008, the Royals introduced a new powder blue alternate with "Royals" in blue with white trim, and letters in white with blue trim; the color lettering scheme in front was reversed starting in 2012. The uniforms were briefly paired with a powder blue cap with blue brim in 2010. Unlike the previous powder blue uniform, this set is paired with the home white pants. As a result, the royal blue alternates were worn exclusively on select road games.
Powder blue was added as a trim color when the Royals issued a new blue alternate in 2014. The "KC" insignia replaced "Royals" and the number in front, while piping was added. After winning the 2015 World Series, the Royals began wearing an alternate white uniform, featuring "Royals" in metallic gold with blue trim. In 2017, the uniform was updated with the team name in blue with gold trim, and numbers in gold and blue trim. A new blue cap with "KC" in gold was paired with this uniform.
The Royals unveiled a fresh uniform set for the 2022 season. The primary home uniform remained the same save for the thicker sleeve stripes. The road primary and blue road alternate returned to the block "Kansas City" wordmark the team used from 1971 to 1982, adding chest numbers on both uniforms. The alternate home powder blue uniform removed the royal blue elements, with the numbers taking the same color as the "Royals" script.
Also in 2022, the Royals wore "City Connect" uniforms in homage to Kansas City's "City of Fountains" moniker. The top of the uniform is navy blue with powder blue accents, with a stylized "KC" insignia on the left chest. The "KC" insignia was shaped to resemble a fountain of water shooting up. Pants worn are white with a powder blue stripe on each side. Caps are all-navy while helmets are navy with powder blue brim; both designs incorporate the "KC" in front.
Beginning in 2023, the Royals' powder blue alternate uniform would be worn with powder blue pants for select games, a combination not worn since the 1991 season.
The Royals' most prominent rivalry is with the intrastate St. Louis Cardinals. For geographic reasons, the teams long played exhibition games, but a true rivalry began with the Royals' victory over the Cardinals in the 1985 World Series, known as the "I-70 Series." Notably, the manager for the Cardinals in the series was Whitey Herzog, who had been the Royals' manager from 1975 to 1979, and led Kansas City to the franchise's first three playoff appearances – in 1976, 1977, and 1978 – before getting fired just shortly after the Royals were eliminated from playoff contention in 1979. Interleague play in 1997 allowed the I-70 Series to be revived in non-exhibition games. The first few seasons of the series were rather even, with the Cardinals holding a slight advantage with a 14–13 record through the 2003 season. Through the 2019 season, the Cardinals hold the series advantage 62–42.
From 1976 to 1980, the Royals faced the New York Yankees four times in five years in the American League Championship Series. The Yankees won in 1976, 1977 and 1978, while the Royals won in 1980. In a 2013 article about the 1983 Pine Tar Incident involving the two teams, Lou Pinella said: "As a team, we didn't really like Kansas City. We had played them in the '76, '77 and '78 postseason and beaten them every time. There was no love lost between the teams. We didn't like each other. They were our big rivals..." George Brett agreed: "I hated everyone on the Yankees, I really did. I hated 'em all, back in that era." Kansas City also held historic grudges against the Yankees in general, as during the Athletics' residency under Arnold Johnson's ownership, it was effectively a de facto "farm team" for the Bronx Bombers due to lopsided trades in favor of New York.
The Royals have retired the numbers of former players George Brett (No. 5) and Frank White (No. 20). Former manager Dick Howser's No. 10 was retired following his death in 1987. Former Brooklyn Dodgers player Jackie Robinson's No. 42 is retired throughout Major League Baseball.
No. 29, worn by Royals greats Dan Quisenberry (238 saves, 2.55 ERA) and Mike Sweeney (.299 batting average, 197 home runs, 837 RBI), has not been assigned since Sweeney's departure in 2007.
Statistics current through December 1, 2018
The Kansas City Royals farm system consists of seven minor league affiliates.
As of 2022, the Royals affiliate radio station is KCSP 610AM, the station having entered into a new four-year deal starting from the 2020 season. The station had been carrying games since 2008. The radio announcers are Denny Matthews and Ryan Lefebvre, with Steve Stewart and Steve Physioc.
Televised games are aired on Bally Sports Kansas City, a branch of Bally Sports Midwest. For the 2012 season, Ryan Lefebvre was joined by Jeff Montgomery for about 20 games while the rest of the broadcasts were covered by former Angels announcer duo of Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc. During the 2016 season, the Royals averaged an 11.7 rating and 105,000 viewers on primetime TV broadcasts. Selected Royals games previously aired in the 2000s on the Royals Network, and its former flagship was KMCI-TV.
On February 22, 2007, Matthews was selected as the 2007 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for major contributions to baseball broadcasting.
Sluggerrr is the mascot of the Royals. Sluggerrr is a lion, and made his first appearance on April 5, 1996. On game day, Sluggerrr can be found giving aggressive encouragement to players and fans, pitching in the "Little K", and firing hot dogs from an air cannon into the stands between innings.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kansas City Royals are an American professional baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. The team was founded as an expansion franchise in 1969, and has played in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014. Outside of a dominant 10-year stretch between 1976 and 1985, and a brief, albeit dominant, resurgence from 2014 to 2015, the Royals have combined for a bottom-ten all time winning percentage in MLB history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The name \"Royals\" pays homage to the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899, as well as the identical names of two former Negro league baseball teams that played in the first half of the 20th century (one was a semi-pro team based in Kansas City in the 1910s and 1920s that toured the Midwest and the other was a California Winter League team based in Los Angeles in the 1940s that was managed by Chet Brewer and included Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson on its roster). The Los Angeles team had personnel connections to the Monarchs but could not use the Monarchs name. The name also fits into something of a theme for other professional sports franchises in the city, including the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 1968, the team held a name-the-team contest that received more than 17,000 entries. Sanford Porte, a bridge engineer from the suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, was named the winner for his “Royals” entry. His reason had nothing to do with royalty. “Kansas City’s new baseball team should be called the Royals because of Missouri’s billion-dollar livestock income, Kansas City’s position as the nation’s leading stocker and feeder market and the nationally known American Royal parade and pageant,” Porte wrote. The team's board voted 6–1 on the name, with the only opposition coming from team owner Ewing Kauffman, who eventually changed his vote and said the name had grown on him.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Entering the American League in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots, the club was founded by Kansas City businessman Ewing Kauffman. The franchise was established following the actions of Stuart Symington, then-U.S. Senator from Missouri, who demanded a new franchise for the city after the Athletics (Kansas City's previous major league team that played from 1955 to 1967) moved to Oakland, California in 1968. Since April 10, 1973, the Royals have played at Kauffman Stadium, formerly known as Royals Stadium.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The new team quickly became a powerhouse, appearing in the playoffs seven times from 1976 to 1985, winning one World Series championship and another AL pennant, led by stars such as Amos Otis, Hal McRae, John Mayberry, George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, and Bret Saberhagen. The team remained competitive throughout the early 1990s, but then had only one winning season from 1995 to 2012. For 28 consecutive seasons (1986–2013), the Royals did not qualify to play in the MLB postseason, one of the longest postseason droughts during baseball's current wild-card era. The team broke this streak in 2014 by securing the franchise's first wild card berth and advancing to the 2014 World Series, where they lost to the San Francisco Giants in seven games. The Royals, led by players like Salvador Perez, Alex Gordon, Johnny Cueto, Danny Duffy, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and an elite group of bullpen pitchers, followed this up by winning the team's first AL Central division title in 2015 and defeating the New York Mets in five games in the 2015 World Series to win their second World Series championship.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Through 2023, the Royals have an all time win–loss record of 4,122–4,547 (.475). Entering the 2023 season, the team is valued at US$1.2 billion, placing them 27th out of MLB's 30 teams. As of 2019, the team is owned by majority owner John Sherman, amongst many other Kansas City business owners and entrepreneurs.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "When the Kansas City Athletics moved to Oakland after the 1967 season, Kansas City was left without major league baseball or, for the first time since 1883, professional baseball at all. The team was led by Charlie Finley, who explored many elaborate relocation plans and essentially shunned Kansas City before the team even relocated. An enraged Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri threatened to introduce legislation removing baseball's antitrust exemption unless Kansas City was granted a team in the next round of expansion. Major League Baseball complied with a hasty round of expansion at the 1967 winter meetings. Kansas City was awarded one of four teams to begin play in 1971. However, Symington was not satisfied with having Kansas City wait three years for baseball to return, and pressured MLB to allow the new teams to start play in 1969. Symington's intervention may have contributed to the financial collapse of the Royals' companion expansion team, the Seattle Pilots, who had to begin play in 1969 before they were ready (the league required new franchises to enter in pairs to preserve symmetry for scheduling purposes).",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Pharmaceutical executive Ewing Kauffman won the bidding for the new Kansas City team. He conducted a contest to determine the best and most appropriate name for the new franchise. Sanford Porte from Overland Park, Kansas submitted the name Royals, in recognition of Missouri's billion-dollar livestock industry. His suggestion was that the American Royal best exemplified Kansas City through its pageantry and parade, so the new team should be named the Royals. The name was selected out of 17,000 submissions and the Royals Board voted 6–1 to adopt the name. The one dissenting vote was Kauffman's. He eventually changed his mind after the name grew on him. (Some sources say it was in honor of the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro leagues team.) The team's logo, a crown atop a shield with the letters \"KC\" inside the shield, was created by Shannon Manning, an artist at Hallmark Cards, based in Kansas City.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Royals began play in 1969 in Kansas City, Missouri. In their inaugural game, on April 8, 1969, the Royals defeated the Minnesota Twins 4–3 in 12 innings. The Royals went 69–93 in their first season, highlighted by Lou Piniella, who won the AL Rookie of the Year Award.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The team was quickly built through a number of trades engineered by its first General Manager, Cedric Tallis, who picked up center fielder Amos Otis, who became the team's first star, first baseman John Mayberry, who provided power, second baseman Cookie Rojas, shortstop Fred Patek, and designated hitter Hal McRae. The Royals also invested in a strong farm system and developed future star pitchers Paul Splittorff, Dennis Leonard, and Steve Busby, infielders George Brett and Frank White, and outfielder Al Cowens. Under these young players, the Royals built a core set up for future success.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1971, the Royals had their first winning season, with manager Bob Lemon leading them to a second-place finish. In 1973, under manager Jack McKeon, the Royals adopted their iconic \"powder blue\" road uniforms and moved from Municipal Stadium to the brand-new Royals Stadium (now known as Kauffman Stadium).",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The 1973 All-Star Game was hosted at Royals Stadium, with Otis and Mayberry in the AL starting lineup. The event was previously held at Municipal Stadium in 1960, when the Athletics were based in Kansas City.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Manager Whitey Herzog replaced McKeon in 1975, and the Royals quickly became the dominant franchise in the American League's Western Division. After a second-place, 91 win season, they won three straight division championships from 1976 to 1978, including the franchise's only 100-win season in 1977. However, the Royals lost to the New York Yankees in three straight American League Championship Series encounters.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After the Royals finished in second place in 1979, Herzog was fired and replaced by Jim Frey. Under Frey and a legendary .390 season from George Brett, the Royals rebounded in 1980 and advanced to the ALCS, where they again faced the Yankees. The Royals vanquished the Yankees in a three-game sweep punctuated by Brett's home run off of Yankees' star relief pitcher Goose Gossage. After reaching their first World Series, the Royals fell to the Philadelphia Phillies in six games. Game 6 was also significant because it remains the most-watched game in World Series history with a television audience of 54.9 million viewers.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In July 1983, while the Royals were headed for a second-place finish behind the Chicago White Sox another chapter in the team's rivalry with the New York Yankees occurred. In what has come to be known as \"the Pine Tar Incident\", umpires discovered illegal placement of pine tar (more than 18 inches up the handle) on third baseman George Brett's bat after he had hit a two-run home run off Gossage that put the Royals up 5–4 in the top of the 9th. After Yankee Manager Billy Martin came out of the dugout to talk to home plate umpire Tim McClelland, McClelland and the other umpires mulled over the bat (measuring it over home plate, touching it, etc.). McClelland then pointed to Brett in the dugout and gave the \"out\" sign, disallowing the home run. Enraged, Brett stormed out of the dugout toward McClelland and Martin, and McClelland ejected Brett. The homer was later reinstated by AL President Lee MacPhail, and the Royals won the game after it was resumed several weeks later.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The 1983 season was also notable for some transitional changes in the Royals organization. First, owner Ewing Kauffman sold 49% of his interest to Memphis developer Avron Fogelman. Second, John Schuerholz was named general manager. Schuerholz soon bolstered the farm system with pitchers Bud Black, Danny Jackson, Mark Gubicza, David Cone, and Bret Saberhagen, as well as hitters such as Kevin Seitzer.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Thanks to the sudden and surprising maturation (specifically, in pitching) of most of the aforementioned players, the Royals won their fifth division championship in 1984, relying on Brett's bat and the young pitching staff of Saberhagen, Gubicza, Charlie Leibrandt, Black and Jackson. The Royals were then swept by the Detroit Tigers in the American League Championship Series. The Tigers went on to win the World Series.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the 1985 regular season the Royals topped the Western Division for the sixth time in ten years, led by Bret Saberhagen's Cy Young Award-winning performance and George Brett's self-described best \"all around year.\" Throughout the ensuing playoffs, the Royals came back from 2–0 and 3–1 deficits, but managed to win the Series. In game three, with KC down 2 games to 0, George Brett homered twice and doubled off the fence in right field to put Kansas City back into the series. With the Royals down three games to one in the American League Championship Series against the Toronto Blue Jays, the Royals eventually rallied to win the series 4–3.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 1985 World Series (nicknamed the \"I-70 Series\" because the two teams are both located in the state of Missouri and connected by Interstate 70) against the cross-state St. Louis Cardinals, the Royals again fell behind, three games to one. After Danny Jackson pitched the Royals to a 6–1 win in game five, the Cardinals and Royals headed back to Kansas City for game six. Facing elimination, the Royals trailed 1–0 in the bottom of the 9th inning, when Jorge Orta led off, hitting a bouncing ground ball to Cardinals 1st basemen Jack Clark, who flipped the ball back to pitcher Todd Worrell at first base. The ball beat Orta to the bag, but umpire Don Denkinger called him safe, and following a dropped popup by Clark and a passed ball, The Royals rallied to score two runs, winning on a walk-off single from pinch hitter Dane Iorg to send the series to game seven. In game seven Bret Saberhagen shutout the Cardinals as Kansas City dominated the Cardinals 11–0, clinching their first title in franchise history.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Royals maintained a reputation as one of the American League West's top teams throughout the late 1980s. The club posted a winning record in three of the four seasons following its 1985 World Series championship, while developing young stars such as Bo Jackson, Tom Gordon, and Kevin Seitzer. The Royals finished the 1989 season with a 92–70 record (third-best in the major leagues) but did not qualify for the playoffs, finishing second in their division behind the eventual World Series champion Oakland Athletics.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At the end of the 1989 season, the team boasted a powerhouse pitching rotation, including the AL Cy Young Award-winner Bret Saberhagen (who set franchise record 23 wins that year), two-time All-Star Mark Gubicza (a 15-game winner in 1989) and 1989 AL Rookie of the Year runner-up Tom Gordon (who won 17 games that year). But the organization felt it was still missing a few necessary pieces to give its divisional rival Oakland Athletics a run for their money. So prior to the 1990 season, the Royals acquired Mark Davis, the 1989 National League Cy Young Award-winner and league leader in saves, signing him to a 4-year, $13 million contract (the largest annual salary in baseball history at the time). The Royals also signed starting pitcher Storm Davis, who was coming off a career-high 19-game win season (third-best in the AL), to a three-year $6 million contract. Despite the promising off-season moves, the team suffered critical bullpen injuries while both newly signed Davises experienced lackluster seasons in 1990. The Royals concluded the season with a 75–86 record, in second-to-last place in the AL West (and with the worst franchise record since 1970). Bo Jackson—the team's potential future franchise player—suffered a devastating hip injury while playing football in the off-season, so the Royals waived him during spring training in 1991.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Though the team dropped out of contention from 1990 to 1992, the Royals still could generally be counted on to post winning records through the strike-shortened 1994 season. With no playoff appearances despite the winning records during this era, many of the team's highlights instead centered around the end of George Brett's career, such as his third and final batting title in 1990—which made him the first player to win batting titles in three different decades—and his 3,000th hit.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1994, the Royals moved from the AL West to the newly created AL Central along with the Chicago White Sox and Minnesota Twins, joined by the Cleveland Indians and Milwaukee Brewers from the AL East. The Brewers left for the NL Central in 1998, replaced by the Detroit Tigers that moved from the AL East.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "At the start of the 1990s, the Royals had been hit with a double-whammy when General Manager John Schuerholz departed in 1990 and team owner Ewing Kauffman died in 1993. Shortly before Kauffman's death, he set up an unprecedented complex succession plan to keep the team in Kansas City. The team was donated at his death to the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and Affiliated Trusts with operating decisions of the team decided by a five-member group chaired by Wal-Mart executive David Glass. According to the plan the Royals had six years to find a local owner for the team before opening ownership to an outside bidder. The new owners would be required to say they would keep the team in Kansas City. Kauffman had feared that new owners would move it noting, \"No one would want to buy a baseball team that consistently loses millions of dollars and had little prospect of making money because it was in a small city.\" If no owner could be found the Kauffman restrictions were to end on January 1, 2002, and the team was to be sold to the highest bidder. In 1999, New York City lawyer and minor league baseball owner Miles Prentice, vowing not to move the team, bid $75 million for the team. This was the minimum amount Kauffman had stipulated the team could be sold for. MLB rejected Prentice's first bid without specifying any reason. In a final round of bids on March 13, 2000, the Foundation voted to accept Glass' bid of $96 million, rejecting Prentice's revised bid of $115 million.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "During the interregnum under Foundation ownership, the team declined. In the 1994 season, the Royals reduced payroll by trading pitcher David Cone and outfielder Brian McRae, then continued their salary dump in the 1995 season. The team payroll, which had previously remained among the league's highest, was sliced in half from $40.5 million in 1994 (fourth-highest in the major leagues) to $18.5 million in 1996 (second-lowest in the major leagues).",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "As attendance slid and the average MLB salary continued to rise, rather than pay higher salaries or lose their players to free agency, the Royals traded their remaining stars such as Kevin Appier, Johnny Damon and Jermaine Dye. By 1999, the team's payroll had fallen again to $16.5 million. Making matters worse, most of the younger players that the Royals received in exchange for these All-Stars proved of little value, setting the stage for an extended downward spiral. Indeed, the Royals set a franchise-low with a .398 winning percentage (64–97 record) in 1999, and lost 97 games again in 2001.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the middle of this era, in 1997, the Royals declined the opportunity to switch to the National League as part of a realignment plan to introduce the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays as expansion teams. The Milwaukee Brewers made the switch instead.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2002, the Royals set a new team record for futility, losing 100 games for the first time in franchise history. They fired manager Tony Muser, and he was replaced by Tony Peña.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The 2003 season saw a temporary end to the losing, when manager Tony Peña, in his first full season with the club, guided the team to its first winning record (83–79) since 1994 and finished in third place in the AL Central. He was named the American League Manager of the Year for his efforts and shortstop Ángel Berroa was named AL Rookie of the Year.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "From the 2004 season through the 2012 season, the Royals posted nine consecutive losing records, the longest streak in team history. In six of those seasons, the team finished in last place in the American League Central, and in eight of those nine seasons the team lost at least 90 games. The worst seasons came in 2004–2006, when the Royals lost at least 100 games each year and set the franchise's all-time record for losses (56–106 in 2005).",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Picked by many to win their division in 2004 after faring well in the free agent market, the Royals got off to a disappointing start and by late June were back in a rebuilding mode, releasing veteran reliever Curtis Leskanic and trading veteran reliever Jason Grimsley and superstar center fielder Carlos Beltrán for prospects, all within a week of each other.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The team subsequently fell apart completely, losing 104 games and breaking the franchise record set just two years earlier. The Royals did, however, see promising seasons from two rookies, center fielder David DeJesus and starting pitcher Zack Greinke. The team continued a youth movement in 2005, but finished with a 56–106 record (.346), a full 43 games out of first place, marking the third time in four seasons that the team reestablished the mark for worst record in franchise history. The season also saw the Royals lose 19 games in a row, a franchise record. During the season manager Tony Peña quit and was replaced by interim manager Bob Schaefer until the Indians' bench coach Buddy Bell was chosen as the next manager. Looking for a quick turnaround, general manager Allard Baird signed several veteran players prior to the 2006 season, including Doug Mientkiewicz, Mark Grudzielanek, Joe Mays and Scott Elarton. Nevertheless, the Royals struggled through another 100-loss season in 2006, becoming just the eleventh team in major league history to lose 100 games in three straight seasons. During the season Baird was fired as GM and replaced by Dayton Moore.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kansas City entered the 2007 season looking to rebound from four out of five seasons ending with at least 100 losses. The Royals outbid the Cubs and Blue Jays for free agent righty Gil Meche, signing him to a five-year, $55 million contract, the largest contract in Royals history. Reliever Octavio Dotel also inked a one-year, $5 million contract. The team also added several new prospects, including Alex Gordon and Billy Butler. Among Dayton Moore's first acts as General Manager was instating a new motto for the team: \"True. Blue. Tradition.\" In June 2007, the Royals had their first winning month since July 2003 and followed it up with a winning July. The Royals finished the season 69–93, but 2007 marked the club's first season with fewer than 100 losses since 2003. Manager Buddy Bell resigned following the 2007 season.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Royals hired Trey Hillman, formerly the manager of the Nippon Ham Fighters and a minor league manager with the New York Yankees, to be the 15th manager in franchise history. The 2008 season began with the release of fan-favorite Mike Sweeney and the trade of Ángel Berroa to the Dodgers. Through 13 games in 2008, the Royals were 8–5 and in first place in the AL Central, a vast improvement over their start from the previous season. However, by the All-Star break, the Royals were again in losing territory, with their record buoyed only by a 13–5 record in interleague play, the best in the American League. The team finished the season in fourth place in the division with a 75–87 record.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Prior to the 2009 season, the Royals renovated Kauffman Stadium, and after the season began, the Royals ended April at the top of the AL Central, both of which raised excitement levels among fans. However, the team faded as the season progressed and finished the year with a final record of 65–97, in a tie for fourth place in the AL Central. The season was highlighted by starter Zack Greinke, who did not allow an earned run in the first 24 innings of the season, went on to finish the year with a Major League-leading 2.16 earned run average, and won the American League Cy Young Award. Greinke joined Bret Saberhagen (in 1985 and 1989) and David Cone (in 1994) as only the third player in Royals history to receive the award.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Royals began the 2010 season with a rocky start, and after the team's record fell to 12–23, manager Trey Hillman was fired. Former Milwaukee Brewers skipper Ned Yost took over as the 16th manager in franchise history, At the end of the 2010 season, the Royals finished with a 67–95 record, in last place in the division for the sixth time in seven years. The Royals also set a dubious franchise record during the season, allowing 42 runs in a three-day span from July 25 to 27. The Royals began 2011 with a hot start, compiling 10–4 record after 14 games, but success faded as the season progressed. The Royals last had a .500 record at 22–22, and by the All-Star break, the Royals had a record of 37–54, the worst in the American League. Almost all of the Royals' bullpen was made up of 2011 minor league call ups, in addition to the infielders Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Johnny Giavotella, and catchers Salvador Pérez and Manny Piña. Hosmer won the AL Rookie of the Month award in July and September and finished the season with 19 home runs. Moustakas collected a fifteen-game hitting streak, which tied the longest such streak by a Royals rookie. The Royals finished the 2011 season with a 71–91 record, in fourth place in the AL Central. The 2012 team saw more of the same, as they improved by one game to 72–90, but finished one spot better in the division.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The 2012 Major League Baseball All-Star Game was hosted by the Royals at Kauffman Stadium on July 10, 2012 (in addition to the 2012 Home Run Derby, All-Star Futures Game and Taco Bell All-Star Legends and Celebrity Softball Game during the All-Star break), which the National League won 8–0. The 2012 season marked the third time the \"Midsummer Classic\" was held in Kansas City.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "On December 10, 2012, in an attempt to strengthen the pitching staff (which was among the worst in baseball in 2012), the Royals traded for Rays pitchers James Shields and Wade Davis, giving Tampa top prospects Wil Myers, Jake Odorizzi, Mike Montgomery, and Patrick Leonard in return. This trade helped catalyze a return to winning records.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "For most of the 2013 season, the Royals hovered near .500. The team also did not commit an error in its first seven games (for 64+2⁄3 innings) for the first time in team history. On September 22, the Royals won their 82nd game of the season to clinch the franchise's first winning season since 2003. The Royals finished the season 86–76 and in third place in the AL Central, securing the team's best winning percentage since 1994.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The 2014 season was even more successful, featuring a return to the postseason for the first time in 29 years, and what would unfold as a historic playoff run from the Wild Card all the way to the 2014 World Series.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Anchored by the \"HDH\" trio of Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland, the bullpen became one of the most dominant in MLB history.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Entering the 2014 season, the Royals had the longest playoff drought of any team in the four main American professional sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA). On July 21, 2014, the Royals had a losing record (48–50) and were eight games behind the Detroit Tigers in the AL Central standings. But spurred by a 22–5 record from July 22 to August 19 coinciding with a mediocre 12–15 stretch by the Tigers, the team surged into first place in the AL Central. The Royals reached the top of the division standings on August 11, after winning their eighth game in a row. This marked the latest date the Royals had led their division since August 29, 2003. The team retained its division lead for a month, before falling out of first-place permanently on September 12. They finished the 2014 regular season with a record 89–73, still the most wins for the Royals since 1989. Though the team finished one game behind Detroit in the AL Central, the Royals secured their first-ever wild card berth.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "After qualifying for the postseason, the Royals embarked on a record-setting eight-game winning streak. They hosted the Oakland Athletics in the 2014 American League Wild Card Game and won 9–8 on a Salvador Pérez walk-off single in the 12th inning, having earlier rallied back from a 7–3 deficit in the eighth. The Royals then swept the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the 2014 American League Division Series. In Game 1 of the ALDS, the score was 2–2 going into the 11th inning, when Mike Moustakas hit a game-winning solo home run. The next day, Kansas City beat the Angels 4–1 in another extra-innings affair, in the process setting an MLB postseason record of three straight extra-inning wins. The Royals then completed the sweep at home, winning 8–3 in game three and advancing to the 2014 American League Championship Series against the Baltimore Orioles.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In the opening game of the ALCS on October 11, 2014, the Royals defeated the Orioles 8–6, with two home runs in the 10th inning. Thus, in eight extra innings over five postseason games in 2014, they succeeded in hitting four homers in extra innings, more than any team in the history of Major League Baseball. In the second ALCS game, the Royals again beat the Orioles 6–4, behind Lorenzo Cain's four hits, including an RBI single. After game three, the ALCS was delayed one day due to rainy weather, when the Royals hosted the Orioles at Kauffman Stadium on October 14, 2014. Pitcher Jeremy Guthrie allowed only one run as KC beat the Orioles 2–1, taking a 3–0 lead in the series. In game four, the Royals completed the sweep of the Orioles with another 2–1 win to advance to the World Series for the first time since 1985. The win marked the team's eighth consecutive postseason win in one year, breaking a major league record previously held by the Colorado Rockies in 2007 and Cincinnati Reds in 1976. It also marked the Royals' 11th win in a row overall in postseason play, dating back to the franchise's final three wins of the 1985 Series, the third-longest multi-year postseason streak in baseball history.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The Royals faced the San Francisco Giants in the 2014 World Series. They had home-field advantage, due to the American League's win in the 2014 All-Star Game.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "After setting an AL record by winning eight straight games to reach the World Series, the Royals opened the series by losing 7–1 in the first game against starter Madison Bumgarner. The Royals bounced back with a 7–2 win in game two to tie the series at 1–1. The Royals won game three in San Francisco 3–2 to take the series lead for the first time. In game four, the Royals lost 11–4, which tied the series with the Giants. In game five, they lost 5–0 to the Giants against starter Madison Bumgarner. In game six, the Royals beat the Giants 10–0. In game seven, the Royals started Jeremy Guthrie against Giants pitcher Tim Hudson. Guthrie lasted 3+1⁄3 innings before he was replaced by Kelvin Herrera, who himself lasted 2+2⁄3 innings. He was then replaced by Wade Davis, who pitched in two innings. Closer Greg Holland ended the game. On the Giants side, Hudson lasted only 1+2⁄3 innings before he was replaced by Jeremy Affeldt, who was later replaced by Madison Bumgarner. The Royals lost game seven, 3–2, with the tying run (Alex Gordon) on third base in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, when Salvador Pérez fouled out to Pablo Sandoval to end the game and the series.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "After earning a wild card entry to the playoffs in 2014, in 2015, the Royals won the franchise's first division title since 1985 and first Central division title ever. The Royals went on to win the 2015 World Series – the first championship for the Royals since 1985 – beating the New York Mets four games to one.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Royals entered the 2015 All-Star break with the best record in the American League at 52–34. The team continued its momentum into the second half of the season, and on July 26, Royals management traded three prospects Brandon Finnegan, John Lamb Archived April 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, and Cody Reed for 2014 All-Star pitcher Johnny Cueto to help bolster its starting pitching rotation, as well as trading two pitchers to the Oakland Athletics for super-utility player Ben Zobrist. The team ended the regular season with a record of 95–67, the best in the entire American League, and the organization's best record since 1980.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Royals faced the Houston Astros in the ALDS. Down 2–1 in the series and trailing 6–2 in the 8th inning of Game 4, the Royals rallied for 5 runs en route to a 9–6 win before Cueto's gem in Game 5 powered the Royals to a second consecutive ALCS. The Royals defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in Game 6, to win the 2015 ALCS and earn a trip to face the New York Mets in the 2015 World Series.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The Royals beat the New York Mets 4 games to 1 to become the 2015 World Series champions. It was the Royals' first World Series title since 1985. The series win was sealed after the Royals beat the Mets 7–2 in the 12th inning of Game 5. The Royals rallied in the 9th inning down 2–0 to tie the score 2–2, forcing the game into extra innings. The five-run 12th inning was initiated by a Salvador Pérez single, with Jarrod Dyson pinch-running for him. This was followed by a single from Christian Colon and doubles from both Alcides Escobar and Lorenzo Cain, scoring runs from Jarrod Dyson, Colon, Paulo Orlando (who reached base on an error by Daniel Murphy), Escobar and Ben Zobrist (who was intentionally walked). Wade Davis, who hadn't allowed a run yet that postseason, closed out the game with a flawless 12th, allowing one hit and striking out Wilmer Flores to end the game and win the World Series for the Royals. Upon conclusion of the final game, catcher Salvador Perez was named World Series MVP.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Royals followed up their World Series victory with an underachieving, injury-riddled campaign in 2016. The Royals had an inconsistent season in which they ultimately finished 81–81, third place in the division and out of playoff contention. This season is notable for the debut of future star Whit Merrifield. The 2017 season marked the end of the World Series core: pitcher Yordano Ventura was killed in a car accident on January 22, and the Royals wore patches that said 'ACE 30' on their jerseys for the 2017 season to honor him; Wade Davis was traded in the offseason. In 2017, the Royals finished similarly to 2016 at 80–82, third place in the division, and missed the playoffs for a second consecutive year. Stars Lorenzo Cain and Eric Hosmer became free agents after the season and signed contracts with the Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres, respectively. However, through both of these years the Royals were one of the most successful teams in the league at challenging umpire calls via instant replay thanks to the work of replay coordinator Bill Duplissea.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Although Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain left in free agency, the Royals were able to re-sign Mike Moustakas and Alcides Escobar. In 2018, the team started a new rebuild, trading Moustakas mid-season for prospects, and giving playing time to young players like Adalberto Mondesi, Ryan O'Hearn, and Brad Keller. Despite this, the team finished with only 58 wins, the team's lowest win total since 2005. The 2018 season also marked the emergence of Whit Merrifield as a star, as he led MLB in hits (192) and stolen bases (45).",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On June 3, 2019, the Royals selected Bobby Witt Jr. with the second pick in the MLB draft. Widely considered one of the top prospects in baseball, Witt is regarded as one of the biggest prospects to be drafted by Kansas City since Eric Hosmer and Mike Moustakas.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "On August 30, 2019, it was announced that John Sherman, a minority owner of the Cleveland Indians, had agreed to purchase the team from David Glass for a reported amount of $1 billion. In September, manager Ned Yost announced that he would retire at the end of the season after ten seasons and a franchise-record 746 wins. The Royals finished the 2019 season one game better than 2018, at 59–103. Whit Merrifield once again led the league in hits, while Jorge Soler led the American League with 48 home runs and three Royals players paced the league in triples (Mondesi, Merrifield and Hunter Dozier, with 10 apiece). On October 31, 2019, the Royals announced the hiring of former St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Matheny to replace Ned Yost. In 2020, the season was shortened to 60 games because of the COVID-19 pandemic; the Royals finished with a 26–34 record (a .433 winning percentage), good for fourth place in the AL Central. Overall in 2021, the Royals finished with a 74–88 record (a .457 winning percentage), landing in fourth place in the AL Central but seeing improvement over both 2019 and 2020, as catcher Salvador Pérez led MLB in both home runs and runs batted in and Bobby Witt Jr. continued to emerge as one of the top prospects in Minor League Baseball.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Beginning with the 2022 season, Dayton Moore was promoted to the team's President of Baseball Operations and J. J. Picollo began his tenure as general manager. Moore was fired by the end of the season. The Royals spent 2022 blending their roster with several rookies (including Bobby Witt Jr., MJ Melendez, and Vinnie Pasquantino among others), often fielding lineups with six or more rookies on a given night. The team finished in fourth place of the AL Central with a 65–97 record, and Mike Matheny was fired after their season finale in Cleveland.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Team owner John Sherman announced in November 2022 that the team plans to leave Kauffman Stadium prior to the end of their lease which expires at the end of the 2030 MLB season. The team announced in June 2023 that the two final sites under consideration for the stadium district are the East Village neighborhood and North Kansas City. The team plans to open the new stadium by the start of the 2027 or 2028 MLB season.",
"title": "Franchise history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Royals' home uniform remained almost unchanged from its first season. The original design featured blue arm and neck piping, along with \"Royals\" in blue and in script lettering. The road uniform was inverted from the home uniform, with \"Kansas City\" written in blue, in script lettering and in an arch arrangement. For the 1971 season the \"Kansas City\" on the road uniforms were changed to block lettering, while both uniforms added a roundel containing the team logo on the left sleeve. The blue cap with \"KC\" stitched in front was also introduced and remains in use today.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The Royals switched to pullover uniforms for the 1973 season. While the home uniform did not deviate much from its original design, the road uniform changed to a powder blue base and white letters. Names were added in the 1978 season.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Royals returned to wearing buttoned uniforms for the 1983 season. The most notable change came on the powder blue uniform, where \"Royals\" in script replaced \"Kansas City\". Both uniforms added numbers on the left chest.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "For the 1992 season, the Royals resumed wearing grey uniforms on the road, but the uniforms retained the \"Royals\" script and letters in blue with white trim. In 1994 a blue alternate uniform was introduced, with \"Royals\" script and letters in white. The following season, the road uniforms were tweaked to feature \"Kansas City\" in block letters, while neck piping was removed. A grey cap with blue brim and \"KC\" in blue was also used for a few games.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Before the 2002 season, the Royals added black to the color scheme, and this was also reflected on the team's uniforms. Initially, the home uniforms were only updated to remove blue piping and include black drop shadows, but in 2003, the Royals went with sleeveless uniforms with blue undershirts. The grey uniforms also removed the sleeves and piping, and were paired with black undershirts and a black cap with blue brim. Letters were also given black drop shadows. The Royals also went with a black alternate uniform, featuring blue piping and \"Royals\" written in blue with white trim. The sleeve patch was updated without the roundel on the home and blue alternate uniforms, while a new \"Royals\" roundel logo was placed on the grey undershirt and black alternates. The logo removed the \"R\" from the shield, enlarged the \"KC\" and added black drop shadows, and the crown was changed to black.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In 2006, black was eliminated from the uniforms, and the Royals returned to wearing sleeved uniforms with arm piping. The crown on the \"KC\" shield logo reverted back to gold, but the black drop shadows were not removed until 2019. The road uniforms brought back the \"Kansas City\" script, albeit written diagonally, with a slight adjustment in size prior to the 2012 season. For a few games in 2006, the black uniforms were used, albeit with the \"Kansas City\" script, before it was retired. In 2008, the Royals introduced a new powder blue alternate with \"Royals\" in blue with white trim, and letters in white with blue trim; the color lettering scheme in front was reversed starting in 2012. The uniforms were briefly paired with a powder blue cap with blue brim in 2010. Unlike the previous powder blue uniform, this set is paired with the home white pants. As a result, the royal blue alternates were worn exclusively on select road games.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Powder blue was added as a trim color when the Royals issued a new blue alternate in 2014. The \"KC\" insignia replaced \"Royals\" and the number in front, while piping was added. After winning the 2015 World Series, the Royals began wearing an alternate white uniform, featuring \"Royals\" in metallic gold with blue trim. In 2017, the uniform was updated with the team name in blue with gold trim, and numbers in gold and blue trim. A new blue cap with \"KC\" in gold was paired with this uniform.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Royals unveiled a fresh uniform set for the 2022 season. The primary home uniform remained the same save for the thicker sleeve stripes. The road primary and blue road alternate returned to the block \"Kansas City\" wordmark the team used from 1971 to 1982, adding chest numbers on both uniforms. The alternate home powder blue uniform removed the royal blue elements, with the numbers taking the same color as the \"Royals\" script.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Also in 2022, the Royals wore \"City Connect\" uniforms in homage to Kansas City's \"City of Fountains\" moniker. The top of the uniform is navy blue with powder blue accents, with a stylized \"KC\" insignia on the left chest. The \"KC\" insignia was shaped to resemble a fountain of water shooting up. Pants worn are white with a powder blue stripe on each side. Caps are all-navy while helmets are navy with powder blue brim; both designs incorporate the \"KC\" in front.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Beginning in 2023, the Royals' powder blue alternate uniform would be worn with powder blue pants for select games, a combination not worn since the 1991 season.",
"title": "Uniform history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The Royals' most prominent rivalry is with the intrastate St. Louis Cardinals. For geographic reasons, the teams long played exhibition games, but a true rivalry began with the Royals' victory over the Cardinals in the 1985 World Series, known as the \"I-70 Series.\" Notably, the manager for the Cardinals in the series was Whitey Herzog, who had been the Royals' manager from 1975 to 1979, and led Kansas City to the franchise's first three playoff appearances – in 1976, 1977, and 1978 – before getting fired just shortly after the Royals were eliminated from playoff contention in 1979. Interleague play in 1997 allowed the I-70 Series to be revived in non-exhibition games. The first few seasons of the series were rather even, with the Cardinals holding a slight advantage with a 14–13 record through the 2003 season. Through the 2019 season, the Cardinals hold the series advantage 62–42.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "From 1976 to 1980, the Royals faced the New York Yankees four times in five years in the American League Championship Series. The Yankees won in 1976, 1977 and 1978, while the Royals won in 1980. In a 2013 article about the 1983 Pine Tar Incident involving the two teams, Lou Pinella said: \"As a team, we didn't really like Kansas City. We had played them in the '76, '77 and '78 postseason and beaten them every time. There was no love lost between the teams. We didn't like each other. They were our big rivals...\" George Brett agreed: \"I hated everyone on the Yankees, I really did. I hated 'em all, back in that era.\" Kansas City also held historic grudges against the Yankees in general, as during the Athletics' residency under Arnold Johnson's ownership, it was effectively a de facto \"farm team\" for the Bronx Bombers due to lopsided trades in favor of New York.",
"title": "Rivalries"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "The Royals have retired the numbers of former players George Brett (No. 5) and Frank White (No. 20). Former manager Dick Howser's No. 10 was retired following his death in 1987. Former Brooklyn Dodgers player Jackie Robinson's No. 42 is retired throughout Major League Baseball.",
"title": "Other players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "No. 29, worn by Royals greats Dan Quisenberry (238 saves, 2.55 ERA) and Mike Sweeney (.299 batting average, 197 home runs, 837 RBI), has not been assigned since Sweeney's departure in 2007.",
"title": "Other players of note"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Statistics current through December 1, 2018",
"title": "Managers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The Kansas City Royals farm system consists of seven minor league affiliates.",
"title": "Minor league affiliations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "As of 2022, the Royals affiliate radio station is KCSP 610AM, the station having entered into a new four-year deal starting from the 2020 season. The station had been carrying games since 2008. The radio announcers are Denny Matthews and Ryan Lefebvre, with Steve Stewart and Steve Physioc.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Televised games are aired on Bally Sports Kansas City, a branch of Bally Sports Midwest. For the 2012 season, Ryan Lefebvre was joined by Jeff Montgomery for about 20 games while the rest of the broadcasts were covered by former Angels announcer duo of Rex Hudler and Steve Physioc. During the 2016 season, the Royals averaged an 11.7 rating and 105,000 viewers on primetime TV broadcasts. Selected Royals games previously aired in the 2000s on the Royals Network, and its former flagship was KMCI-TV.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "On February 22, 2007, Matthews was selected as the 2007 recipient of the Ford C. Frick Award, presented annually for major contributions to baseball broadcasting.",
"title": "Radio and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Sluggerrr is the mascot of the Royals. Sluggerrr is a lion, and made his first appearance on April 5, 1996. On game day, Sluggerrr can be found giving aggressive encouragement to players and fans, pitching in the \"Little K\", and firing hot dogs from an air cannon into the stands between innings.",
"title": "Mascot"
}
] |
The Kansas City Royals are an American professional baseball team based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) Central division. The team was founded as an expansion franchise in 1969, and has played in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014. Outside of a dominant 10-year stretch between 1976 and 1985, and a brief, albeit dominant, resurgence from 2014 to 2015, the Royals have combined for a bottom-ten all time winning percentage in MLB history. The name "Royals" pays homage to the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899, as well as the identical names of two former Negro league baseball teams that played in the first half of the 20th century. The Los Angeles team had personnel connections to the Monarchs but could not use the Monarchs name. The name also fits into something of a theme for other professional sports franchises in the city, including the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League. In 1968, the team held a name-the-team contest that received more than 17,000 entries. Sanford Porte, a bridge engineer from the suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, was named the winner for his “Royals” entry. His reason had nothing to do with royalty. “Kansas City’s new baseball team should be called the Royals because of Missouri’s billion-dollar livestock income, Kansas City’s position as the nation’s leading stocker and feeder market and the nationally known American Royal parade and pageant,” Porte wrote. The team's board voted 6–1 on the name, with the only opposition coming from team owner Ewing Kauffman, who eventually changed his vote and said the name had grown on him. Entering the American League in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots, the club was founded by Kansas City businessman Ewing Kauffman. The franchise was established following the actions of Stuart Symington, then-U.S. Senator from Missouri, who demanded a new franchise for the city after the Athletics moved to Oakland, California in 1968. Since April 10, 1973, the Royals have played at Kauffman Stadium, formerly known as Royals Stadium. The new team quickly became a powerhouse, appearing in the playoffs seven times from 1976 to 1985, winning one World Series championship and another AL pennant, led by stars such as Amos Otis, Hal McRae, John Mayberry, George Brett, Frank White, Willie Wilson, and Bret Saberhagen. The team remained competitive throughout the early 1990s, but then had only one winning season from 1995 to 2012. For 28 consecutive seasons (1986–2013), the Royals did not qualify to play in the MLB postseason, one of the longest postseason droughts during baseball's current wild-card era. The team broke this streak in 2014 by securing the franchise's first wild card berth and advancing to the 2014 World Series, where they lost to the San Francisco Giants in seven games. The Royals, led by players like Salvador Perez, Alex Gordon, Johnny Cueto, Danny Duffy, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, and an elite group of bullpen pitchers, followed this up by winning the team's first AL Central division title in 2015 and defeating the New York Mets in five games in the 2015 World Series to win their second World Series championship. Through 2023, the Royals have an all time win–loss record of 4,122–4,547 (.475). Entering the 2023 season, the team is valued at US$1.2 billion, placing them 27th out of MLB's 30 teams. As of 2019, the team is owned by majority owner John Sherman, amongst many other Kansas City business owners and entrepreneurs.
|
2001-10-23T02:52:42Z
|
2023-12-21T15:23:11Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_Royals
|
16,887 |
Kosher (disambiguation)
|
Kosher is food that may be consumed according to kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws.
Kosher may also refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kosher is food that may be consumed according to kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kosher may also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kosher is food that may be consumed according to kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws. Kosher may also refer to: Kosher (band), an American punk rock band formed in 1995 in Warrensburg, Missouri
Kosher Gym, a fitness club on Coney Island Avenue in the Midwood section of Flatbush, Brooklyn
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-17T01:47:16Z
|
[
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosher_(disambiguation)
|
16,890 |
Klingon language
|
The Klingon language (Klingon: tlhIngan Hol, pIqaD: , pronounced [ˈt͡ɬɪ.ŋɑn xol]) is the constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race called the Klingons, in the Star Trek universe.
Described in the 1985 book The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound "alien", it has a number of typologically uncommon features. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was devised by actor James Doohan ("Scotty") and producer Jon Povill for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film marked the first time the language had been heard. In all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English, even to each other. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language.
Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as "Klingonee" /ˈklɪŋɡɒni/), but among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language called Klingonaase that was introduced in John M. Ford's 1984 Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, and appears in other Star Trek novels by Ford.
The play A Klingon Christmas Carol is the first production that is primarily in Klingon (only the narrator speaks English). The opera ʼuʼ is entirely in Klingon.
A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Because its vocabulary is heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, it can be hard for everyday use because of the lack of words for a casual conversation.
The language is first mentioned in the original Star Trek series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" (1967), but is not heard until Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). According to the actor who spoke the lines, Mark Lenard, James Doohan recorded the lines he had written on a tape, and Lenard transcribed the recorded lines in a way he found useful in learning them.
For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett wanted the Klingons to speak a structured language instead of random gibberish, and so commissioned a full language, based on the phrases Doohan had originated, from Marc Okrand, who had earlier constructed four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
Okrand enlarged the lexicon and developed a grammar based on Doohan's original dozen words. The language appeared intermittently in later films featuring the original cast; for example, in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), where translation difficulties served as a plot device.
Two "non-canon" dialects of Klingon are hinted at in the novelization of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as Saavik speaks in Klingon to the only Klingon officer aboard Cpt. Kruge's starship after his death, as the survivors of the Enterprise's self-destruction transport up from the crumbling Genesis Planet to the Klingon ship. The surviving officer, Maltz, states that he speaks the Rumaiy dialect, while Saavik is speaking to him in the Kumburan dialect of Klingon, per Maltz's spoken reply to her.
With the advent of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)—in which one of the main characters, Worf, was a Klingon—and successors, the language and various cultural aspects for the fictional species were expanded. In the episode "A Matter of Honor", several members of a Klingon ship's crew speak a language that is not translated for the benefit of the viewer (even Commander Riker, enjoying the benefits of a universal translator, is unable to understand) until one Klingon orders the others to "speak their [i.e., human] language".
A small number of non-Klingon characters were later depicted in Star Trek as having learned to speak Klingon, notably Jean-Luc Picard and Dax.
Hobbyists around the world have studied the Klingon language. At least nine Klingon translations of works of world literature have been published, among which are: ghIlghameS (the Epic of Gilgamesh), Hamlet (Hamlet), paghmoʼ tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing), pInʼaʼ qan paQDIʼnorgh (Tao Te Ching), Sun pInʼaʼ veS mIw (the Art of War), chIjwI' tIQ bom (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), 'aS 'IDnar pIn'a' Dun (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), taʼpuq mach (the Little Prince), and QelIS boqHarmey (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The Shakespearean choices were inspired by a remark from High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." In the bonus material on the DVD, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and actor William Shatner both explain that this was an allusion to the German myth that Shakespeare was in fact German.
The Klingon Language Institute exists to promote the language.
CBS Television Studios owns the copyright on the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. While constructed languages ("conlangs") are viewed as creations with copyright protection, natural languages are not protected, excluding dictionaries and other works created with them. Mizuki Miyashita and Laura Moll note, "Copyrights on dictionaries are unusual because the entries in the dictionary are not copyrightable as the words themselves are facts, and facts can not be copyrighted. However, the formatting, example sentences, and instructions for dictionary use are created by the author, so they are copyrightable."
Okrand had studied some Native American and Southeast Asian languages, and phonological and grammatical features of these languages "worked their way into Klingon, but for the most part, not by design." Okrand himself has stated that a design principle of the Klingon language was dissimilarity to existing natural languages in general, and English in particular. He therefore avoided patterns that are typologically common and deliberately chose features that occur relatively infrequently in human languages. This includes above all the highly asymmetric consonant inventory and the basic word order.
A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Arika Okrent guessed in her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent speakers. Since that time, with the appearance of Duolingo's Klingon course and the increasing popularity of video chat platforms such as Zoom and Discord, the number of conversationally fluent speakers has definitely increased; in 2021, there are perhaps 50-60. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek–Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use. For instance, while words for transporter ionizer unit (jolvoyʼ) or bridge (of a ship) (meH) have been known since close to the language's inception, the word for bridge in the sense of a crossing over water (QI) was unknown until August 2012. Nonetheless, mundane conversations are possible among skilled speakers.
One Klingon speaker, d'Armond Speers, raised his son Alec to speak Klingon as a first language, whilst the boy's mother communicated with him in English. Alec rarely responded to his father in Klingon, although when he did, his pronunciation was "excellent". After Alec's fifth birthday, Speers reported that his son eventually stopped responding to him when spoken to in Klingon as he clearly did not enjoy it, so Speers switched to English.
In 2007, a report surfaced that Multnomah County, Oregon, was hiring Klingon translators for its mental health program in case patients came into a psychiatric hospital speaking nothing but Klingon. Most circulations of the report seemingly implied that this was a problem that health officials faced before; however, the original report indicated that this was just a precaution for a hypothetical and that said translator would only be paid on an as needed basis. After the report was misinterpreted, the County issued another release noting that releasing the original report was a "mistake".
In May 2009, Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Ultralingua Inc., a developer of electronic dictionary applications, announced the release of a suite of electronic Klingon language software for most computer platforms including a dictionary, a phrasebook, and an audio learning tool.
In September 2011, Eurotalk released the "Learn Klingon" course in its Talk Now! series. The language is displayed in both Latin and pIqaD fonts, making this the first language course written in pIqaD and approved by CBS and Marc Okrand. It was translated by Jonathan Brown and Okrand and uses the Hol-pIqaD TrueType font.
In August 2016, a company in the United Kingdom, Bidvine, began offering Klingon lessons as one of their services.
In March 2018, the popular language learning site Duolingo opened a beta course in Klingon. After it proved its effectiveness, the company offered to promote it from beta status, but due to ongoing software issues regarding Klingon's unexpected use of upper- and lower-case letters and the apostrophe as a consonant instead of punctuation, the course developers chose not to accept the offer until the problems were addressed.
There are Klingon language meetings and linguists or students are interested in researching this topic, even writing essays about the language or its users.
Klingon speakers are also referred to in non-Star Trek TV series, including Frasier, The Big Bang Theory, and Lucifer, and were heavily featured in the "My Big Fat Geek Wedding" episode of The Simpsons. In the 2017 film Please Stand By, in which a young autistic woman played by Dakota Fanning leaves her group home in San Francisco to deliver a Star Trek screenplay she wrote to Paramount Pictures, a Los Angeles police officer played by Patton Oswalt coaxes her out of hiding by speaking with her in Klingon.
In the Quentin Tarantino film 'Kill Bill Volume 1' (2003), the opening of the film cites 'Revenge is a dish best served cold' as an 'old Klingon proverb'.
In 2010, a Chicago Theatre company presented a version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in Klingon language and a Klingon setting. On September 25, 2010, the Washington Shakespeare Company (now known as WSC Avant Bard) performed selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in the Klingon language in Arlington County, Virginia. The performance was proposed by Okrand in his capacity as chairman of the group's board. This performance was reprised on February 27, 2011 featuring Stephen Fry as the Klingon Osric and was filmed by the BBC as part of a 5-part documentary on language entitled Fry's Planet Word.
Google Search and the Java edition of Minecraft each have a Klingon language setting.
The 2003–2010 version of the puzzle globe logo of Wikipedia, representing its multilingualism, contained a Klingon character. When updated in 2010, the Klingon character was removed from the logo, and substituted with one from the Ge'ez script. A Klingon language Wikipedia was started in June 2004 at tlh.wikipedia.org. It was permanently locked in August 2005 and moved to Wikia. The Klingon Wiktionary was closed in 2008.
The file management software XYplorer has been translated into Klingon by its developer.
Microsoft's Bing Translator attempts to translate Klingon from and to other languages. It can do a good job with individual words, and with phrases included in its training corpus, but it is not well tuned for Klingon's system of prefixes and suffixes. For example, DaHaDnIS "You must study it" is rendered instead as "They Must Study."
In July 2015, when Conservative Welsh Assembly Member Darren Millar formally asked the Welsh Economy Minister Edwina Hart about the Welsh Government's policy funding research into sightings of UFOs at Cardiff Airport, a press officer in the Minister's office issued a written reply in Klingon: jang vIDa je due luq. ʼach ghotvamʼeʼ QIʼyaH-devolved qaS, which was translated as: "The minister will reply in due course. However this is a non-devolved matter."
With the digital-only release of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, streaming service Netflix announced it would provide Klingon subtitles for the entire first season, translated by Klingon language expert Lieven L. Litaer. They can be enabled like any other language provided by the streaming service, and are shown using romanized transliteration rather than Klingon script.
In 2017, a version of “The Gummy Bear Song” was uploaded to YouTube, fully translated to the Klingon language. Its title, “ngalbogh mIl'oD jIH”, translates to English as “I am a sabre bear that is chewy.” The version was released to iTunes in 2018.
In 2020 the German artist Hans Solo (Äi-Tiem) released an EP NuqneH, whose 5 tracks are completely rapped in Klingon language.
An important concept to spoken and written Klingon is canonicity. Only words and grammatical forms introduced by Marc Okrand are considered canonical Klingon by the KLI and most Klingonists. However, as the growing number of speakers employ different strategies to express themselves, it is often unclear as to what level of neologism is permissible. New vocabulary has been collected in a list maintained by the KLI until 2005 and has since then been followed up by Klingon expert Lieven Litaer.
Within the fictional universe of Star Trek, Klingon is derived from the original language spoken by the messianic figure Kahless the Unforgettable, who united the Klingon home-world of QoʼnoS under one empire more than 1500 years ago. Many dialects exist, but the standardized dialect of prestige is almost invariably that of the sitting emperor.
Klingon has been developed with a phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound alien to human ears. When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek franchise) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of retroflex and uvular consonants in the language's inventory. Klingon has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Klingon is normally written in a variant of the Latin alphabet. The orthography of this transliteration is case-sensitive, that is, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable (uppercase letters mostly represent sounds different from those expected by English speakers), although with the exception of Q/q there are no minimal pairs between case. In other words, while hol is incorrect Klingon, it cannot be misread as anything but an erroneous form of Hol (which means language); on the other hand, Qat and qat are two different words, the first meaning be popular and the second meaning accompany. In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in ⟨angle brackets⟩, and the phonemic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between /slashes/.
The inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of places of articulation. In spite of this, the inventory has many gaps: Klingon has no velar plosives, and only one sibilant fricative. Deliberately, this arrangement is very different from that of most human languages. The combination of an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive /tʰ/ and a voiced retroflex plosive /ɖ/ is particularly unusual.
There are a few dialectal pronunciation differences (it is not known if the aforementioned non-canon Kumburan or Rumaiy dialects of tlhIngan Hol hinted at in the novelization of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock might differ):
In the Morskan dialect:
In contrast to its consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple, and similar to those of many human languages, such as Spanish or Japanese. There are five vowels spaced more or less evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, one back unrounded vowel, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels. The vowel inventory is asymmetrical in that the back rounded vowels are tense and the front vowels are lax.
The two front vowels, ⟨e⟩ and ⟨I⟩, represent sounds that are found in English, but are more open and lax than a typical English speaker might assume when reading Klingon text written in the Latin alphabet, thus causing the consonants of a word to be more prominent. This enhances the sense that Klingon is a clipped and harsh-sounding language.
Diphthongs can be analyzed phonetically as the combination of the five vowels plus one of the two semivowels /w/ and /j/ (represented by ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩, respectively). Thus, the combinations ⟨ay⟩, ⟨ey⟩, ⟨Iy⟩, ⟨oy⟩, ⟨uy⟩, ⟨aw⟩, ⟨ew⟩ and ⟨Iw⟩ are possible. There are no words in the Klingon language that contain *⟨ow⟩ or *⟨uw⟩.
Klingon follows a strict syllable structure. A syllable must start with a consonant (including the glottal stop) followed by one vowel. In prefixes and rare other syllables, this is enough. More commonly, this consonant-vowel pair is followed by one consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-wʼ -yʼ -rgh/. Thus, ta "record", tar "poison" and targh "targ" (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not. Despite this, one suffix takes the shape vowel+consonant: the endearment suffix -oy.
In verbs, the stressed syllable is usually the verbal stem itself, as opposed to a prefix or any suffixes, except when a suffix ending with ⟨ʼ⟩ is separated from the verb by at least one other suffix, in which case the suffix ending in ⟨ʼ⟩ is also stressed. In addition, stress may shift to a suffix that is meant to be emphasized.
In nouns, the final syllable of the stem (the noun itself, excluding any affixes) is stressed. If any syllables ending in ⟨ʼ⟩ are present, the stress shifts to those syllables.
The stress in other words seems to be variable, but this is not a serious issue because most of these words are only one syllable in length. There are some words which should fall under the rules above, but do not, although using the standard rules would still be acceptable.
Klingon is an agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function or meaning of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms, such as jengvaʼ "plate" (vs. ngop "plates"), but most nouns require a suffix to express plurality explicitly. Depending on the type of noun (body part, being capable of using language, or neither) the suffix changes. For beings capable of using language, the suffix is -puʼ, as in tlhInganpuʼ, meaning "Klingons," or jaghpuʼ, meaning "enemies". For body parts, the plural suffix is -Duʼ, as in mInDuʼ, "eyes". For items that are neither body parts nor capable of speech, the suffix is -mey, such as in Hovmey ("stars"), or targhmey ("targs") for a Klingon animal somewhat resembling a boar. (However, a plural suffix is never obligatory. To say "The stars are beautiful", ʼIH Hovmey and ʼIH Hov are equally grammatical, although the second can also mean "The star is beautiful".)
The words loD and beʼ, which on their own mean "man" and "woman" respectively, can be used in compound words to refer to the referent's sex. For example, from puq ("child") this process derives puqloD ("son") and puqbeʼ ("daughter").
Klingon nouns take suffixes to indicate grammatical number. There are three noun classes, two levels of deixis, and a possession and syntactic function. In all, twenty-nine noun suffixes from five classes may be employed: jupoypuʼnaʼwIʼvaD "for my beloved true friends". A word may carry no more than one suffix from each class, and the classes have a specific order of appearance.
Verbs in Klingon take a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, whereas suffixes are taken from nine ordered classes and a special suffix class called rovers. Each of the four known rovers has a unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific. The Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.
The most common word order in Klingon is object–verb–subject, and, in most cases, the word order is the exact reverse of English for an equivalent sentence:
DaH
now
mojaq-mey-vam
suffix-PL-DEM
DI-vuS-nIS-beʼ
1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need-NEG
ʼeʼ
that
vI-Har
1SG.A.3SG.P-believe
DaH mojaq-mey-vam DI-vuS-nIS-beʼ ʼeʼ vI-Har
now suffix-PL-DEM 1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need-NEG that 1SG.A.3SG.P-believe
"I believe that we do not need to limit these suffixes now."
(Hyphens are used in the above only to illustrate the use of affixes. Hyphens are not used in Klingon.)
An important aspect of Klingon grammar is its "ungrammaticality". As with for example Japanese, shortening of communicative statements is common, and is called "Clipped Klingon" (tlhIngan Hol poD or, more simply, Hol poD) and Ritualized Speech. Clipped Klingon is especially useful in situations where speed is a decisive factor. Grammar is abbreviated, and sentence parts deemed to be superfluous are dropped. Intentional ungrammaticality is widespread, and it takes many forms. It is exemplified by the practice of pabHaʼ, which Marc Okrand translates as "to misfollow the rules" or "to follow the rules wrongly".
When written in the Latin alphabet, Klingon is unusual in being case-sensitive, with some letters written in capitals and others in lowercase. In one contrast, q and Q, there is an actual case-sensitive pair representing two different consonants. Capitals are generally reserved for uvular or retroflex consonants pronounced further back in the mouth or throat than is normal for the corresponding English sounds, as with D, Q, and S. However, H, pronounced like the ⟨ch⟩ in German "ich" or Scottish "loch", is further forward in the throat than English /h/. One phoneme, the vowel I, is written capital to look more like the IPA symbol for the sound /ɪ/, and can pose problems when writing Klingon in sans-serif fonts such as Arial, as it looks almost the same as the consonant l.
This has led some Klingon enthusiasts to write it lowercase like the other vowels ("i") to prevent confusion, but this use is non-canonical. Instead, a serif font that clearly distinguishes "I" and "l", such as Courier or Courier New, has traditionally been employed for writing Klingon in the Latin alphabet. In any case, it can be disambiguated through context, as I never occurs next to another vowel, while l always does. The apostrophe, denoting the glottal stop, is considered a letter, not a punctuation mark, as with a Hawaiian 'okina.
Klingon is often written in (in-universe, "transliterated to") the Latin alphabet as used above, but on the television series, the Klingons use their own alien writing system. In The Klingon Dictionary, this alphabet is named as pIqaD, but no information is given about it. When Klingon symbols are used in Star Trek productions, they are merely decorative graphic elements, designed to emulate real writing and create an appropriate atmosphere. Enthusiasts have settled on the name pIqaD for this writing system.
The Astra Image Corporation designed the symbols currently used to "write" Klingon for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although these symbols are often incorrectly attributed to Michael Okuda. They based the letters on the Klingon battlecruiser hull markings (three letters) first created by Matt Jefferies and on Tibetan writing because the script has sharp letter forms—used as a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades.
For April Fools' Day in 2013, Nokia and typography company Dalton Maag claimed to have used "communication devices to far-flung star systems" to assist them in localizing the Nokia Pure font to the Klingon writing system. Though the explanation was of course humorous in nature, as part of the practical joke a series of real fonts based upon the most commonly used pIqaD character mapping were in fact developed, and have been made available for free download.
A design principle of the Klingon language is the great degree of lexical-cultural correlation in the vocabulary. For example, there are several words meaning "to fight" or "to clash against", each having a different degree of intensity. There is an abundance of words relating to warfare and weaponry and also a great variety of curses (cursing is considered a fine art in Klingon culture). This helps lend a particular character to the language.
There are many in-jokes built into the language. For example, the word for "pair" is changʼeng, a reference to the original "Siamese twins" Chang and Eng Bunker; a leSpal is a mid-size stringed instrument, comparable to a guitar (i.e. Les Paul); a "chronometer" is tlhaq (pronounced similar to "clock"); the word for "torture" is joy; "hangover" is ʼuH, and the word for "fish" is ghotIʼ.
Sources for the vocabulary include English (albeit heavily disguised), and also Yiddish: SaʼHut for "buttocks" (from תּחת tuches spelled backwards), and ʼoyʼ for "ache, pain, sore" (cf. oy vey).
Many English words do not have direct translations into Klingon. To express "hello", the nearest equivalent is nuqneH, meaning "What do you want?", with "goodbye" translated as Qapla', "Success!".
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Klingon language (Klingon: tlhIngan Hol, pIqaD: , pronounced [ˈt͡ɬɪ.ŋɑn xol]) is the constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race called the Klingons, in the Star Trek universe.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Described in the 1985 book The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound \"alien\", it has a number of typologically uncommon features. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was devised by actor James Doohan (\"Scotty\") and producer Jon Povill for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film marked the first time the language had been heard. In all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English, even to each other. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode \"The Trouble with Tribbles\", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as \"Klingonee\" /ˈklɪŋɡɒni/), but among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language called Klingonaase that was introduced in John M. Ford's 1984 Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, and appears in other Star Trek novels by Ford.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The play A Klingon Christmas Carol is the first production that is primarily in Klingon (only the narrator speaks English). The opera ʼuʼ is entirely in Klingon.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Because its vocabulary is heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, it can be hard for everyday use because of the lack of words for a casual conversation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The language is first mentioned in the original Star Trek series episode \"The Trouble with Tribbles\" (1967), but is not heard until Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). According to the actor who spoke the lines, Mark Lenard, James Doohan recorded the lines he had written on a tape, and Lenard transcribed the recorded lines in a way he found useful in learning them.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett wanted the Klingons to speak a structured language instead of random gibberish, and so commissioned a full language, based on the phrases Doohan had originated, from Marc Okrand, who had earlier constructed four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Okrand enlarged the lexicon and developed a grammar based on Doohan's original dozen words. The language appeared intermittently in later films featuring the original cast; for example, in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), where translation difficulties served as a plot device.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Two \"non-canon\" dialects of Klingon are hinted at in the novelization of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as Saavik speaks in Klingon to the only Klingon officer aboard Cpt. Kruge's starship after his death, as the survivors of the Enterprise's self-destruction transport up from the crumbling Genesis Planet to the Klingon ship. The surviving officer, Maltz, states that he speaks the Rumaiy dialect, while Saavik is speaking to him in the Kumburan dialect of Klingon, per Maltz's spoken reply to her.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "With the advent of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)—in which one of the main characters, Worf, was a Klingon—and successors, the language and various cultural aspects for the fictional species were expanded. In the episode \"A Matter of Honor\", several members of a Klingon ship's crew speak a language that is not translated for the benefit of the viewer (even Commander Riker, enjoying the benefits of a universal translator, is unable to understand) until one Klingon orders the others to \"speak their [i.e., human] language\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "A small number of non-Klingon characters were later depicted in Star Trek as having learned to speak Klingon, notably Jean-Luc Picard and Dax.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Hobbyists around the world have studied the Klingon language. At least nine Klingon translations of works of world literature have been published, among which are: ghIlghameS (the Epic of Gilgamesh), Hamlet (Hamlet), paghmoʼ tIn mIS (Much Ado About Nothing), pInʼaʼ qan paQDIʼnorgh (Tao Te Ching), Sun pInʼaʼ veS mIw (the Art of War), chIjwI' tIQ bom (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), 'aS 'IDnar pIn'a' Dun (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), taʼpuq mach (the Little Prince), and QelIS boqHarmey (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The Shakespearean choices were inspired by a remark from High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, \"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.\" In the bonus material on the DVD, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and actor William Shatner both explain that this was an allusion to the German myth that Shakespeare was in fact German.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Klingon Language Institute exists to promote the language.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "CBS Television Studios owns the copyright on the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. While constructed languages (\"conlangs\") are viewed as creations with copyright protection, natural languages are not protected, excluding dictionaries and other works created with them. Mizuki Miyashita and Laura Moll note, \"Copyrights on dictionaries are unusual because the entries in the dictionary are not copyrightable as the words themselves are facts, and facts can not be copyrighted. However, the formatting, example sentences, and instructions for dictionary use are created by the author, so they are copyrightable.\"",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Okrand had studied some Native American and Southeast Asian languages, and phonological and grammatical features of these languages \"worked their way into Klingon, but for the most part, not by design.\" Okrand himself has stated that a design principle of the Klingon language was dissimilarity to existing natural languages in general, and English in particular. He therefore avoided patterns that are typologically common and deliberately chose features that occur relatively infrequently in human languages. This includes above all the highly asymmetric consonant inventory and the basic word order.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Arika Okrent guessed in her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent speakers. Since that time, with the appearance of Duolingo's Klingon course and the increasing popularity of video chat platforms such as Zoom and Discord, the number of conversationally fluent speakers has definitely increased; in 2021, there are perhaps 50-60. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek–Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use. For instance, while words for transporter ionizer unit (jolvoyʼ) or bridge (of a ship) (meH) have been known since close to the language's inception, the word for bridge in the sense of a crossing over water (QI) was unknown until August 2012. Nonetheless, mundane conversations are possible among skilled speakers.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "One Klingon speaker, d'Armond Speers, raised his son Alec to speak Klingon as a first language, whilst the boy's mother communicated with him in English. Alec rarely responded to his father in Klingon, although when he did, his pronunciation was \"excellent\". After Alec's fifth birthday, Speers reported that his son eventually stopped responding to him when spoken to in Klingon as he clearly did not enjoy it, so Speers switched to English.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2007, a report surfaced that Multnomah County, Oregon, was hiring Klingon translators for its mental health program in case patients came into a psychiatric hospital speaking nothing but Klingon. Most circulations of the report seemingly implied that this was a problem that health officials faced before; however, the original report indicated that this was just a precaution for a hypothetical and that said translator would only be paid on an as needed basis. After the report was misinterpreted, the County issued another release noting that releasing the original report was a \"mistake\".",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In May 2009, Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Ultralingua Inc., a developer of electronic dictionary applications, announced the release of a suite of electronic Klingon language software for most computer platforms including a dictionary, a phrasebook, and an audio learning tool.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In September 2011, Eurotalk released the \"Learn Klingon\" course in its Talk Now! series. The language is displayed in both Latin and pIqaD fonts, making this the first language course written in pIqaD and approved by CBS and Marc Okrand. It was translated by Jonathan Brown and Okrand and uses the Hol-pIqaD TrueType font.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In August 2016, a company in the United Kingdom, Bidvine, began offering Klingon lessons as one of their services.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In March 2018, the popular language learning site Duolingo opened a beta course in Klingon. After it proved its effectiveness, the company offered to promote it from beta status, but due to ongoing software issues regarding Klingon's unexpected use of upper- and lower-case letters and the apostrophe as a consonant instead of punctuation, the course developers chose not to accept the offer until the problems were addressed.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "There are Klingon language meetings and linguists or students are interested in researching this topic, even writing essays about the language or its users.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Klingon speakers are also referred to in non-Star Trek TV series, including Frasier, The Big Bang Theory, and Lucifer, and were heavily featured in the \"My Big Fat Geek Wedding\" episode of The Simpsons. In the 2017 film Please Stand By, in which a young autistic woman played by Dakota Fanning leaves her group home in San Francisco to deliver a Star Trek screenplay she wrote to Paramount Pictures, a Los Angeles police officer played by Patton Oswalt coaxes her out of hiding by speaking with her in Klingon.",
"title": "Speakers"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the Quentin Tarantino film 'Kill Bill Volume 1' (2003), the opening of the film cites 'Revenge is a dish best served cold' as an 'old Klingon proverb'.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In 2010, a Chicago Theatre company presented a version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in Klingon language and a Klingon setting. On September 25, 2010, the Washington Shakespeare Company (now known as WSC Avant Bard) performed selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in the Klingon language in Arlington County, Virginia. The performance was proposed by Okrand in his capacity as chairman of the group's board. This performance was reprised on February 27, 2011 featuring Stephen Fry as the Klingon Osric and was filmed by the BBC as part of a 5-part documentary on language entitled Fry's Planet Word.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Google Search and the Java edition of Minecraft each have a Klingon language setting.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The 2003–2010 version of the puzzle globe logo of Wikipedia, representing its multilingualism, contained a Klingon character. When updated in 2010, the Klingon character was removed from the logo, and substituted with one from the Ge'ez script. A Klingon language Wikipedia was started in June 2004 at tlh.wikipedia.org. It was permanently locked in August 2005 and moved to Wikia. The Klingon Wiktionary was closed in 2008.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The file management software XYplorer has been translated into Klingon by its developer.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Microsoft's Bing Translator attempts to translate Klingon from and to other languages. It can do a good job with individual words, and with phrases included in its training corpus, but it is not well tuned for Klingon's system of prefixes and suffixes. For example, DaHaDnIS \"You must study it\" is rendered instead as \"They Must Study.\"",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In July 2015, when Conservative Welsh Assembly Member Darren Millar formally asked the Welsh Economy Minister Edwina Hart about the Welsh Government's policy funding research into sightings of UFOs at Cardiff Airport, a press officer in the Minister's office issued a written reply in Klingon: jang vIDa je due luq. ʼach ghotvamʼeʼ QIʼyaH-devolved qaS, which was translated as: \"The minister will reply in due course. However this is a non-devolved matter.\"",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "With the digital-only release of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017, streaming service Netflix announced it would provide Klingon subtitles for the entire first season, translated by Klingon language expert Lieven L. Litaer. They can be enabled like any other language provided by the streaming service, and are shown using romanized transliteration rather than Klingon script.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2017, a version of “The Gummy Bear Song” was uploaded to YouTube, fully translated to the Klingon language. Its title, “ngalbogh mIl'oD jIH”, translates to English as “I am a sabre bear that is chewy.” The version was released to iTunes in 2018.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In 2020 the German artist Hans Solo (Äi-Tiem) released an EP NuqneH, whose 5 tracks are completely rapped in Klingon language.",
"title": "Other media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "An important concept to spoken and written Klingon is canonicity. Only words and grammatical forms introduced by Marc Okrand are considered canonical Klingon by the KLI and most Klingonists. However, as the growing number of speakers employ different strategies to express themselves, it is often unclear as to what level of neologism is permissible. New vocabulary has been collected in a list maintained by the KLI until 2005 and has since then been followed up by Klingon expert Lieven Litaer.",
"title": "Canon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Within the fictional universe of Star Trek, Klingon is derived from the original language spoken by the messianic figure Kahless the Unforgettable, who united the Klingon home-world of QoʼnoS under one empire more than 1500 years ago. Many dialects exist, but the standardized dialect of prestige is almost invariably that of the sitting emperor.",
"title": "Canon"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Klingon has been developed with a phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound alien to human ears. When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek franchise) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of retroflex and uvular consonants in the language's inventory. Klingon has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Klingon is normally written in a variant of the Latin alphabet. The orthography of this transliteration is case-sensitive, that is, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable (uppercase letters mostly represent sounds different from those expected by English speakers), although with the exception of Q/q there are no minimal pairs between case. In other words, while hol is incorrect Klingon, it cannot be misread as anything but an erroneous form of Hol (which means language); on the other hand, Qat and qat are two different words, the first meaning be popular and the second meaning accompany. In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in ⟨angle brackets⟩, and the phonemic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between /slashes/.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of places of articulation. In spite of this, the inventory has many gaps: Klingon has no velar plosives, and only one sibilant fricative. Deliberately, this arrangement is very different from that of most human languages. The combination of an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive /tʰ/ and a voiced retroflex plosive /ɖ/ is particularly unusual.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "There are a few dialectal pronunciation differences (it is not known if the aforementioned non-canon Kumburan or Rumaiy dialects of tlhIngan Hol hinted at in the novelization of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock might differ):",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the Morskan dialect:",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In contrast to its consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple, and similar to those of many human languages, such as Spanish or Japanese. There are five vowels spaced more or less evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, one back unrounded vowel, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels. The vowel inventory is asymmetrical in that the back rounded vowels are tense and the front vowels are lax.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The two front vowels, ⟨e⟩ and ⟨I⟩, represent sounds that are found in English, but are more open and lax than a typical English speaker might assume when reading Klingon text written in the Latin alphabet, thus causing the consonants of a word to be more prominent. This enhances the sense that Klingon is a clipped and harsh-sounding language.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Diphthongs can be analyzed phonetically as the combination of the five vowels plus one of the two semivowels /w/ and /j/ (represented by ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩, respectively). Thus, the combinations ⟨ay⟩, ⟨ey⟩, ⟨Iy⟩, ⟨oy⟩, ⟨uy⟩, ⟨aw⟩, ⟨ew⟩ and ⟨Iw⟩ are possible. There are no words in the Klingon language that contain *⟨ow⟩ or *⟨uw⟩.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Klingon follows a strict syllable structure. A syllable must start with a consonant (including the glottal stop) followed by one vowel. In prefixes and rare other syllables, this is enough. More commonly, this consonant-vowel pair is followed by one consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-wʼ -yʼ -rgh/. Thus, ta \"record\", tar \"poison\" and targh \"targ\" (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *tarD and *ar are not. Despite this, one suffix takes the shape vowel+consonant: the endearment suffix -oy.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In verbs, the stressed syllable is usually the verbal stem itself, as opposed to a prefix or any suffixes, except when a suffix ending with ⟨ʼ⟩ is separated from the verb by at least one other suffix, in which case the suffix ending in ⟨ʼ⟩ is also stressed. In addition, stress may shift to a suffix that is meant to be emphasized.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In nouns, the final syllable of the stem (the noun itself, excluding any affixes) is stressed. If any syllables ending in ⟨ʼ⟩ are present, the stress shifts to those syllables.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The stress in other words seems to be variable, but this is not a serious issue because most of these words are only one syllable in length. There are some words which should fall under the rules above, but do not, although using the standard rules would still be acceptable.",
"title": "Phonology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Klingon is an agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function or meaning of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms, such as jengvaʼ \"plate\" (vs. ngop \"plates\"), but most nouns require a suffix to express plurality explicitly. Depending on the type of noun (body part, being capable of using language, or neither) the suffix changes. For beings capable of using language, the suffix is -puʼ, as in tlhInganpuʼ, meaning \"Klingons,\" or jaghpuʼ, meaning \"enemies\". For body parts, the plural suffix is -Duʼ, as in mInDuʼ, \"eyes\". For items that are neither body parts nor capable of speech, the suffix is -mey, such as in Hovmey (\"stars\"), or targhmey (\"targs\") for a Klingon animal somewhat resembling a boar. (However, a plural suffix is never obligatory. To say \"The stars are beautiful\", ʼIH Hovmey and ʼIH Hov are equally grammatical, although the second can also mean \"The star is beautiful\".)",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The words loD and beʼ, which on their own mean \"man\" and \"woman\" respectively, can be used in compound words to refer to the referent's sex. For example, from puq (\"child\") this process derives puqloD (\"son\") and puqbeʼ (\"daughter\").",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Klingon nouns take suffixes to indicate grammatical number. There are three noun classes, two levels of deixis, and a possession and syntactic function. In all, twenty-nine noun suffixes from five classes may be employed: jupoypuʼnaʼwIʼvaD \"for my beloved true friends\". A word may carry no more than one suffix from each class, and the classes have a specific order of appearance.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Verbs in Klingon take a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, whereas suffixes are taken from nine ordered classes and a special suffix class called rovers. Each of the four known rovers has a unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific. The Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "The most common word order in Klingon is object–verb–subject, and, in most cases, the word order is the exact reverse of English for an equivalent sentence:",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "DaH",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "now",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "mojaq-mey-vam",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "suffix-PL-DEM",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "DI-vuS-nIS-beʼ",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need-NEG",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "ʼeʼ",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "that",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "vI-Har",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "1SG.A.3SG.P-believe",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "DaH mojaq-mey-vam DI-vuS-nIS-beʼ ʼeʼ vI-Har",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "now suffix-PL-DEM 1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need-NEG that 1SG.A.3SG.P-believe",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "\"I believe that we do not need to limit these suffixes now.\"",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "(Hyphens are used in the above only to illustrate the use of affixes. Hyphens are not used in Klingon.)",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "An important aspect of Klingon grammar is its \"ungrammaticality\". As with for example Japanese, shortening of communicative statements is common, and is called \"Clipped Klingon\" (tlhIngan Hol poD or, more simply, Hol poD) and Ritualized Speech. Clipped Klingon is especially useful in situations where speed is a decisive factor. Grammar is abbreviated, and sentence parts deemed to be superfluous are dropped. Intentional ungrammaticality is widespread, and it takes many forms. It is exemplified by the practice of pabHaʼ, which Marc Okrand translates as \"to misfollow the rules\" or \"to follow the rules wrongly\".",
"title": "Grammar"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "When written in the Latin alphabet, Klingon is unusual in being case-sensitive, with some letters written in capitals and others in lowercase. In one contrast, q and Q, there is an actual case-sensitive pair representing two different consonants. Capitals are generally reserved for uvular or retroflex consonants pronounced further back in the mouth or throat than is normal for the corresponding English sounds, as with D, Q, and S. However, H, pronounced like the ⟨ch⟩ in German \"ich\" or Scottish \"loch\", is further forward in the throat than English /h/. One phoneme, the vowel I, is written capital to look more like the IPA symbol for the sound /ɪ/, and can pose problems when writing Klingon in sans-serif fonts such as Arial, as it looks almost the same as the consonant l.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "This has led some Klingon enthusiasts to write it lowercase like the other vowels (\"i\") to prevent confusion, but this use is non-canonical. Instead, a serif font that clearly distinguishes \"I\" and \"l\", such as Courier or Courier New, has traditionally been employed for writing Klingon in the Latin alphabet. In any case, it can be disambiguated through context, as I never occurs next to another vowel, while l always does. The apostrophe, denoting the glottal stop, is considered a letter, not a punctuation mark, as with a Hawaiian 'okina.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Klingon is often written in (in-universe, \"transliterated to\") the Latin alphabet as used above, but on the television series, the Klingons use their own alien writing system. In The Klingon Dictionary, this alphabet is named as pIqaD, but no information is given about it. When Klingon symbols are used in Star Trek productions, they are merely decorative graphic elements, designed to emulate real writing and create an appropriate atmosphere. Enthusiasts have settled on the name pIqaD for this writing system.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Astra Image Corporation designed the symbols currently used to \"write\" Klingon for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although these symbols are often incorrectly attributed to Michael Okuda. They based the letters on the Klingon battlecruiser hull markings (three letters) first created by Matt Jefferies and on Tibetan writing because the script has sharp letter forms—used as a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "For April Fools' Day in 2013, Nokia and typography company Dalton Maag claimed to have used \"communication devices to far-flung star systems\" to assist them in localizing the Nokia Pure font to the Klingon writing system. Though the explanation was of course humorous in nature, as part of the practical joke a series of real fonts based upon the most commonly used pIqaD character mapping were in fact developed, and have been made available for free download.",
"title": "Writing systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "A design principle of the Klingon language is the great degree of lexical-cultural correlation in the vocabulary. For example, there are several words meaning \"to fight\" or \"to clash against\", each having a different degree of intensity. There is an abundance of words relating to warfare and weaponry and also a great variety of curses (cursing is considered a fine art in Klingon culture). This helps lend a particular character to the language.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "There are many in-jokes built into the language. For example, the word for \"pair\" is changʼeng, a reference to the original \"Siamese twins\" Chang and Eng Bunker; a leSpal is a mid-size stringed instrument, comparable to a guitar (i.e. Les Paul); a \"chronometer\" is tlhaq (pronounced similar to \"clock\"); the word for \"torture\" is joy; \"hangover\" is ʼuH, and the word for \"fish\" is ghotIʼ.",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Sources for the vocabulary include English (albeit heavily disguised), and also Yiddish: SaʼHut for \"buttocks\" (from תּחת tuches spelled backwards), and ʼoyʼ for \"ache, pain, sore\" (cf. oy vey).",
"title": "Vocabulary"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Many English words do not have direct translations into Klingon. To express \"hello\", the nearest equivalent is nuqneH, meaning \"What do you want?\", with \"goodbye\" translated as Qapla', \"Success!\".",
"title": "Vocabulary"
}
] |
The Klingon language is the constructed language spoken by a fictional alien race called the Klingons, in the Star Trek universe. Described in the 1985 book The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound "alien", it has a number of typologically uncommon features. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was devised by actor James Doohan ("Scotty") and producer Jon Povill for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film marked the first time the language had been heard. In all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English, even to each other. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language. Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese, but among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language called Klingonaase that was introduced in John M. Ford's 1984 Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, and appears in other Star Trek novels by Ford. The play A Klingon Christmas Carol is the first production that is primarily in Klingon. The opera ʼuʼ is entirely in Klingon. A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Because its vocabulary is heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, it can be hard for everyday use because of the lack of words for a casual conversation.
|
2001-10-03T13:21:59Z
|
2023-12-27T20:18:27Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language
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Kid Icarus
|
Kid Icarus is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System in Europe and North America. It was released in Japan in December 1986, in Europe in February 1987, and in North America in July.
The plot of Kid Icarus revolves around protagonist Pit's quest for three sacred treasures, which he must equip to rescue the Greek-inspired fantasy world Angel Land and its ruler, the goddess Palutena. The player controls Pit through platform areas while fighting monsters and collecting items. The objective is to reach the end of the levels, and to find and defeat boss monsters that guard the three treasures. The game was developed by Nintendo's Research and Development 1 division with assistance with an external company (later identified to be Tose), which helped with testing. It was designed by Toru Osawa and Yoshio Sakamoto, directed by Satoru Okada, and produced by Gunpei Yokoi.
Kid Icarus had a mixed critical reception but became a cult classic. Reviewers praised its music and its mixture of gameplay elements from different genres, but criticized its graphics and high difficulty level. It was included in several lists of the best games compiled by IGN and Nintendo Power.
It was later re-released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2004. It was released on the Wii's Virtual Console in 2007 and the Wii U's Virtual Console in 2013. A 3D Classics remake was released in Japan in 2011 and in North America, Europe, and Australia in 2012. In 2016, Kid Icarus was included on the North American and PAL region releases of the NES Classic Edition. It was released on Nintendo Switch Online in 2019.
A sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was released for the Game Boy in 1991. A third entry in the series, Kid Icarus: Uprising, was released for Nintendo 3DS in March 2012, after Pit's inclusion as a playable character in the 2008 game Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Kid Icarus is a side-scrolling platformer with role-playing elements. The player controls the protagonist Pit through two-dimensional levels, which contain monsters, obstacles and items. Pit's primary weapon is a bow with an unlimited supply of arrows that can be upgraded with three collectable power items: the guard crystal shields Pit from enemies, the flaming arrows hit multiple targets, and the holly bow increases the range of the arrows. These upgrades will work only if Pit's health is high enough. The game keeps track of the player's score, and increases Pit's health bar at the end of a level if enough points were collected.
Throughout the stages, the player may enter doors to access seven different types of chambers. Stores and black markets offer items in exchange for hearts, which are left behind by defeated monsters. Treasure chambers contain items, enemy nests give the player an opportunity to earn extra hearts, and hot springs restore Pit's health. In the god's chamber, the strength of Pit's bow and arrow may be increased depending on several factors, such as the number of enemies defeated and the amount of damage taken in battle. In the training chamber, Pit will be awarded with one of the three power items if he passes a test of endurance.
The game world is divided into three stages: the Underworld, the Overworld (Earth) and the Skyworld. Each stage encompasses three unidirectional area levels and a fortress. The areas of the Underworld and Skyworld stages have Pit climb to the top, while those of the surface world are side-scrolling levels. The fortresses at the end of the stages are labyrinths with non-scrolling rooms, in which the player must find and defeat a gatekeeper boss. Within a fortress, Pit may buy a check sheet, pencil, and torch to guide him through the labyrinth. A single-use item, the hammer, can destroy stone statues, which frees a flying soldier called a Centurion that will aid the player in boss battles. For each of the bosses destroyed, Pit receives one of three sacred treasures that are needed to access the fourth and final stage, the sky temple. This last portion abandons the platforming elements of the previous levels, and resembles a scrolling shooter.
The game is set in Angel Land, which is a fantasy world with a Greek mythology theme. Before the events of the game, Earth was ruled by Palutena (Goddess of Light) and Medusa (Goddess of Darkness). Palutena bestowed the people with light to make them happy. Medusa hated the humans, dried up their crop, and turned them to stone. Enraged by this, Palutena transformed Medusa into a monster and banished her to the Underworld. Out of revenge, Medusa conspired with the monsters of the Underworld to take over Palutena's residence the Palace in the Sky. She launched a surprise attack, and stole the three sacred treasures — the Mirror Shield, the Light Arrows and the Wings of Pegasus — which deprived Palutena's army of its power. After her soldiers had been turned to stone by Medusa, Palutena was defeated in battle and imprisoned deep inside the Palace in the Sky.
With her last power, she sent a bow and arrow to the young angel Pit. He escapes from his prison in the Underworld and sets out to save Palutena and Angel Land. Throughout the course of the story, Pit retrieves the three sacred treasures from the fortress gatekeepers at their respective fortresses in the Underworld, the Overworld, and the Skyworld. Afterward, he equips himself with the treasures and storms the sky temple where he defeats Medusa and rescues Palutena. The game has five different endings; depending on the player's performance, Palutena may present Pit with headgear or transform him into a full-grown angel. In the Japanese version, the best ending from the English version does not exist, and instead another bad ending is present.
The game was designed at Nintendo's Research and Development 1 (R&D1) division, and the programming was handled by the external company Intelligent Systems. It was developed for the Family Computer Disk System (FDS) because its floppy disk, called Disk Card, has three times the storage capacity of the Family Computer's cartridges of the time. Combined with the possibility to store the players' progress, the Disk Card format enabled the developers to create a longer game with a more extensive game world. Kid Icarus was the debut of Toru Osawa (credited as Inusawa) as a video game designer, and he was the only staff member working on the game at the beginning of the project. Originally he wanted to make an action game with role-playing elements, and wrote a story rooted in Greek mythology, which he had always been fond of. He drew the pixel art, and wrote the technical specifications, which were the basis for the playable prototype that was programmed by Intelligent Systems. After Nintendo's action-adventure Metroid had been finished, more staff members were allotted to the development of Kid Icarus.
The game was directed by Satoru Okada (credited as S. Okada), and produced by the general manager of the R&D1 division, Gunpei Yokoi (credited as G. Yokoi). Hirokazu Tanaka (credited as Hip Tanaka) composed the music. Yoshio Sakamoto (credited as Shikao.S) joined the team upon return from his vacation after the completion of Metroid. He streamlined the development process, and made many decisions that affected the design of Kid Icarus. Several out-of-place elements were included in the game, such as credit cards, a wizard turning player character Pit into an eggplant, and a large, moving nose that was meant to resemble composer Tanaka. Sakamoto attributed this unrestrained humor to the former personnel of the R&D1 division, which he referred to as "strange". Osawa said that he had originally tried to make Kid Icarus completely serious, but opted for a more humorous approach after objections from the team.
To meet the projected release date of December 19, 1986, the staff members worked overtime and often stayed in the office at night. They used torn cardboard boxes as beds, and covered themselves in curtains to resist the low temperatures of the unheated development building. Eventually, Kid Icarus was finished and entered production a mere three days before the release date. Several ideas for additional stages had to be dropped because of these scheduling conflicts.
In February and July 1987, respectively, a cartridge-based version was published for the NES in Europe and North America. For this release, the graphics of the ending were updated, and staff credits were added. Unlike the Japanese version, which saves the player's progress on the Disk Card, the cartridge version uses a password system to restore progress, an almost unprecedented feature.
In August 2004, Kid Icarus was re-released in the Famicom Mini Disk System Selection for the Game Boy Advance. It was released on the Wii's Virtual Console on January 23, 2007, in Japan, on February 12 in North America, and on February 23 in Europe and Australia; it was released on the Wii U's Virtual Console on August 14, 2013, in Japan, on July 11 in Europe and Australia, and on July 25 in North America. Passwords from the NES version do not work in the Virtual Console version due to the checksum algorithm being changed. In 2016, the game was included on the North American and PAL region releases of the NES Classic Edition. In 2019, it was released on Nintendo Switch Online.
A 3D Classics remake of Kid Icarus was published for the Nintendo 3DS handheld console. The remake features stereoscopic 3D along with updated graphics including backgrounds. It uses the save system instead of passwords. It has the Family Computer Disk System's extra sound channel for music and sound effects.
It became available on the Nintendo eShop on January 18, 2012, in Japan, on February 2 in Europe, on April 12 in Australia, and on April 19 in North America. It was available early for free via download code to users who registered two selected 3DS games with Nintendo in Japan, Europe, and Australia. In Japan, it was available to users who registered any two Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between October 1, 2011, and January 15, 2012, and became available for download starting on December 19, 2011; in Europe, it was available to users who registered any two of a selection of Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between November 1, 2011, and January 31, 2012, with the first batch of emails with codes being sent out on January 5, 2012; in Australia, it was available to users who registered any two of a selection of Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between November 1, 2011, and March 31, 2012, with the first batch of emails with codes being sent out in January 2012. In North America, download codes for the 3D Classics version were given to customers who pre-ordered Kid Icarus: Uprising at select retailers when they picked up the game, which was released on March 23, 2012, allowing them to obtain the game early.
By late 2003, 1.76 million copies of Kid Icarus had been sold worldwide, with a cult following. It received mixed reviews from critics over the years. In October 1992, a staff writer of the UK publication Nintendo Magazine System said that it was "pretty good fun", but did not "compare too well" to other platform games, due in part to its "rather dated" graphics. Retro Gamer magazine's Stuart Hunt called it an "unsung hero of the NES" that "looks and sounds pretty". He described the music as "sublime", and the enemy characters as "brilliantly drawn". Although he considered the blend of gameplay elements from different genres a success, he said that it suffered from "frustrating" design flaws, such as its high difficulty level. Jeremy Parish of 1Up.com disagreed with the game's status as an "unfairly forgotten masterpiece" among its substantial Internet following. He found it to be "underwhelming", "buggy", and "pretty annoying", because of "shrill music, loose controls, and some weird design decisions". He said that the game was "[not] terrible, or even bad – just a little lacking". He recommended players to buy the Virtual Console version, if only because it allowed them to experience Kid Icarus "with a fresh perspective".
GameSpot's Frank Provo reviewed the Virtual Console version. He noted that the gameplay was "[not] the most unique blueprint for a video game", but that it had been "fairly fresh back in 1987". He considered the difficulty "excessive", and found certain areas to be designed to frustrate players. He said that the presentation had not aged well. Though favoring the Grecian scenery, he criticized the graphics for the small, bicolored, and barely animated sprites, the black backgrounds, and the absence of multiple scrolling layers. He said the music was "nicely composed", but the sound effects were "all taps and thuds". He was dissatisfied with the emulation, because the Virtual Console release preserves the slowdown problems of the NES, and removed its cheat codes. He warned potential buyers that they might appreciate Kid Icarus for its "straightforward gameplay and challenging level layouts", but might "find nothing special in the gameplay and recoil in horror at the unflinching difficulty". Lucas M. Thomas of IGN noted that the game design was "odd" and "not Nintendo's most focused". He said it had "[not] aged in as timeless a manner as many other first-party Nintendo games from the NES era", and described it as "one of those games that made a lot more sense back in the '80s, accompanied by a tips and tricks strategy sheet". He complimented the theme music, which he considered heroic and memorable. In his review of the Virtual Console release, Thomas criticized the removal of cheat codes as "nonsensical". He found it to be "not an issue worthy of a prolonged rant", but said that "[Nintendo has] willfully edited its product, and damaged its nostalgic value in the process".
Kid Icarus is IGN's 20th of the top 100 NES games and 84th of the top 100 games of all time. It is 34th on Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1997 "100 Best Games of All Time", which said it "was one of the first big NES games to show that the system went way beyond offering the single-screen arcade-style experience". In 2001 Game Informer ranked it the 83rd best game ever made. They claimed that despite its high level of difficulty and frustration, it was fun enough to be worth playing. The game was inducted into GameSpy's "Hall of Fame", and was voted 54th place in Nintendo Power's top 200 Nintendo games. Nintendo Power also listed it as the 20th best NES video game, and praised it for its "unique vertically scrolling stages, fun platforming, and infectious 8-bit tunes", but with "unmerciful difficulty". Official Nintendo Magazine placed the game 67th on a list of greatest Nintendo games.
A Game Boy sequel to Kid Icarus, titled Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was released in North America in November 1991, and in Europe on May 21, 1992. It was developed by Nintendo and Tose, and largely adopts the gameplay mechanics of its predecessor. Of Myths and Monsters remained the last installment in the series for over 20 years.
In 2008, rumors of a 3D Kid Icarus game for the Wii alleged it was developed by the German American studio Factor 5. However, the game was said to be in production without the approval of Nintendo, and Factor 5 canceled multiple projects following the closure of its American branch in early 2009. In a 2010 interview, Yoshio Sakamoto was asked about a Kid Icarus game for the Wii, to which he replied that he was not aware of any plans to revive the franchise. A new series entry for the Nintendo 3DS, Kid Icarus: Uprising, was eventually revealed at the E3 2010 trade show and released in 2012. The game is a third-person shooter, and was developed by Project Sora, the company of Super Smash Bros. designer Masahiro Sakurai.
Pit is a recurring character named "Kid Icarus" in the American animated television series Captain N: The Game Master, and made cameo appearances in Nintendo games such as Tetris, F-1 Race, and the Super Smash Bros. series.
In May 2011, independent developer Flip Industries released Super Kid Icarus, an unofficial Flash game with a SNES style.
In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario is seen playing Kid Icarus in his room shortly after an argument with his family.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kid Icarus is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System in Europe and North America. It was released in Japan in December 1986, in Europe in February 1987, and in North America in July.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The plot of Kid Icarus revolves around protagonist Pit's quest for three sacred treasures, which he must equip to rescue the Greek-inspired fantasy world Angel Land and its ruler, the goddess Palutena. The player controls Pit through platform areas while fighting monsters and collecting items. The objective is to reach the end of the levels, and to find and defeat boss monsters that guard the three treasures. The game was developed by Nintendo's Research and Development 1 division with assistance with an external company (later identified to be Tose), which helped with testing. It was designed by Toru Osawa and Yoshio Sakamoto, directed by Satoru Okada, and produced by Gunpei Yokoi.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kid Icarus had a mixed critical reception but became a cult classic. Reviewers praised its music and its mixture of gameplay elements from different genres, but criticized its graphics and high difficulty level. It was included in several lists of the best games compiled by IGN and Nintendo Power.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It was later re-released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2004. It was released on the Wii's Virtual Console in 2007 and the Wii U's Virtual Console in 2013. A 3D Classics remake was released in Japan in 2011 and in North America, Europe, and Australia in 2012. In 2016, Kid Icarus was included on the North American and PAL region releases of the NES Classic Edition. It was released on Nintendo Switch Online in 2019.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "A sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was released for the Game Boy in 1991. A third entry in the series, Kid Icarus: Uprising, was released for Nintendo 3DS in March 2012, after Pit's inclusion as a playable character in the 2008 game Super Smash Bros. Brawl.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kid Icarus is a side-scrolling platformer with role-playing elements. The player controls the protagonist Pit through two-dimensional levels, which contain monsters, obstacles and items. Pit's primary weapon is a bow with an unlimited supply of arrows that can be upgraded with three collectable power items: the guard crystal shields Pit from enemies, the flaming arrows hit multiple targets, and the holly bow increases the range of the arrows. These upgrades will work only if Pit's health is high enough. The game keeps track of the player's score, and increases Pit's health bar at the end of a level if enough points were collected.",
"title": "Gameplay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Throughout the stages, the player may enter doors to access seven different types of chambers. Stores and black markets offer items in exchange for hearts, which are left behind by defeated monsters. Treasure chambers contain items, enemy nests give the player an opportunity to earn extra hearts, and hot springs restore Pit's health. In the god's chamber, the strength of Pit's bow and arrow may be increased depending on several factors, such as the number of enemies defeated and the amount of damage taken in battle. In the training chamber, Pit will be awarded with one of the three power items if he passes a test of endurance.",
"title": "Gameplay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The game world is divided into three stages: the Underworld, the Overworld (Earth) and the Skyworld. Each stage encompasses three unidirectional area levels and a fortress. The areas of the Underworld and Skyworld stages have Pit climb to the top, while those of the surface world are side-scrolling levels. The fortresses at the end of the stages are labyrinths with non-scrolling rooms, in which the player must find and defeat a gatekeeper boss. Within a fortress, Pit may buy a check sheet, pencil, and torch to guide him through the labyrinth. A single-use item, the hammer, can destroy stone statues, which frees a flying soldier called a Centurion that will aid the player in boss battles. For each of the bosses destroyed, Pit receives one of three sacred treasures that are needed to access the fourth and final stage, the sky temple. This last portion abandons the platforming elements of the previous levels, and resembles a scrolling shooter.",
"title": "Gameplay"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The game is set in Angel Land, which is a fantasy world with a Greek mythology theme. Before the events of the game, Earth was ruled by Palutena (Goddess of Light) and Medusa (Goddess of Darkness). Palutena bestowed the people with light to make them happy. Medusa hated the humans, dried up their crop, and turned them to stone. Enraged by this, Palutena transformed Medusa into a monster and banished her to the Underworld. Out of revenge, Medusa conspired with the monsters of the Underworld to take over Palutena's residence the Palace in the Sky. She launched a surprise attack, and stole the three sacred treasures — the Mirror Shield, the Light Arrows and the Wings of Pegasus — which deprived Palutena's army of its power. After her soldiers had been turned to stone by Medusa, Palutena was defeated in battle and imprisoned deep inside the Palace in the Sky.",
"title": "Plot"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "With her last power, she sent a bow and arrow to the young angel Pit. He escapes from his prison in the Underworld and sets out to save Palutena and Angel Land. Throughout the course of the story, Pit retrieves the three sacred treasures from the fortress gatekeepers at their respective fortresses in the Underworld, the Overworld, and the Skyworld. Afterward, he equips himself with the treasures and storms the sky temple where he defeats Medusa and rescues Palutena. The game has five different endings; depending on the player's performance, Palutena may present Pit with headgear or transform him into a full-grown angel. In the Japanese version, the best ending from the English version does not exist, and instead another bad ending is present.",
"title": "Plot"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The game was designed at Nintendo's Research and Development 1 (R&D1) division, and the programming was handled by the external company Intelligent Systems. It was developed for the Family Computer Disk System (FDS) because its floppy disk, called Disk Card, has three times the storage capacity of the Family Computer's cartridges of the time. Combined with the possibility to store the players' progress, the Disk Card format enabled the developers to create a longer game with a more extensive game world. Kid Icarus was the debut of Toru Osawa (credited as Inusawa) as a video game designer, and he was the only staff member working on the game at the beginning of the project. Originally he wanted to make an action game with role-playing elements, and wrote a story rooted in Greek mythology, which he had always been fond of. He drew the pixel art, and wrote the technical specifications, which were the basis for the playable prototype that was programmed by Intelligent Systems. After Nintendo's action-adventure Metroid had been finished, more staff members were allotted to the development of Kid Icarus.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The game was directed by Satoru Okada (credited as S. Okada), and produced by the general manager of the R&D1 division, Gunpei Yokoi (credited as G. Yokoi). Hirokazu Tanaka (credited as Hip Tanaka) composed the music. Yoshio Sakamoto (credited as Shikao.S) joined the team upon return from his vacation after the completion of Metroid. He streamlined the development process, and made many decisions that affected the design of Kid Icarus. Several out-of-place elements were included in the game, such as credit cards, a wizard turning player character Pit into an eggplant, and a large, moving nose that was meant to resemble composer Tanaka. Sakamoto attributed this unrestrained humor to the former personnel of the R&D1 division, which he referred to as \"strange\". Osawa said that he had originally tried to make Kid Icarus completely serious, but opted for a more humorous approach after objections from the team.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "To meet the projected release date of December 19, 1986, the staff members worked overtime and often stayed in the office at night. They used torn cardboard boxes as beds, and covered themselves in curtains to resist the low temperatures of the unheated development building. Eventually, Kid Icarus was finished and entered production a mere three days before the release date. Several ideas for additional stages had to be dropped because of these scheduling conflicts.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In February and July 1987, respectively, a cartridge-based version was published for the NES in Europe and North America. For this release, the graphics of the ending were updated, and staff credits were added. Unlike the Japanese version, which saves the player's progress on the Disk Card, the cartridge version uses a password system to restore progress, an almost unprecedented feature.",
"title": "Release"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In August 2004, Kid Icarus was re-released in the Famicom Mini Disk System Selection for the Game Boy Advance. It was released on the Wii's Virtual Console on January 23, 2007, in Japan, on February 12 in North America, and on February 23 in Europe and Australia; it was released on the Wii U's Virtual Console on August 14, 2013, in Japan, on July 11 in Europe and Australia, and on July 25 in North America. Passwords from the NES version do not work in the Virtual Console version due to the checksum algorithm being changed. In 2016, the game was included on the North American and PAL region releases of the NES Classic Edition. In 2019, it was released on Nintendo Switch Online.",
"title": "Release"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A 3D Classics remake of Kid Icarus was published for the Nintendo 3DS handheld console. The remake features stereoscopic 3D along with updated graphics including backgrounds. It uses the save system instead of passwords. It has the Family Computer Disk System's extra sound channel for music and sound effects.",
"title": "Release"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "It became available on the Nintendo eShop on January 18, 2012, in Japan, on February 2 in Europe, on April 12 in Australia, and on April 19 in North America. It was available early for free via download code to users who registered two selected 3DS games with Nintendo in Japan, Europe, and Australia. In Japan, it was available to users who registered any two Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between October 1, 2011, and January 15, 2012, and became available for download starting on December 19, 2011; in Europe, it was available to users who registered any two of a selection of Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between November 1, 2011, and January 31, 2012, with the first batch of emails with codes being sent out on January 5, 2012; in Australia, it was available to users who registered any two of a selection of Nintendo 3DS games on Club Nintendo between November 1, 2011, and March 31, 2012, with the first batch of emails with codes being sent out in January 2012. In North America, download codes for the 3D Classics version were given to customers who pre-ordered Kid Icarus: Uprising at select retailers when they picked up the game, which was released on March 23, 2012, allowing them to obtain the game early.",
"title": "Release"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "By late 2003, 1.76 million copies of Kid Icarus had been sold worldwide, with a cult following. It received mixed reviews from critics over the years. In October 1992, a staff writer of the UK publication Nintendo Magazine System said that it was \"pretty good fun\", but did not \"compare too well\" to other platform games, due in part to its \"rather dated\" graphics. Retro Gamer magazine's Stuart Hunt called it an \"unsung hero of the NES\" that \"looks and sounds pretty\". He described the music as \"sublime\", and the enemy characters as \"brilliantly drawn\". Although he considered the blend of gameplay elements from different genres a success, he said that it suffered from \"frustrating\" design flaws, such as its high difficulty level. Jeremy Parish of 1Up.com disagreed with the game's status as an \"unfairly forgotten masterpiece\" among its substantial Internet following. He found it to be \"underwhelming\", \"buggy\", and \"pretty annoying\", because of \"shrill music, loose controls, and some weird design decisions\". He said that the game was \"[not] terrible, or even bad – just a little lacking\". He recommended players to buy the Virtual Console version, if only because it allowed them to experience Kid Icarus \"with a fresh perspective\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "GameSpot's Frank Provo reviewed the Virtual Console version. He noted that the gameplay was \"[not] the most unique blueprint for a video game\", but that it had been \"fairly fresh back in 1987\". He considered the difficulty \"excessive\", and found certain areas to be designed to frustrate players. He said that the presentation had not aged well. Though favoring the Grecian scenery, he criticized the graphics for the small, bicolored, and barely animated sprites, the black backgrounds, and the absence of multiple scrolling layers. He said the music was \"nicely composed\", but the sound effects were \"all taps and thuds\". He was dissatisfied with the emulation, because the Virtual Console release preserves the slowdown problems of the NES, and removed its cheat codes. He warned potential buyers that they might appreciate Kid Icarus for its \"straightforward gameplay and challenging level layouts\", but might \"find nothing special in the gameplay and recoil in horror at the unflinching difficulty\". Lucas M. Thomas of IGN noted that the game design was \"odd\" and \"not Nintendo's most focused\". He said it had \"[not] aged in as timeless a manner as many other first-party Nintendo games from the NES era\", and described it as \"one of those games that made a lot more sense back in the '80s, accompanied by a tips and tricks strategy sheet\". He complimented the theme music, which he considered heroic and memorable. In his review of the Virtual Console release, Thomas criticized the removal of cheat codes as \"nonsensical\". He found it to be \"not an issue worthy of a prolonged rant\", but said that \"[Nintendo has] willfully edited its product, and damaged its nostalgic value in the process\".",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kid Icarus is IGN's 20th of the top 100 NES games and 84th of the top 100 games of all time. It is 34th on Electronic Gaming Monthly's 1997 \"100 Best Games of All Time\", which said it \"was one of the first big NES games to show that the system went way beyond offering the single-screen arcade-style experience\". In 2001 Game Informer ranked it the 83rd best game ever made. They claimed that despite its high level of difficulty and frustration, it was fun enough to be worth playing. The game was inducted into GameSpy's \"Hall of Fame\", and was voted 54th place in Nintendo Power's top 200 Nintendo games. Nintendo Power also listed it as the 20th best NES video game, and praised it for its \"unique vertically scrolling stages, fun platforming, and infectious 8-bit tunes\", but with \"unmerciful difficulty\". Official Nintendo Magazine placed the game 67th on a list of greatest Nintendo games.",
"title": "Reception"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A Game Boy sequel to Kid Icarus, titled Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was released in North America in November 1991, and in Europe on May 21, 1992. It was developed by Nintendo and Tose, and largely adopts the gameplay mechanics of its predecessor. Of Myths and Monsters remained the last installment in the series for over 20 years.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2008, rumors of a 3D Kid Icarus game for the Wii alleged it was developed by the German American studio Factor 5. However, the game was said to be in production without the approval of Nintendo, and Factor 5 canceled multiple projects following the closure of its American branch in early 2009. In a 2010 interview, Yoshio Sakamoto was asked about a Kid Icarus game for the Wii, to which he replied that he was not aware of any plans to revive the franchise. A new series entry for the Nintendo 3DS, Kid Icarus: Uprising, was eventually revealed at the E3 2010 trade show and released in 2012. The game is a third-person shooter, and was developed by Project Sora, the company of Super Smash Bros. designer Masahiro Sakurai.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Pit is a recurring character named \"Kid Icarus\" in the American animated television series Captain N: The Game Master, and made cameo appearances in Nintendo games such as Tetris, F-1 Race, and the Super Smash Bros. series.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In May 2011, independent developer Flip Industries released Super Kid Icarus, an unofficial Flash game with a SNES style.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Mario is seen playing Kid Icarus in his room shortly after an argument with his family.",
"title": "Legacy"
}
] |
Kid Icarus is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Family Computer Disk System in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System in Europe and North America. It was released in Japan in December 1986, in Europe in February 1987, and in North America in July. The plot of Kid Icarus revolves around protagonist Pit's quest for three sacred treasures, which he must equip to rescue the Greek-inspired fantasy world Angel Land and its ruler, the goddess Palutena. The player controls Pit through platform areas while fighting monsters and collecting items. The objective is to reach the end of the levels, and to find and defeat boss monsters that guard the three treasures. The game was developed by Nintendo's Research and Development 1 division with assistance with an external company, which helped with testing. It was designed by Toru Osawa and Yoshio Sakamoto, directed by Satoru Okada, and produced by Gunpei Yokoi. Kid Icarus had a mixed critical reception but became a cult classic. Reviewers praised its music and its mixture of gameplay elements from different genres, but criticized its graphics and high difficulty level. It was included in several lists of the best games compiled by IGN and Nintendo Power. It was later re-released for the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2004. It was released on the Wii's Virtual Console in 2007 and the Wii U's Virtual Console in 2013. A 3D Classics remake was released in Japan in 2011 and in North America, Europe, and Australia in 2012. In 2016, Kid Icarus was included on the North American and PAL region releases of the NES Classic Edition. It was released on Nintendo Switch Online in 2019. A sequel, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, was released for the Game Boy in 1991. A third entry in the series, Kid Icarus: Uprising, was released for Nintendo 3DS in March 2012, after Pit's inclusion as a playable character in the 2008 game Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
|
2001-10-04T09:27:18Z
|
2023-11-29T19:32:01Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Icarus
|
16,893 |
Kansas City (disambiguation)
|
Kansas City metropolitan area is a metropolitan area in Missouri and Kansas, United States.
Kansas City may also refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kansas City metropolitan area is a metropolitan area in Missouri and Kansas, United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kansas City may also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kansas City metropolitan area is a metropolitan area in Missouri and Kansas, United States. Kansas City may also refer to:
|
2002-02-25T15:51:15Z
|
2023-12-11T20:40:35Z
|
[
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:TOC right",
"Template:Disambiguation"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_(disambiguation)
|
16,894 |
Kylie Minogue
|
Kylie Ann Minogue AO OBE (/mɪˈnoʊɡ/; born 28 May 1968) is an Australian singer, songwriter and actress. Minogue is the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time, having sold over 80 million records worldwide. She has been recognised for reinventing herself in music as well as fashion, and is referred to by the European press as the "Princess of Pop" and a style icon. Her accolades include a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards and eighteen ARIA Music Awards.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring as Charlene Robinson in the Australian soap opera Neighbours (1986–1988). She began her music career in the late 1980s, releasing four bubblegum and dance-pop-influenced studio albums under PWL. By the early 1990s, Minogue had amassed several top ten singles in Australia and the UK, including "The Loco-Motion", "I Should Be So Lucky", "Especially for You", "Hand on Your Heart" and "Better the Devil You Know". Taking more creative control over her music, she signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released the albums Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997).
By joining Parlophone in 1999, Minogue returned to mainstream dance-oriented music with Light Years (2000), including the number-one hits "Spinning Around" and "On a Night Like This". The follow-up, Fever (2001), was an international breakthrough for Minogue, becoming her best-selling album to date. Its lead single, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" becoming one of the most successful singles of the 2000s, selling over five million units. Follow up singles, "In Your Eyes" and "Love at First Sight" became hits as well. She continued reinventing her image and experimenting with a range of genres on her subsequent albums, which spawned successful singles such as "Slow", "I Believe in You", "2 Hearts" and "All the Lovers". In 2017, she partnered with BMG Rights Management, with "Dancing" (2018) as their first release. In the following years, Minogue became the only female artist to have a number-one album and a top ten single, from the 1980s to the 2020s in the UK charts, with Disco (2020) and "Padam Padam" (2023) respectively.
In film, Minogue made her debut in The Delinquents (1989), and appeared in Street Fighter (1994), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012) and San Andreas (2015). In reality television, she appeared as a judge on The Voice UK and The Voice Australia both in 2014. Her other ventures include product endorsements, books, perfumes, charitable work and a wine brand. Minogue's achievements include being an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.).
Kylie Ann Minogue was born at Bethlehem Hospital in Caulfield South, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, on 28 May 1968, to car company accountant Ronald Charles Minogue and his wife Carol Ann (née Jones), a former ballet dancer. Both parents had moved to Australia in 1958 as part of an assisted migration scheme on the ship Fairsea. Also aboard were the Gibb family of later Bee Gees fame. Minogue is of English and Welsh descent (though her surname is of Irish origin) and was named after the Nyungar word for "boomerang". She is the eldest of three children: her brother, Brendan Minogue, is a news cameraman in Australia, and her sister, Dannii Minogue, is an actress, singer and television host. The family frequently moved around various suburbs in Melbourne to sustain their living expenses, which Minogue found unsettling as a child. She would often stay at home reading, sewing, and learning to play violin and piano. When they moved to Surrey Hills, Victoria, she went on to Camberwell High School. During her schooling years, she found it difficult to make friends. She got her HSC with subjects including Arts and Graphics and English. Minogue described herself as being of "average intelligence" and "quite modest" during her high school years. Growing up, she and her sister Dannii took singing and dancing lessons.
A 10-year-old Minogue accompanied Dannii to a hearing arranged by the sisters' aunt, Suzette, and, while producers found Dannii too young, Australian television producer Alan Hardy gave Minogue a minor role in soap opera The Sullivans (1979). She also appeared in another small role in soap opera Skyways (1980). In 1985, she was cast in one of the lead roles in the television series The Henderson Kids. Minogue took time off school to film The Henderson Kids and while Carol was not impressed, Minogue felt that she needed the independence to make it into the entertainment industry. During filming, co-star Nadine Garner labelled Minogue "fragile" after producers yelled at her for forgetting her lines; she would often cry on set. Minogue was dropped from the second season of the show after Hardy felt the need for her character to be "written off". In retrospect, Hardy stated that removing her from the show "turned out to be the best thing for her". Interested in following a career in music, Minogue made a demo tape for the producers of weekly music program Young Talent Time, which featured Dannii as a regular performer. Minogue gave her first television singing performance on the show in 1985 but was not invited to join the cast.
She was cast in the soap opera Neighbours in 1986, as Charlene Mitchell, a schoolgirl turned garage mechanic. The show achieved popularity in the UK, and a story arc that created a romance between her character and the character played by Jason Donovan culminated in a wedding episode in 1987 that attracted an audience of 20 million viewers. She became the first person to win four Logie Awards in one year and was the youngest recipient of the "Gold Logie Award for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television", with the result determined by public vote.
During a Fitzroy Football Club benefit concert, Minogue performed "I Got You Babe" as a duet with fellow actor John Waters, and "The Loco-Motion" as an encore. Producer Greg Petherick arranged for Minogue to record a demo of the latter song, re-titled as "Locomotion". The demo was sent to the head of Mushroom Records Michael Gudinski, who decided to sign Minogue in early 1987 based on her popularity from Neighbours. The track was first recorded in big band style, and was later given a completely new backing track by producer Mike Duffy, inspired by the hi-NRG sound of English band Dead or Alive. "Locomotion" was released as her debut single in Australia on 13 July 1987, the week after the wedding episode of Neighbours premiered. The single became the best-selling single of the decade in Australia, according to the Kent Music Report.
The success of the single resulted in Minogue travelling to London to work with record producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman in September 1987. They knew little of Minogue and had forgotten that she was arriving; as a result, they wrote "I Should Be So Lucky" while she waited outside the studio. The track was written and recorded in under 40 minutes. The song reached number one in Australia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Switzerland and the UK. Although Minogue needed to be convinced to work with Stock Aitken Waterman again after feeling she'd been disrespected during her first recording session, more sessions with the producers occurred from February to April 1988 in London and Melbourne, where the singer was filming her last episodes for Neighbours. The trio ended up composing and producing all the tracks on the forthcoming album and produced a new version of "The Loco-Motion". Producer Pete Waterman justified the highly controversial decision to re-record the latter track by claiming Minogue's platinum-selling Australian version was poorly produced, but Mike Duffy instead blamed the decision on Waterman's alleged wish to claim the prestige and royalties from the track's placement of the soundtrack of the 1988 film Arthur 2: On the Rocks.
Minogue's self-titled debut album, Kylie, was released in July 1988. The album is a collection of dance-oriented pop tunes and spent more than a year on the UK Albums Chart, including several weeks at number one, eventually becoming the best-selling album of the 1980s by a female artist. It went gold in the United States, while the single "The Locomotion" reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, and number one on the Canadian dance chart. The single "Got to Be Certain" became her third consecutive number one single in Australia. Later in the year, she left Neighbours to focus on her music career. She collaborated with Jason Donovan on the song "Especially for You", after "intense" demand for the duet from the public, media and retailers overcame her initial reservations. The single peaked at number one in the UK. By December 2014, it sold its one millionth copy in the country. She was sometimes referred to as "the Singing Budgie" by her detractors over the coming years. In a review of the album Kylie for AllMusic, Chris True described the tunes as "standard, late-80s ... bubblegum", but added, "her cuteness makes these rather vapid tracks bearable". She received the ARIA Award for the year's highest-selling single. She won her second consecutive ARIA Award for the year's highest-selling single, and received a "Special Achievement Award".
Minogue's second studio album, Enjoy Yourself, was released in October 1989. The album was number-one in the UK, and spawned the number-one singles in the country such as "Hand on Your Heart" and "Tears on My Pillow". In North America, it failed to sell well and she was dropped by American record label Geffen Records. Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine, stated "there isn't a lot to differentiate her sophomore effort from its predecessor by repeating the sonic template of her debut album." In support of the album, she embarked on her concert tour, the Enjoy Yourself Tour in Europe, Asia and Australia in February 1990.
Minogue's debut film, The Delinquents, was released in December 1989. The film received mixed reviews by critics but proved popular with audiences. In the UK, it grossed more than £200,000, and in Australia, it was the fourth-highest-grossing local film of 1989 and the highest-grossing local film of 1990. From 1989 to 1991, Minogue dated Australian INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.
Unhappy with her level of creative input on her first two albums, Minogue worked with her manager Terry Blamey and her Australian label Mushroom Records to force a change in her relationship with SAW, and to push for a more mature sound.
Minogue's third album, Rhythm of Love, was released in November 1990 and was described as "leaps and bounds more mature" than her previous albums by AllMusic's Chris True.
The album did not match the commercial success of its predecessors, peaking at number nine in the UK, although Blamey described the album as a "big success" that "made lots of money for PWL". Three of its singles – "Better the Devil You Know", "Step Back in Time" and "Shocked – reached the top ten in Australia. In the UK, all four singles, including "What Do I Have to Do", entered the top ten.
Entertainment Weekly's Ernest Macias observed that, by the third album, Minogue "presented a more mature and sexually-fuelled image". Macias also pointed out that the album "showcases the beginning of Minogue's career as a pop icon, propelled by her angelic vocals, sensual music videos, chic fashion, and distinct dance sound." Her relationship with Australian musician-actor Michael Hutchence was also seen as part of her departure from her earlier persona. The making of the "Better the Devil You Know" music video was the first time Minogue "felt part of the creative process". She said: "I wasn't in charge but I had a voice. I'd bought some clothes on King's Road for the video. I saw a new way to express my point of view creatively." To promote the album, she embarked on the Rhythm of Love Tour in February 1991.
Minogue's fourth album, Let's Get to It, was released in October 1991. It peaked at number fifteen in the UK, making it her first album to fail to reach the top ten. The first single from the album, "Word Is Out", became her first single to miss the top ten in the UK. Subsequent singles "If You Were with Me Now", "Give Me Just a Little More Time" and "Finer Feelings" – all reached the top ten. Nick Levine of Digital Spy labeled the album "lacking a moment of pure pop brilliance to match her [Minogue's] previously released singles." In support of the album, she embarked on the Let's Get to It Tour in October. She later expressed her opinion that she was stifled by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, saying, "I was very much a puppet in the beginning. I was blinkered by my record company. I was unable to look left or right."
Minogue's first best-of compilation album, titled Greatest Hits, was released in August 1992. Chris True of AllMusic called it "an excellent overview of the first half of Minogue's career." It reached number one in the UK and number three in Australia. The compilation spawned the singles "What Kind of Fool" and a cover of Kool & the Gang's "Celebration". Both singles peaked outside of the top ten in the UK. By the end of 1992, PWL did not renew their contract with Minogue, believing the singer "was [not] moving in a direction that was going to be successful".
Minogue's signing with British record label Deconstruction Records in 1993 marked a new phase in her career. Her fifth studio album, Kylie Minogue, was released in September 1994 and was a departure from her previous efforts as it "no longer featured the Stock-Aitken-Waterman production gloss", with critics praising Minogue's vocals and the album production. It was produced by dance music producers the Brothers in Rhythm, namely Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson, who had previously produced "Finer Feelings". As of 2015, Anderson continued to be Minogue's musical director. The album peaked at number four in the UK. Its lead single, "Confide in Me", spent four weeks at number one in Australia, and peaked at number two in the UK. The follow-up singles, "Put Yourself in My Place" and "Where Is the Feeling?", both reached the top twenty in the UK.
During this period, Minogue made a guest appearance as herself in an episode of the comedy The Vicar of Dibley. Director Steven E. de Souza saw her cover photo in Australia's Who Magazine as one of "The 30 Most Beautiful People in the World" and offered her a role opposite Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme in the film Street Fighter. The film was a moderate success, earning US$70 million in the US box-office, but received poor reviews, with The Washington Post's Richard Harrington calling Minogue "the worst actress in the English-speaking world". She had an affair with Van Damme while shooting the film in Thailand. She had a minor role in the 1996 film Bio-Dome starring American actors Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin. She also appeared in the 1995 short film Hayride to Hell and in the 1997 film Diana & Me. In 1995, she collaborated with Australian artist Nick Cave for the song "Where the Wild Roses Grow". Cave had been interested in working with Minogue since hearing "Better the Devil You Know", saying it contained "one of pop music's most violent and distressing lyrics". The music video for the song was inspired by John Everett Millais's painting Ophelia (1851–52), and showed Minogue as the murdered woman, floating in a pond as a serpent swam over her body. The single received widespread attention in Europe, where it reached the top 10 in several countries, and reached number two in Australia. The song won ARIA Awards for "Song of the Year" and "Best Pop Release". Following concert appearances with Cave, Minogue recited the lyrics to "I Should Be So Lucky" as poetry in London's Royal Albert Hall.
By 1997, Minogue was in a relationship with French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, who encouraged her to develop her creativity. Inspired by a mutual appreciation of Japanese culture, they created a visual combination of "geisha and manga superheroine" for the photographs taken for Minogue's sixth studio album, Impossible Princess, and the music video for "GBI (German Bold Italic)", her collaboration with Japanese musician Towa Tei. She drew inspiration from the music of artists such as Scottish singer Shirley Manson and American rock band Garbage, Icelandic singer Björk, British rapper Tricky and Irish rock band U2, and Japanese pop musicians such as Pizzicato Five and Towa Tei. The album featured collaborations with musicians including James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore of the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers. It garnered some negative reviews upon its release in 1997, but would be praised as her most personal and best work in retrospective reviews. In 2003, Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani called it a "deeply personal effort" and "Minogue's best album to date", while Evan Sawdey, from PopMatters, described the album as "one of the most crazed, damn-near perfect dance-pop albums ever created" in a 2008 review. Mostly a dance album, she countered suggestions that she was trying to become an indie artist.
Acknowledging that Minogue had attempted to escape the perceptions of her that had developed during her early career, she commented that she was ready to "forget the painful criticism" and "accept the past, embrace it, use it". The music video for "Did It Again" paid homage to her earlier "incarnations". Retitled Kylie Minogue in the UK following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it became the lowest-selling album of her career. At the end of the year, a campaign by Virgin Radio stated, "We've done something to improve Minogue's records: we've banned them." The lead single "Some Kind of Bliss" failed to reach the top twenty in the UK. In Australia, the album was a success and spent 35 weeks on the album chart. After the album's release, she was dropped by Deconstruction in 1998. Her Intimate and Live tour in 1998 was extended due to demand. She gave several live performances in Australia, including the 1998 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and the opening ceremonies of Melbourne's Crown Casino, and Sydney's Fox Studios in 1999 (where she performed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend") as well as a Christmas concert in Dili, East Timor, in association with the United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces.
In 1999, Minogue performed a duet with the English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys' on their Nightlife album and spent several months in Barbados performing in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. She then appeared in the film Sample People and recorded a cover version of Russell Morris's "The Real Thing" for the soundtrack. She signed with German–British record label Parlophone in April, who wanted to re-establish Minogue as a pop artist.
Minogue's seventh studio album, Light Years, was released in September 2000. NME magazine called it a "fun, perfectly-formed" record, which saw Minogue "dropping her considerable concern for cool and bouncing back to her disco-pop roots". It was a commercial success, becoming her first number one album in her native Australia and charting at number two in the UK. The lead single, "Spinning Around", debuted atop the UK in July, making her the second artist to have a number-one single in three consecutive decades, after American singer-songwriter Madonna. Its accompanying video featured Minogue in revealing gold hotpants, which came to be regarded as a "trademark". Three other singles — "On a Night Like This", "Kids" with English singer Robbie Williams and "Please Stay" all peaked in the top ten in the UK.
An elaborate art book titled Kylie, featuring contributions by Minogue and creative director William Baker, was published by Booth-Clibborn in March 2000. At the time, she began a romantic relationship with model James Gooding. Their relationship ended after two and a half years. In October, she performed at both the closing ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics and in the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, all held in Sydney. Her performance of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was chosen as one of the most memorable Olympic closing ceremony moments by Kate Samuelson of TNT. In March 2001, she embarked on the On a Night Like This Tour, which was inspired by the style of Broadway shows and the musicals of the 1930s. She also made a brief cameo as The Green Fairy in Baz Luhrmann's film, Moulin Rouge!. It earned her an MTV Movie Award nomination in 2002. "Spinning Around" and Light Years consecutively won the ARIA Award for Best Pop Release in 2000 and 2001. In early 2001, she launched her own brand of underwear called Love Kylie in partnership with the Holeproof brand of Australian Pacific Brands.
In September 2001, Minogue released "Can't Get You Out of My Head", the lead single from her eighth studio album, Fever. It reached number one in over forty countries and sold five million copies, becoming her most successful single. The accompanying music video featured the singer sporting a hooded white jumpsuit with deep plunging neckline. The remaining singles — "In Your Eyes", "Love at First Sight" and "Come into My World" — all peaked in the top ten in Australia and the UK. The album was released in October and topped the charts in Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and the UK, eventually achieving worldwide sales in excess of six million. Dominique Leone from Pitchfork complimented its simple and "comfortable" composition, terming it a "mature sound from a mature artist, and one that may very well re-establish Minogue for the VH1 generation". The warm reception towards the album led to its release in the U.S. in February 2002, through Capitol Records. Her first release in the U.S. in thirteen years, which led to her highest-charting album in the country, debuting at number three on the Billboard 200. On the Canadian Albums Chart, it peaked at number ten.
In April 2002, Minogue embarked on her KylieFever2002 tour in Europe and Australia, in support of the album. In the U.S., she performed several songs from the setlist in a series of KIIS-FM Jingle Ball concerts throughout 2002 and 2003. She received four accolades at the ARIA Music Awards of 2002, including Highest Selling Single and Single of the Year for "Can't Get You Out of My Head". That same year, she won her first Brit Award for International Female Solo Artist and Best International Album for Fever.
In 2003, for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards, Minogue received her first Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording for "Love at First Sight", before winning the award for "Come into My World" the following year. It marked the first time an Australian recording artist had won in a major category since Men at Work in 1983. She began a relationship with French actor Olivier Martinez after meeting him at the 2003 Grammy Awards ceremony. They ended their relationship in February 2007, and remained on friendly terms. She was reported to have been "saddened by false [media] accusations of [Martinez's] disloyalty" and defended Martinez, and acknowledged the support he had given during her treatment for breast cancer.
In November 2003, Minogue released her ninth studio album, Body Language, following an invitation-only concert, titled Money Can't Buy, at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. The album downplayed the disco style and was inspired by 1980s artists such as Scritti Politti, The Human League, Adam and the Ants and Prince, blending their styles with elements of hip hop. Andy Battaglia from The A.V. Club stated the album "shows Minogue as a surprisingly impressive presence in spurts, but she sounds better with her pleasure engine revving at full purr". The sales of the album were lower than anticipated after the success of Fever, peaking at number six in the UK. The album achieved first week sales of 43,000 and declined significantly in the second week. The lead single, "Slow", was a number one hit in Australia and the UK. In the US, it received a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Dance Recording category. Two more singles were released – "Red Blooded Woman" and "Chocolate", both charted within the top ten in the UK.
In November 2004, Minogue released her second greatest hits compilation album, Ultimate Kylie. It peaked at number five in Australia and number four in the UK. The Guardian included the compilation in their "1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" list in 2007. The album yielded two singles: "I Believe in You" and "Giving You Up", which both entered the top ten in Australia and in the UK. "I Believe in You" was later nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of "Best Dance Recording".
In February 2005, the animated film The Magic Roundabout was released, in which she served as the voice actress for the role of Florence. She reprised the role in 2006 and recorded the theme song for the American edition, re-titled as Doogal. In March, Minogue commenced her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour. It initially had tour dates in Europe, Australia, Asia and a headlining appearance in Glastonbury Festival announced. In May, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, forcing her to cancel the remainder of the tour. In the same month, she underwent surgery and commenced chemotherapy treatment soon after.
In January 2006, it was announced that Minogue had finished chemotherapy and the disease "had no recurrence" after the surgery. She would continue her treatment for the next months. Her children's book, The Showgirl Princess, written during her period of convalescence, was published in October, and her perfume, Darling, was launched in November. The range was later augmented by eau de toilettes including Pink Sparkle, Couture and Inverse. She resumed her then cancelled tour in November, under the title Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. Her dance routines had been reworked to accommodate her medical condition, with slower costume changes and longer breaks between sections of the show to conserve her strength. The Sydney Morning Herald described the tour as an "extravaganza" and "nothing less than a triumph".
In October 2007, Minogue was featured in White Diamond: A Personal Portrait of Kylie Minogue, a documentary filmed during 2006 and 2007 as she embarked on her Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. In November, her tenth studio and "comeback" album, X was released. The electro-styled album included contributions from British producer Guy Chambers, British singer-songwriter Cathy Dennis, Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant and English DJ-producer Calvin Harris. It received criticism from Chris True from AllMusic, for the "triviality" of its subject matter in light of her experiences with breast cancer. Both the album and its lead single, "2 Hearts", entered at number one in Australia. In the UK, the album initially attracted lukewarm sales. Its commercial performance eventually improved. The lead single and follow-up singles – "In My Arms" and "Wow", all peaked inside the top ten in the UK. In the U.S., the album was nominated at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards for Best Electronic/Dance Album. She appeared on her own television special The Kylie Show, which featured music performances and comedy sketches. By December, she guest-starred in the British television series Doctor Who's Christmas special – "Voyage of the Damned" as Astrid Peth. It was watched by 13.31 million viewers in the UK, which was the show's highest viewing figure since 1979.
In February 2008, Minogue launched her range of home furnishings, Kylie Minogue at Home. Her business venture later went on to launch its newest collection by February 2018, for its tenth anniversary. In May, she embarked on the KylieX2008 tour, her most expensive tour to date with production costs of £10 million. It was considered a success, with ticket sales estimated at US$70 million. She was then appointed a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the junior grade of France's highest cultural honour. In July, she was officially invested by the Prince of Wales as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. She won the "Best International Female Solo Artist" award at the Brit Awards 2008. In September, she made her Middle East debut as the headline act at the opening of Atlantis, The Palm, a hotel resort in Dubai. She was in a relationship with Spanish model Andrés Velencoso, starting from 2008 up until 2013.
In January 2009, Minogue hosted the Brit Awards with English multi-hyphenates James Corden and Mathew Horne. She then embarked on the For You, for Me tour by September, her first concert tour in North America. In October, she was featured in the Hindi film, Blue, performing an A. R. Rahman song.
In July 2010, Minogue released her eleventh studio album, Aphrodite. The album featured work from English record producer Stuart Price, British DJ and record producer Calvin Harris, American musician Jake Shears, English singer-songwriter Nerina Pallot, Belgian musician Pascal Gabriel, Danish record producer Lucas Secon, English alternative rock band member Tim Rice-Oxley of Keane and British group Kish Mauve. Price served as an executive producer. Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone labelled the album as Minogue's "finest work since 1997's Impossible Princess." Tim Sendra from AllMusic commended Minogue's choice of collaborators and producers, commenting that it is the "work of someone who knows exactly what her skills are and who to hire to help showcase them to perfection." The album debuted at number-one in the UK. The lead single, "All the Lovers" peaked at number three in the UK. Subsequent singles from the album — "Get Outta My Way", "Better than Today" and "Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)" followed. In November, she was featured on the single by the English singer Taio Cruz, "Higher". It peaked at number eight in the UK by January of next year.
In February 2011, Minogue embarked on the Aphrodite: Les Folies Tour, performing in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and Africa. With a stage set inspired by the "goddess of love" Aphrodite and Grecian culture and history, it was greeted with positive reviews from critics, who praised the concept and the stage production. The tour was a commercial success, grossing US$60 million.
In 2012, Minogue began a year-long celebration for her 25 years in the music industry, which was often called "K25". The anniversary started in March, with her embarking on the Anti Tour in England and Australia. The tour featured b-sides, demos and rarities from her music catalogue. The tour was positively received for its intimate atmosphere and was a commercial success. She released the single "Timebomb" in May and the greatest hits compilation album, The Best of Kylie Minogue in June. She performed at events such as Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Concert and BBC Proms in the Park London 2012. In October, she released the compilation album The Abbey Road Sessions, which contained reworked and orchestral versions of her previously released songs. It was recorded at London's Abbey Road Studios and was produced by British record producer Steve Anderson and Colin Elliot. The album received favourable reviews from music critics. Andy Gill of The Independent called it "a more traditional makeover, an attempt to give a more elegant lustre to callow pop kitsch, usually by slowing the song down and loading on strings." It debuted at number two in the UK. In film, she has appeared in the American independent film Jack & Diane for a cameo role, and a lead role in the French film Holy Motors. Jack & Diane opened at the Tribeca Festival in April, while Holy Motors opened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival in May.
In January 2013, Minogue parted ways with manager Terry Blamey, whom managed her since the start of her singing career. The following month, she signed to entertainment agency Roc Nation for a management deal. In September, she was featured on Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini's single "Limpido", which was a number-one hit in Italy and received a nomination for "World's Best Song" at the 2013 World Music Awards. In the same month, she was hired as a coach for the third series of BBC One's talent competition television show The Voice UK, alongside American record producer and The Black Eyed Peas member, will.i.am, English singer Ricky Wilson of Kaiser Chiefs and Welsh singer Tom Jones. The show opened with 9.35 million views in the UK, an increase from the previous season. It accumulated an estimated 8.10 million viewers on average. Ed Power from The Daily Telegraph commented on Minogue for being "glamorous, agreeably giggly [and] a card-carrying national treasure". In November, she was hired as a coach for the third season of Nine Network's The Voice Australia.
In March 2014, Minogue released her twelfth studio album, Kiss Me Once. It featured contributions from Australian singer-songwriter Sia, American record producer Mike Del Rio, Danish record producer Cutfather, American multi-hyphenate Pharrell Williams, British record producer MNEK, American record producer Ariel Rechtshaid and Spanish singer-songwriter Enrique Iglesias. Kitty Empire from The Observer described it "polished but kittenish... remains true to the effervescent dance-pop for which Minogue is known." The album peaked at number one in Australia and number two in the UK. Two singles were released, "Into the Blue" and "I Was Gonna Cancel". In August, she performed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, donning a custom Jean Paul Gaultier corset. In September, she embarked on the Kiss Me Once Tour.
In March 2015, Minogue left Parlophone Records and Roc Nation. She entered into a trademark dispute with reality television personality Kylie Jenner, in Jenner's attempt to trademark the brand "Kylie", which Minogue has been trading under since the 1990s. The dispute was eventually resolved in Minogue's favour in 2017. In May, she appeared as Susan Riddick in the American film San Andreas, starring American actor Dwayne Johnson and American actress Carla Gugino. In September, an extended play with Mexican-American record producer Fernando Garibay titled Kylie + Garibay was released. Garibay and Moroder served as producers for the extended play.
In November, Minogue released her thirteenth studio album and first Christmas album, Kylie Christmas. It features work from actress-singer-presenter Dannii Minogue, English musician Chris Martin of Coldplay and record producing team Stargate. The album missed entering the top ten in the UK. Lauren Murphy from The Irish Times commented on her review, "do we really need another pop star doing another bog-standard Christmas album with a sprinkling of festive cheese?... Minogue is better placed than most to do such an album, given her longevity in the business." The following year, it was re-released entitled as Kylie Christmas: Snow Queen Edition. A Christmas concert series in the Royal Albert Hall, London was held in both December 2015 and 2016, in support of the album. In 2016, she was engaged to British actor Joshua Sasse, with their relationship ending in 2017.
In February 2017, Minogue signed a record deal with BMG Rights Management. In December 2017, she and BMG had struck a joint-deal with Mushroom Group—under the sub-division label Liberator Music to release her next album in Australia and New Zealand. Throughout 2017, she worked with writers and producers for her fourteenth studio album, including Nigerian-German record producer Sky Adams and British record-producer Richard Stannard. It was recorded in London, Los Angeles and Nashville, with the latter profoundly influencing the record.
The album Golden was released in April 2018, with "Dancing" serving as its lead single. It debuted at number one in Australia and in the UK. Tim Sendra from AllMusic labelled the album a "darn bold" for an artist of Minogue's longevity, stating "the amazing thing about the album, and about her, is that she pulls off the country as well as she's pulled off new wave, disco, electro, murder ballads, and everything else she's done in her long career." Pitchfork's Ben Cardew stated that it "sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it." The album spawned several more singles such as "Stop Me from Falling", the title track "Golden", "A Lifetime to Repair" and "Music's Too Sad Without You" featuring English singer Jack Savoretti. In support of the album, she embarked on Kylie Presents Golden and Golden Tour. She was among the performers at The Queen's Birthday Party held at the Royal Albert Hall in April. In the same year, she began dating Paul Solomons, the creative director of British GQ. After five years, they split in February 2023.
In June 2019, Minogue released the greatest hits compilation album Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection, featuring "New York City" as the lead single. Tim Sendra of AllMusic complimented the collection describing it as a "truly definitive and essential for anyone who wants to look back on her [Minogue's] brilliant career." It reached number one in Australia and in the UK. In the same month, she embarked on her Summer 2019 tour, which included her debut performance at the Glastonbury Festival – fourteen years after her breast cancer diagnosis forced her to cancel her 2005 headlining slot. Performing in the "Legends slot", her set featured appearances from Australian musician Nick Cave and English musician Chris Martin. The Guardian labeled it as "solid-gold, peerless and phenomenal". Her set was the most watched of the BBC coverage, earning three million viewers and setting a history record for the most attended Glastonbury set. By December, she appeared in her own Christmas television special, Kylie's Secret Night on Channel 4.
In May 2020, Minogue launched Kylie Minogue Wines in partnership with English beverages distributor Benchmark Drinks, with Rosé Vin de France serving as the debut product. Her prosecco rosé had become the number one branded prosecco in the UK, according to Nielsen Holdings data. The wine brand has sold over five million bottles by June 2022, and won a Golden Vines Award for entrepreneurship.
Following her Glastonbury performance, Minogue stated that she would like to create a "pop-disco album" and return to recording new material after the performance. In 2020, work continued on her fifteenth studio album during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a home studio to record throughout lockdowns, she also recorded and audio engineered her own vocals. The singles, "Say Something" and "Magic" were released in July and September respectively. In November, Disco was released, reaching number one in Australia and the UK. She became the only female artist to achieve a number one album in five consecutive decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s. In support of the album, a livestream concert titled Infinite Disco was held. Nick Levine of NME called the album her "most consistent and enjoyable album in a decade." In December, "Real Groove" was released as a single, with a subsequent remix featuring English singer Dua Lipa. The album was reissued in November 2021, titled Disco: Guest List Edition. It contained new tracks featuring British band Years & Years, English singer Jessie Ware and American singer Gloria Gaynor.
In February 2022, after living in London since the 1990s, Minogue relocated back to Melbourne, citing a desire to be closer to her family in Australia. In the same year, she began working on her sixteenth studio album. In July, she returned to her role in Neighbours as Charlene, for a brief appearance for the show's intended series finale.
In 2023, Minogue's studio album Tension was released in September to critical acclaim. Featuring works from British record producer Lostboy, Dutch DJ Oliver Heldens, British singer-songwriter Kamille and previous collaborators Richard Stannard, Duck Blackwell and Jon Green; Minogue described the album as "a blend of personal reflection, club abandon and melancholic high". Hannah Mylrea of Rolling Stone UK claimed it as "brilliantly good fun and soaring pop music, with a huge amount of heart that brings big emotions to the dancefloor, much like its creator." The album debuted at number one in Australia and the UK. The lead single, "Padam Padam" entered the top ten in the United Kingdom, and marked her as the only female artist to achieve a UK top ten entry, in the 1980s to the 2020s. The song won an ARIA Award for Best Pop Release and is nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Dance Recording. "Tension" and "Hold On to Now" served as the follow up singles.
In November, Minogue embarked on a concert residency – More Than Just a Residency at Voltaire at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. The show sold out within minutes. Michael Idato of The Sydney Morning Herald said that a show was "brief and a blast of Vegas high". In December, a television concert special, An Audience with Kylie filmed at the Royal Albert Hall, aired on ITV. Ateeqe Bhatti of Attitude gave her performance a good review, labeling Minogue as a "masterclass in stage performance".
Minogue explained that she first became interested in pop music during her adolescence: "I first got into pop music in 1981, I'd say. It was all about Prince, Adam + the Ants, that whole New Romantic period. Prior to that, it was the Jackson 5, Donna Summer, and my dad's records – the Stones and Beatles." She would also listen to the records of Olivia Newton-John and ABBA. She said that she "wanted to be" Newton-John while growing up. Her producer, Pete Waterman, recalled Minogue during the early years of her music career with the observation: "She was setting her sights on becoming the new Prince or Madonna ... What I found amazing was that she was outselling Madonna four to one, but still wanted to be her." Minogue came to prominence in the music scene as a bubblegum pop singer and was deemed a "product of the Stock Aitken Waterman Hit Factory". Australian musician Nick Cave, who worked with her, was a major influence on her artistic development. She told The Guardian: "He's definitely infiltrated my life in beautiful and profound ways." Throughout her career, her work was also influenced by British singer-songwriter-producer Cathy Dennis, British record producer D Mob, British band Scritti Politti, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk, British rapper Tricky, Irish rock band U2 and Japanese pop band Pizzicato Five, among others.
Minogue has been known for her soft soprano vocal range. Tim Sendra of AllMusic reviewed her album Aphrodite and said that Minogue's "slightly nasal, girl next door vocals serve her needs perfectly." According to Fiona MacDonald from Madison magazine, Minogue "has never shied away from making some brave but questionable artistic decisions". In musical terms, Minogue has worked with many genres in pop and dance music. However, her signature music has been contemporary disco music. Her first studio albums with Stock, Aitken, and Waterman present a more bubblegum pop influence, with many critics comparing her to American singer-songwriter Madonna. Chris True from AllMusic, reviewed her debut album, Kylie and found her music "standard late-'80s Stock-Aitken-Waterman bubblegum", however he stated that she presented the most personality of any 1980s recording artist. He said of her third album Rhythm of Love, from the early 1990s, "The songwriting is stronger, the production dynamic, and Kylie seems more confident vocally." At the time of her third studio album, "She began to trade in her cutesy, bubblegum pop image for a more mature one, and in turn, a more sexual one." Chris True stated that during her relationship with Australian singer-actor Michael Hutchence, "her shedding of the near-virginal façade that dominated her first two albums, began to have an effect, not only on how the press and her fans treated her, but in the evolution of her music."
Her self-titled fifth studio album, primarily a dance-pop album that integrates elements of R&B and adult contemporary music saw a shift in her music. Chris True of AllMusic stated the album is a "remarkable change from Minogue's previous teen pop material" and the "start of a second phase" in her music career. From her work on her sixth studio album, Impossible Princess, her songwriting and musical content began to change. She was constantly writing down words, exploring the form and meaning of sentences. She had written lyrics before, but called them "safe, just neatly rhymed words and that's that". Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine said that the album bears a resemblance to Madonna's Ray of Light (1998). He said that she took inspiration from "both the Britpop and electronica movements of the mid-'90s", saying that "Impossible Princess is the work of an artist willing to take risks".
Her seventh studio album, Light Years is a disco-influenced dance-pop record, with AllMusic's Chris True calling it "Arguably one of the best disco records since the '70s". True stated that her eighth studio album, Fever, "combines the disco-diva comeback of Light Years with simple dance rhythms". Her ninth studio album, Body Language, was quite different from her musical experiments in the past as it was a "successful" attempt at broadening her sound with electro and hip-hop for instance. Incorporating styles of dance music with funk, disco and R&B, the album was listed on Q's "Best Albums of 2003".
Critics said Minogue's tenth studio album X did not feature enough "consistency" and Chris True called the tracks "cold, calculated dance-pop numbers." Tim Sendra of AllMusic said that her eleventh album, Aphrodite, "rarely strays past sweet love songs or happy dance anthems" and "the main sound is the kind of glittery disco pop that really is her strong suit." Sendra found Aphrodite "One of her best, in fact." Kiss Me Once, her twelfth studio album has been described by critics as her return to contemporary pop music.
Her fourteenth studio album, Golden was heavily influenced by country music, although maintaining her dance-pop sensibilities. Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine wrote that "Golden further bolsters Minogue's reputation for taking risks—and artfully sets the stage for her inevitable disco comeback." For her fifteenth studio album, Disco, she began to audio engineer her own music due to the restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Minogue's efforts to be taken seriously as a recording artist were initially hindered by the perception that she had not "paid her dues" and was no more than a manufactured pop star exploiting the image she had created during her stint on the soap opera Neighbours. She acknowledged this viewpoint, saying, "If you're part of a record company, I think to a degree it's fair to say that you're a manufactured product. You're a product and you're selling a product. It doesn't mean that you're not talented and that you don't make creative and business decisions about what you will and won't do and where you want to go."
In 1993, Australian director Baz Luhrmann introduced Minogue to photographer Bert Stern, notable for his work with American actress Marilyn Monroe. Stern photographed her in Los Angeles and, comparing her to Monroe, commented that Minogue had a similar mix of vulnerability and eroticism. Throughout her career, she has chosen photographers who attempt to create a new "look" for her, and the resulting photographs have appeared in a variety of magazines, from the cutting edge The Face to the more traditionally sophisticated Vogue and Vanity Fair, making the Minogue face and name known to a broad range of people. Stylist William Baker has suggested that this is part of the reason she entered mainstream pop culture in Europe more successfully than many other pop singers who concentrate solely on selling records.
By 2000, Minogue was considered to have achieved a degree of musical credibility for having maintained her career longer than her critics had expected. Her progression from the wholesome "girl next door" to a more sophisticated performer with a flirtatious and playful persona attracted new fans. Her music video for "Spinning Around" led to some media outlets referring to her as "SexKylie", and sex became a stronger element in her subsequent videos. In September 2002, she was ranked 27 on VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists list. She was also named one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time by Men's Health in 2013. William Baker described her status as a sex symbol as a "double edged sword", observing that "we always attempted to use her sex appeal as an enhancement of her music and to sell a record. But now it has become in danger of eclipsing what she actually is: a pop singer." After 20 years as a performer, she was described by BBC's Fiona Pryor as a fashion "trend-setter" and a "style icon who constantly reinvents herself". Pointing out the several reinventions in Minogue's image, Larissa Dubecki from The Age labelled her the "Mother of Reinvention".
Minogue has been inspired by and compared to American artist Madonna throughout her career. She received negative comments that her Rhythm of Love Tour in 1991 was too similar visually to Madonna's Blond Ambition World Tour, for which critics labelled her a Madonna wannabe. Writing for the Observer Music Monthly, Rufus Wainwright described her as "the anti-Madonna. Self-knowledge is a truly beautiful thing and Kylie knows herself inside out. She is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it. She is the gay shorthand for joy." Kathy McCabe for The Telegraph noted that Minogue and Madonna follow similar styles in music and fashion, but concluded, "Where they truly diverge on the pop-culture scale is in shock value. Minogue's clips might draw a gasp from some but Madonna's ignite religious and political debate unlike any other artist on the planet ... Simply, Madonna is the dark force; Kylie is the light force." She has said of Madonna, "Her huge influence on the world, in pop and fashion, meant that I wasn't immune to the trends she created. I admire Madonna greatly but in the beginning she made it difficult for artists like me, she had done everything there was to be done", and "Madonna's the Queen of Pop, I'm the princess. I'm quite happy with that."
In January 2007, Madame Tussauds in London unveiled its fourth waxwork of Minogue. During the same week a bronze cast of her hands was added to Wembley Arena's "Square of Fame". In 2007, a bronze statue of Minogue was unveiled at Melbourne Docklands for permanent display.
In March 2010, Minogue was declared by researchers as the "most powerful celebrity in Britain". The study examined how marketers identify celebrity and brand partnerships. Mark Husak, head of Millward Brown's UK media practice, said: "Kylie is widely accepted as an adopted Brit. People know her, like her and she is surrounded by positive buzz". In 2016, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, Minogue had a net worth of £55 million.
In May 2020, Alison Boshoff of The New Zealand Herald labelled her as the "great comeback queen of Pop, for springing back from any setback" in her life and career. In November 2020, Nick Levine of BBC described her as "pop's most underestimated icon", adding "she's [Minogue] lasted more than 30 years by delivering pop songs with passion and panache, and retaining a quintessentially likeable persona along the way, in such a cutthroat industry." In June 2023, Barbara Ellen of The Guardian commented that "modesty, likeability and vulnerability have aided Minogue enduring appeal", 36 years after the 1987 single "I Should Be So Lucky" was released.
Minogue is regarded as a gay icon, which she has encouraged with comments including "I am not a traditional gay icon. There's been no tragedy in my life, only tragic outfits" and "My gay audience has been with me from the beginning ... they kind of adopted me." Her status as a gay icon has been attributed to her music, fashion sense and career longevity. Author Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis wrote about Minogue's appeal to gay men in Strike a Pose, Forever: The Legacy of Vogue... and observed that she "frequently incorporates camp-inflected themes in her extravaganzas, drawing mainly from the disco scene, the S/M culture, and the burlesque stage." In Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (2007), Marc Brennan stated that Minogue's work "provides a gorgeous form of escapism". Minogue has explained that she first became aware of her gay audience in 1988, when several drag queens performed to her music at a Sydney pub, and she later saw a similar show in Melbourne. She said that she felt "very touched" to have such an "appreciative crowd", and this encouraged her to perform at gay venues throughout the world, as well as headlining the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Minogue has one of the largest gay followings in the world.
Entertainment Weekly's Ernest Macias said that, by combining "a panache for fabulous fashion" with "her unequivocal disco-pop sound", Minogue "established herself as a timeless icon." Paula Joye of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that "Minogue's fusion of fashion and music has made a huge contribution to the style zeitgeist." Fiona MacDonald, from fashion magazine Madison, acknowledged Minogue as "one of the handful of singers recognised around the world by her first name alone. ... And yet despite becoming an international music superstar, style icon and honorary Brit, those two syllables still seem as Australian as the smell of eucalyptus or a barbeque on a hot day." In 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum "celebrated her influence on fashion" with an exhibition called Kylie Minogue: Image of a Pop Star.
In 2012, Dino Scatena of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Minogue: "A quarter of a century ago, a sequence of symbiotic events altered the fabric of Australian popular culture and set in motion the transformation of a 19-year-old soap actor from Melbourne into an international pop icon." Scatena also described her as "Australia's single most successful entertainer and a world-renowned style idol". In the same year, VH1 cited Minogue among its choices on the 100 Greatest Women in Music and the 50 Greatest Women of the Video Era.
Minogue has been recognised with many honorific nicknames, most notably the "Princess of Pop". Jon O'Brien of AllMusic reviewed her box-set The Albums 2000–2010 and stated that it "contains plenty of moments to justify her position as one of the all-time premier pop princesses." In January 2012, NME critics ranked her single "Can't Get You Out of My Head" at number four on their Greatest Pop Songs in History list. Channel 4 listed her as one of the world's greatest pop stars. In 2020, Rolling Stone Australia placed her at number three on its 50 Greatest Australian Artists of All Time list.
Minogue's work has influenced pop and dance artists including Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, Alice Chater, Rina Sawayama, Kim Petras, Melanie C, Ricki-Lee Coulter, Years & Years singer Olly Alexander, September, Diana Vickers, The Veronicas, Slayyyter, Pabllo Vittar, Hailee Steinfeld and Paris Hilton. In 2007, French avant-garde guitarist Noël Akchoté released So Lucky, featuring solo guitar versions of tunes recorded by Minogue.
Minogue has received many accolades, including a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards, seventeen ARIA Music Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards and six Mo Awards, including the Australian Performer of the Year in 2001 and 2003. In October 2007, she was honoured with Music Industry Trust's award for recognition of her 20-year career and was hailed as "an icon of pop and style", becoming the first female musician to receive a Music Industry Trust award. In July 2008, she was invested by Charles III as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In April 2017, the Britain–Australia Society recognised Minogue with its 2016 award for outstanding contribution to the improving of relations and bilateral understanding between Britain and Australia. The citation reads: "In recognition of significant contributions to the Britain-Australia relationship as an acclaimed singer, songwriter, actor and iconic personality in both countries". The award was announced at a reception in Australia House but was personally presented the next day by Prince Philip, Patron of the Society, at Windsor Castle. In January 2019, she was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours.
In August 2004, she held the record for the most singles at number one in the ARIA singles chart, with nine. In November 2011, Minogue was inducted by the Australian Recording Industry Association into the ARIA Hall of Fame. In January 2011, Minogue received a Guinness World Records citation for having the most consecutive decades with top five albums in the UK, with all her albums doing so. In February 2011, she made history for having two songs inside the top three on the U.S. Dance Club Songs chart, with her singles "Better than Today" and "Higher" charting at one and three, respectively. In June 2012, Official Charts Company mentioned that Minogue is the 12th best selling singer in the United Kingdom to date, and the third best selling female artist, selling over 10.1 million singles. In December 2016, Billboard ranked her as the eighteenth most successful dance artist of all time. In November 2020, she became the only female artist to reach the top spot of the UK Albums Chart in five consecutive decades, when her studio album, Disco reached number one. In June 2023, she became the only female artist to reach the top ten of the UK Singles Chart in the 1980s to the 2020s, when her single "Padam Padam" entered the top ten.
As of November 2020, Minogue has sold 80 million records worldwide. She is the most successful Australian female recording artist of all time. According to PRS for Music, her 2001 single "Can't Get You Out of My Head" was the most-played track of the 2000s, "after receiving the most airplay and live covers" in the decade.
Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36 in May 2005, leading to the postponement of the remainder of her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour and her withdrawal from the Glastonbury Festival. Her hospitalisation and treatment in Melbourne resulted in a brief but intense period of media coverage, particularly in Australia, where then Prime Minister John Howard issued a statement of support. As media and fans began to congregate outside the Minogue residence in Melbourne, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks warned the international media that any disruption of the Minogue family's rights under Australian privacy laws would not be tolerated.
Minogue underwent a lumpectomy, on 21 May 2005 at Cabrini Hospital in Malvern and commenced chemotherapy treatment soon after. After the surgery, the disease "had no recurrence". On 8 July 2005, she made her first public appearance after surgery when she visited a children's cancer ward at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital. She returned to France where she completed her chemotherapy treatment at the Institut Gustave-Roussy in Villejuif, near Paris. In January 2006, her publicist announced that she had finished chemotherapy, and her treatment continued for the next months. On her return to Australia for her concert tour, she discussed her illness and said that her chemotherapy treatment had been like "experiencing a nuclear bomb". While appearing on the American television talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2008, she said that her cancer had originally been misdiagnosed. She commented, "Because someone is in a white coat and using big medical instruments doesn't necessarily mean they're right", but later spoke of her respect for the medical profession.
Minogue was acknowledged for the impact she made by publicly discussing her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. In May 2008, the French Cultural Minister Christine Albanel said, "Doctors now even go as far as saying there is a "Kylie effect" that encourages young women to have regular checks." Several scientific studies have been carried out how publicity around her case resulted in more women undergoing regular checks for cancer symptoms. Television host Giuliana Rancic cited Minogue's cancer story as "inspirational" when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Minogue has helped fundraise on many occasions. In 1989, she participated in recording "Do They Know It's Christmas?" under the name Band Aid II to help raise money. She spent a week in Thailand after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. In 2008, Minogue pledged her support for a campaign to raise money for abused children, to be donated to the British charities ChildLine and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. According to the source, around $93 million was raised. She spoke out in relation to the cause, saying: "Finding the courage to tell someone about being abused is one of the most difficult decisions a child will ever have to make." Since her breast cancer diagnosis in 2005, she has been a sponsor and ambassador for the cause. In May 2010, she held a breast cancer campaign for the first time. She later spoke about the cause saying "It means so much to me to be part of this year's campaign for Fashion Targets Breast Cancer. I wholeheartedly support their efforts to raise funds for the vital work undertaken by Breakthrough Breast Cancer." For the cause, she "posed in a silk sheet emblazoned with the distinctive target logo of Fashion Targets Breast Cancer" for photographer Mario Testino. Minogue is a supporter of amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, hosting the amfAR Inspiration Gala in Los Angeles in 2010. She has also attended amfAR fundraising benefits in Cannes, and performed at galas for the charity in São Paulo and Hong Kong.
In early 2010, Minogue along with many other artists, under the name Helping Haiti, recorded a cover version of "Everybody Hurts". The single was a fundraiser to help after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. During her 2011 Aphrodite World Tour, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, which was on her itinerary. She declared she would continue to tour there, stating, "I was here to do shows and I chose not to cancel, Why did I choose not to cancel? I thought long and hard about it and it wasn't an easy decision to make." While she was there, she and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard were star guests at an Australian Embassy fundraiser for the disaster. In April 2014, she launched One Note Against Cancer, a campaign to raise funds and awareness for French cancer research charity APREC (The Alliance for Cancer Research). As part of the campaign, she released the single "Crystallize", with the public able to bid via online auction to own each of the song's 4,408 notes. The proceeds of the auction were donated to APREC, with the names of the successful bidders appearing in the accompanying music video's credits. In January 2020, in response to the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, she announced that she and her family were donating A$500,000 towards immediate firefighting efforts and ongoing support.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kylie Ann Minogue AO OBE (/mɪˈnoʊɡ/; born 28 May 1968) is an Australian singer, songwriter and actress. Minogue is the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time, having sold over 80 million records worldwide. She has been recognised for reinventing herself in music as well as fashion, and is referred to by the European press as the \"Princess of Pop\" and a style icon. Her accolades include a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards and eighteen ARIA Music Awards.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring as Charlene Robinson in the Australian soap opera Neighbours (1986–1988). She began her music career in the late 1980s, releasing four bubblegum and dance-pop-influenced studio albums under PWL. By the early 1990s, Minogue had amassed several top ten singles in Australia and the UK, including \"The Loco-Motion\", \"I Should Be So Lucky\", \"Especially for You\", \"Hand on Your Heart\" and \"Better the Devil You Know\". Taking more creative control over her music, she signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released the albums Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "By joining Parlophone in 1999, Minogue returned to mainstream dance-oriented music with Light Years (2000), including the number-one hits \"Spinning Around\" and \"On a Night Like This\". The follow-up, Fever (2001), was an international breakthrough for Minogue, becoming her best-selling album to date. Its lead single, \"Can't Get You Out of My Head\" becoming one of the most successful singles of the 2000s, selling over five million units. Follow up singles, \"In Your Eyes\" and \"Love at First Sight\" became hits as well. She continued reinventing her image and experimenting with a range of genres on her subsequent albums, which spawned successful singles such as \"Slow\", \"I Believe in You\", \"2 Hearts\" and \"All the Lovers\". In 2017, she partnered with BMG Rights Management, with \"Dancing\" (2018) as their first release. In the following years, Minogue became the only female artist to have a number-one album and a top ten single, from the 1980s to the 2020s in the UK charts, with Disco (2020) and \"Padam Padam\" (2023) respectively.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In film, Minogue made her debut in The Delinquents (1989), and appeared in Street Fighter (1994), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012) and San Andreas (2015). In reality television, she appeared as a judge on The Voice UK and The Voice Australia both in 2014. Her other ventures include product endorsements, books, perfumes, charitable work and a wine brand. Minogue's achievements include being an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kylie Ann Minogue was born at Bethlehem Hospital in Caulfield South, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, on 28 May 1968, to car company accountant Ronald Charles Minogue and his wife Carol Ann (née Jones), a former ballet dancer. Both parents had moved to Australia in 1958 as part of an assisted migration scheme on the ship Fairsea. Also aboard were the Gibb family of later Bee Gees fame. Minogue is of English and Welsh descent (though her surname is of Irish origin) and was named after the Nyungar word for \"boomerang\". She is the eldest of three children: her brother, Brendan Minogue, is a news cameraman in Australia, and her sister, Dannii Minogue, is an actress, singer and television host. The family frequently moved around various suburbs in Melbourne to sustain their living expenses, which Minogue found unsettling as a child. She would often stay at home reading, sewing, and learning to play violin and piano. When they moved to Surrey Hills, Victoria, she went on to Camberwell High School. During her schooling years, she found it difficult to make friends. She got her HSC with subjects including Arts and Graphics and English. Minogue described herself as being of \"average intelligence\" and \"quite modest\" during her high school years. Growing up, she and her sister Dannii took singing and dancing lessons.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A 10-year-old Minogue accompanied Dannii to a hearing arranged by the sisters' aunt, Suzette, and, while producers found Dannii too young, Australian television producer Alan Hardy gave Minogue a minor role in soap opera The Sullivans (1979). She also appeared in another small role in soap opera Skyways (1980). In 1985, she was cast in one of the lead roles in the television series The Henderson Kids. Minogue took time off school to film The Henderson Kids and while Carol was not impressed, Minogue felt that she needed the independence to make it into the entertainment industry. During filming, co-star Nadine Garner labelled Minogue \"fragile\" after producers yelled at her for forgetting her lines; she would often cry on set. Minogue was dropped from the second season of the show after Hardy felt the need for her character to be \"written off\". In retrospect, Hardy stated that removing her from the show \"turned out to be the best thing for her\". Interested in following a career in music, Minogue made a demo tape for the producers of weekly music program Young Talent Time, which featured Dannii as a regular performer. Minogue gave her first television singing performance on the show in 1985 but was not invited to join the cast.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "She was cast in the soap opera Neighbours in 1986, as Charlene Mitchell, a schoolgirl turned garage mechanic. The show achieved popularity in the UK, and a story arc that created a romance between her character and the character played by Jason Donovan culminated in a wedding episode in 1987 that attracted an audience of 20 million viewers. She became the first person to win four Logie Awards in one year and was the youngest recipient of the \"Gold Logie Award for Most Popular Personality on Australian Television\", with the result determined by public vote.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During a Fitzroy Football Club benefit concert, Minogue performed \"I Got You Babe\" as a duet with fellow actor John Waters, and \"The Loco-Motion\" as an encore. Producer Greg Petherick arranged for Minogue to record a demo of the latter song, re-titled as \"Locomotion\". The demo was sent to the head of Mushroom Records Michael Gudinski, who decided to sign Minogue in early 1987 based on her popularity from Neighbours. The track was first recorded in big band style, and was later given a completely new backing track by producer Mike Duffy, inspired by the hi-NRG sound of English band Dead or Alive. \"Locomotion\" was released as her debut single in Australia on 13 July 1987, the week after the wedding episode of Neighbours premiered. The single became the best-selling single of the decade in Australia, according to the Kent Music Report.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The success of the single resulted in Minogue travelling to London to work with record producing trio Stock Aitken Waterman in September 1987. They knew little of Minogue and had forgotten that she was arriving; as a result, they wrote \"I Should Be So Lucky\" while she waited outside the studio. The track was written and recorded in under 40 minutes. The song reached number one in Australia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Switzerland and the UK. Although Minogue needed to be convinced to work with Stock Aitken Waterman again after feeling she'd been disrespected during her first recording session, more sessions with the producers occurred from February to April 1988 in London and Melbourne, where the singer was filming her last episodes for Neighbours. The trio ended up composing and producing all the tracks on the forthcoming album and produced a new version of \"The Loco-Motion\". Producer Pete Waterman justified the highly controversial decision to re-record the latter track by claiming Minogue's platinum-selling Australian version was poorly produced, but Mike Duffy instead blamed the decision on Waterman's alleged wish to claim the prestige and royalties from the track's placement of the soundtrack of the 1988 film Arthur 2: On the Rocks.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Minogue's self-titled debut album, Kylie, was released in July 1988. The album is a collection of dance-oriented pop tunes and spent more than a year on the UK Albums Chart, including several weeks at number one, eventually becoming the best-selling album of the 1980s by a female artist. It went gold in the United States, while the single \"The Locomotion\" reached number three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, and number one on the Canadian dance chart. The single \"Got to Be Certain\" became her third consecutive number one single in Australia. Later in the year, she left Neighbours to focus on her music career. She collaborated with Jason Donovan on the song \"Especially for You\", after \"intense\" demand for the duet from the public, media and retailers overcame her initial reservations. The single peaked at number one in the UK. By December 2014, it sold its one millionth copy in the country. She was sometimes referred to as \"the Singing Budgie\" by her detractors over the coming years. In a review of the album Kylie for AllMusic, Chris True described the tunes as \"standard, late-80s ... bubblegum\", but added, \"her cuteness makes these rather vapid tracks bearable\". She received the ARIA Award for the year's highest-selling single. She won her second consecutive ARIA Award for the year's highest-selling single, and received a \"Special Achievement Award\".",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Minogue's second studio album, Enjoy Yourself, was released in October 1989. The album was number-one in the UK, and spawned the number-one singles in the country such as \"Hand on Your Heart\" and \"Tears on My Pillow\". In North America, it failed to sell well and she was dropped by American record label Geffen Records. Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine, stated \"there isn't a lot to differentiate her sophomore effort from its predecessor by repeating the sonic template of her debut album.\" In support of the album, she embarked on her concert tour, the Enjoy Yourself Tour in Europe, Asia and Australia in February 1990.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Minogue's debut film, The Delinquents, was released in December 1989. The film received mixed reviews by critics but proved popular with audiences. In the UK, it grossed more than £200,000, and in Australia, it was the fourth-highest-grossing local film of 1989 and the highest-grossing local film of 1990. From 1989 to 1991, Minogue dated Australian INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Unhappy with her level of creative input on her first two albums, Minogue worked with her manager Terry Blamey and her Australian label Mushroom Records to force a change in her relationship with SAW, and to push for a more mature sound.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Minogue's third album, Rhythm of Love, was released in November 1990 and was described as \"leaps and bounds more mature\" than her previous albums by AllMusic's Chris True.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The album did not match the commercial success of its predecessors, peaking at number nine in the UK, although Blamey described the album as a \"big success\" that \"made lots of money for PWL\". Three of its singles – \"Better the Devil You Know\", \"Step Back in Time\" and \"Shocked – reached the top ten in Australia. In the UK, all four singles, including \"What Do I Have to Do\", entered the top ten.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Entertainment Weekly's Ernest Macias observed that, by the third album, Minogue \"presented a more mature and sexually-fuelled image\". Macias also pointed out that the album \"showcases the beginning of Minogue's career as a pop icon, propelled by her angelic vocals, sensual music videos, chic fashion, and distinct dance sound.\" Her relationship with Australian musician-actor Michael Hutchence was also seen as part of her departure from her earlier persona. The making of the \"Better the Devil You Know\" music video was the first time Minogue \"felt part of the creative process\". She said: \"I wasn't in charge but I had a voice. I'd bought some clothes on King's Road for the video. I saw a new way to express my point of view creatively.\" To promote the album, she embarked on the Rhythm of Love Tour in February 1991.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Minogue's fourth album, Let's Get to It, was released in October 1991. It peaked at number fifteen in the UK, making it her first album to fail to reach the top ten. The first single from the album, \"Word Is Out\", became her first single to miss the top ten in the UK. Subsequent singles \"If You Were with Me Now\", \"Give Me Just a Little More Time\" and \"Finer Feelings\" – all reached the top ten. Nick Levine of Digital Spy labeled the album \"lacking a moment of pure pop brilliance to match her [Minogue's] previously released singles.\" In support of the album, she embarked on the Let's Get to It Tour in October. She later expressed her opinion that she was stifled by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, saying, \"I was very much a puppet in the beginning. I was blinkered by my record company. I was unable to look left or right.\"",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Minogue's first best-of compilation album, titled Greatest Hits, was released in August 1992. Chris True of AllMusic called it \"an excellent overview of the first half of Minogue's career.\" It reached number one in the UK and number three in Australia. The compilation spawned the singles \"What Kind of Fool\" and a cover of Kool & the Gang's \"Celebration\". Both singles peaked outside of the top ten in the UK. By the end of 1992, PWL did not renew their contract with Minogue, believing the singer \"was [not] moving in a direction that was going to be successful\".",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Minogue's signing with British record label Deconstruction Records in 1993 marked a new phase in her career. Her fifth studio album, Kylie Minogue, was released in September 1994 and was a departure from her previous efforts as it \"no longer featured the Stock-Aitken-Waterman production gloss\", with critics praising Minogue's vocals and the album production. It was produced by dance music producers the Brothers in Rhythm, namely Dave Seaman and Steve Anderson, who had previously produced \"Finer Feelings\". As of 2015, Anderson continued to be Minogue's musical director. The album peaked at number four in the UK. Its lead single, \"Confide in Me\", spent four weeks at number one in Australia, and peaked at number two in the UK. The follow-up singles, \"Put Yourself in My Place\" and \"Where Is the Feeling?\", both reached the top twenty in the UK.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "During this period, Minogue made a guest appearance as herself in an episode of the comedy The Vicar of Dibley. Director Steven E. de Souza saw her cover photo in Australia's Who Magazine as one of \"The 30 Most Beautiful People in the World\" and offered her a role opposite Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme in the film Street Fighter. The film was a moderate success, earning US$70 million in the US box-office, but received poor reviews, with The Washington Post's Richard Harrington calling Minogue \"the worst actress in the English-speaking world\". She had an affair with Van Damme while shooting the film in Thailand. She had a minor role in the 1996 film Bio-Dome starring American actors Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin. She also appeared in the 1995 short film Hayride to Hell and in the 1997 film Diana & Me. In 1995, she collaborated with Australian artist Nick Cave for the song \"Where the Wild Roses Grow\". Cave had been interested in working with Minogue since hearing \"Better the Devil You Know\", saying it contained \"one of pop music's most violent and distressing lyrics\". The music video for the song was inspired by John Everett Millais's painting Ophelia (1851–52), and showed Minogue as the murdered woman, floating in a pond as a serpent swam over her body. The single received widespread attention in Europe, where it reached the top 10 in several countries, and reached number two in Australia. The song won ARIA Awards for \"Song of the Year\" and \"Best Pop Release\". Following concert appearances with Cave, Minogue recited the lyrics to \"I Should Be So Lucky\" as poetry in London's Royal Albert Hall.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "By 1997, Minogue was in a relationship with French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, who encouraged her to develop her creativity. Inspired by a mutual appreciation of Japanese culture, they created a visual combination of \"geisha and manga superheroine\" for the photographs taken for Minogue's sixth studio album, Impossible Princess, and the music video for \"GBI (German Bold Italic)\", her collaboration with Japanese musician Towa Tei. She drew inspiration from the music of artists such as Scottish singer Shirley Manson and American rock band Garbage, Icelandic singer Björk, British rapper Tricky and Irish rock band U2, and Japanese pop musicians such as Pizzicato Five and Towa Tei. The album featured collaborations with musicians including James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore of the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers. It garnered some negative reviews upon its release in 1997, but would be praised as her most personal and best work in retrospective reviews. In 2003, Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani called it a \"deeply personal effort\" and \"Minogue's best album to date\", while Evan Sawdey, from PopMatters, described the album as \"one of the most crazed, damn-near perfect dance-pop albums ever created\" in a 2008 review. Mostly a dance album, she countered suggestions that she was trying to become an indie artist.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Acknowledging that Minogue had attempted to escape the perceptions of her that had developed during her early career, she commented that she was ready to \"forget the painful criticism\" and \"accept the past, embrace it, use it\". The music video for \"Did It Again\" paid homage to her earlier \"incarnations\". Retitled Kylie Minogue in the UK following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it became the lowest-selling album of her career. At the end of the year, a campaign by Virgin Radio stated, \"We've done something to improve Minogue's records: we've banned them.\" The lead single \"Some Kind of Bliss\" failed to reach the top twenty in the UK. In Australia, the album was a success and spent 35 weeks on the album chart. After the album's release, she was dropped by Deconstruction in 1998. Her Intimate and Live tour in 1998 was extended due to demand. She gave several live performances in Australia, including the 1998 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and the opening ceremonies of Melbourne's Crown Casino, and Sydney's Fox Studios in 1999 (where she performed Marilyn Monroe's \"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend\") as well as a Christmas concert in Dili, East Timor, in association with the United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1999, Minogue performed a duet with the English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys' on their Nightlife album and spent several months in Barbados performing in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. She then appeared in the film Sample People and recorded a cover version of Russell Morris's \"The Real Thing\" for the soundtrack. She signed with German–British record label Parlophone in April, who wanted to re-establish Minogue as a pop artist.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Minogue's seventh studio album, Light Years, was released in September 2000. NME magazine called it a \"fun, perfectly-formed\" record, which saw Minogue \"dropping her considerable concern for cool and bouncing back to her disco-pop roots\". It was a commercial success, becoming her first number one album in her native Australia and charting at number two in the UK. The lead single, \"Spinning Around\", debuted atop the UK in July, making her the second artist to have a number-one single in three consecutive decades, after American singer-songwriter Madonna. Its accompanying video featured Minogue in revealing gold hotpants, which came to be regarded as a \"trademark\". Three other singles — \"On a Night Like This\", \"Kids\" with English singer Robbie Williams and \"Please Stay\" all peaked in the top ten in the UK.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "An elaborate art book titled Kylie, featuring contributions by Minogue and creative director William Baker, was published by Booth-Clibborn in March 2000. At the time, she began a romantic relationship with model James Gooding. Their relationship ended after two and a half years. In October, she performed at both the closing ceremonies of the 2000 Summer Olympics and in the opening ceremony of the Paralympics, all held in Sydney. Her performance of ABBA's \"Dancing Queen\" was chosen as one of the most memorable Olympic closing ceremony moments by Kate Samuelson of TNT. In March 2001, she embarked on the On a Night Like This Tour, which was inspired by the style of Broadway shows and the musicals of the 1930s. She also made a brief cameo as The Green Fairy in Baz Luhrmann's film, Moulin Rouge!. It earned her an MTV Movie Award nomination in 2002. \"Spinning Around\" and Light Years consecutively won the ARIA Award for Best Pop Release in 2000 and 2001. In early 2001, she launched her own brand of underwear called Love Kylie in partnership with the Holeproof brand of Australian Pacific Brands.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In September 2001, Minogue released \"Can't Get You Out of My Head\", the lead single from her eighth studio album, Fever. It reached number one in over forty countries and sold five million copies, becoming her most successful single. The accompanying music video featured the singer sporting a hooded white jumpsuit with deep plunging neckline. The remaining singles — \"In Your Eyes\", \"Love at First Sight\" and \"Come into My World\" — all peaked in the top ten in Australia and the UK. The album was released in October and topped the charts in Australia, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and the UK, eventually achieving worldwide sales in excess of six million. Dominique Leone from Pitchfork complimented its simple and \"comfortable\" composition, terming it a \"mature sound from a mature artist, and one that may very well re-establish Minogue for the VH1 generation\". The warm reception towards the album led to its release in the U.S. in February 2002, through Capitol Records. Her first release in the U.S. in thirteen years, which led to her highest-charting album in the country, debuting at number three on the Billboard 200. On the Canadian Albums Chart, it peaked at number ten.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In April 2002, Minogue embarked on her KylieFever2002 tour in Europe and Australia, in support of the album. In the U.S., she performed several songs from the setlist in a series of KIIS-FM Jingle Ball concerts throughout 2002 and 2003. She received four accolades at the ARIA Music Awards of 2002, including Highest Selling Single and Single of the Year for \"Can't Get You Out of My Head\". That same year, she won her first Brit Award for International Female Solo Artist and Best International Album for Fever.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2003, for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards, Minogue received her first Grammy nomination for Best Dance Recording for \"Love at First Sight\", before winning the award for \"Come into My World\" the following year. It marked the first time an Australian recording artist had won in a major category since Men at Work in 1983. She began a relationship with French actor Olivier Martinez after meeting him at the 2003 Grammy Awards ceremony. They ended their relationship in February 2007, and remained on friendly terms. She was reported to have been \"saddened by false [media] accusations of [Martinez's] disloyalty\" and defended Martinez, and acknowledged the support he had given during her treatment for breast cancer.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In November 2003, Minogue released her ninth studio album, Body Language, following an invitation-only concert, titled Money Can't Buy, at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. The album downplayed the disco style and was inspired by 1980s artists such as Scritti Politti, The Human League, Adam and the Ants and Prince, blending their styles with elements of hip hop. Andy Battaglia from The A.V. Club stated the album \"shows Minogue as a surprisingly impressive presence in spurts, but she sounds better with her pleasure engine revving at full purr\". The sales of the album were lower than anticipated after the success of Fever, peaking at number six in the UK. The album achieved first week sales of 43,000 and declined significantly in the second week. The lead single, \"Slow\", was a number one hit in Australia and the UK. In the US, it received a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Dance Recording category. Two more singles were released – \"Red Blooded Woman\" and \"Chocolate\", both charted within the top ten in the UK.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In November 2004, Minogue released her second greatest hits compilation album, Ultimate Kylie. It peaked at number five in Australia and number four in the UK. The Guardian included the compilation in their \"1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die\" list in 2007. The album yielded two singles: \"I Believe in You\" and \"Giving You Up\", which both entered the top ten in Australia and in the UK. \"I Believe in You\" was later nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of \"Best Dance Recording\".",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In February 2005, the animated film The Magic Roundabout was released, in which she served as the voice actress for the role of Florence. She reprised the role in 2006 and recorded the theme song for the American edition, re-titled as Doogal. In March, Minogue commenced her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour. It initially had tour dates in Europe, Australia, Asia and a headlining appearance in Glastonbury Festival announced. In May, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, forcing her to cancel the remainder of the tour. In the same month, she underwent surgery and commenced chemotherapy treatment soon after.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In January 2006, it was announced that Minogue had finished chemotherapy and the disease \"had no recurrence\" after the surgery. She would continue her treatment for the next months. Her children's book, The Showgirl Princess, written during her period of convalescence, was published in October, and her perfume, Darling, was launched in November. The range was later augmented by eau de toilettes including Pink Sparkle, Couture and Inverse. She resumed her then cancelled tour in November, under the title Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. Her dance routines had been reworked to accommodate her medical condition, with slower costume changes and longer breaks between sections of the show to conserve her strength. The Sydney Morning Herald described the tour as an \"extravaganza\" and \"nothing less than a triumph\".",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In October 2007, Minogue was featured in White Diamond: A Personal Portrait of Kylie Minogue, a documentary filmed during 2006 and 2007 as she embarked on her Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour. In November, her tenth studio and \"comeback\" album, X was released. The electro-styled album included contributions from British producer Guy Chambers, British singer-songwriter Cathy Dennis, Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant and English DJ-producer Calvin Harris. It received criticism from Chris True from AllMusic, for the \"triviality\" of its subject matter in light of her experiences with breast cancer. Both the album and its lead single, \"2 Hearts\", entered at number one in Australia. In the UK, the album initially attracted lukewarm sales. Its commercial performance eventually improved. The lead single and follow-up singles – \"In My Arms\" and \"Wow\", all peaked inside the top ten in the UK. In the U.S., the album was nominated at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards for Best Electronic/Dance Album. She appeared on her own television special The Kylie Show, which featured music performances and comedy sketches. By December, she guest-starred in the British television series Doctor Who's Christmas special – \"Voyage of the Damned\" as Astrid Peth. It was watched by 13.31 million viewers in the UK, which was the show's highest viewing figure since 1979.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In February 2008, Minogue launched her range of home furnishings, Kylie Minogue at Home. Her business venture later went on to launch its newest collection by February 2018, for its tenth anniversary. In May, she embarked on the KylieX2008 tour, her most expensive tour to date with production costs of £10 million. It was considered a success, with ticket sales estimated at US$70 million. She was then appointed a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the junior grade of France's highest cultural honour. In July, she was officially invested by the Prince of Wales as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. She won the \"Best International Female Solo Artist\" award at the Brit Awards 2008. In September, she made her Middle East debut as the headline act at the opening of Atlantis, The Palm, a hotel resort in Dubai. She was in a relationship with Spanish model Andrés Velencoso, starting from 2008 up until 2013.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In January 2009, Minogue hosted the Brit Awards with English multi-hyphenates James Corden and Mathew Horne. She then embarked on the For You, for Me tour by September, her first concert tour in North America. In October, she was featured in the Hindi film, Blue, performing an A. R. Rahman song.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In July 2010, Minogue released her eleventh studio album, Aphrodite. The album featured work from English record producer Stuart Price, British DJ and record producer Calvin Harris, American musician Jake Shears, English singer-songwriter Nerina Pallot, Belgian musician Pascal Gabriel, Danish record producer Lucas Secon, English alternative rock band member Tim Rice-Oxley of Keane and British group Kish Mauve. Price served as an executive producer. Rob Sheffield from Rolling Stone labelled the album as Minogue's \"finest work since 1997's Impossible Princess.\" Tim Sendra from AllMusic commended Minogue's choice of collaborators and producers, commenting that it is the \"work of someone who knows exactly what her skills are and who to hire to help showcase them to perfection.\" The album debuted at number-one in the UK. The lead single, \"All the Lovers\" peaked at number three in the UK. Subsequent singles from the album — \"Get Outta My Way\", \"Better than Today\" and \"Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)\" followed. In November, she was featured on the single by the English singer Taio Cruz, \"Higher\". It peaked at number eight in the UK by January of next year.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In February 2011, Minogue embarked on the Aphrodite: Les Folies Tour, performing in Europe, North America, Asia, Australia and Africa. With a stage set inspired by the \"goddess of love\" Aphrodite and Grecian culture and history, it was greeted with positive reviews from critics, who praised the concept and the stage production. The tour was a commercial success, grossing US$60 million.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In 2012, Minogue began a year-long celebration for her 25 years in the music industry, which was often called \"K25\". The anniversary started in March, with her embarking on the Anti Tour in England and Australia. The tour featured b-sides, demos and rarities from her music catalogue. The tour was positively received for its intimate atmosphere and was a commercial success. She released the single \"Timebomb\" in May and the greatest hits compilation album, The Best of Kylie Minogue in June. She performed at events such as Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Concert and BBC Proms in the Park London 2012. In October, she released the compilation album The Abbey Road Sessions, which contained reworked and orchestral versions of her previously released songs. It was recorded at London's Abbey Road Studios and was produced by British record producer Steve Anderson and Colin Elliot. The album received favourable reviews from music critics. Andy Gill of The Independent called it \"a more traditional makeover, an attempt to give a more elegant lustre to callow pop kitsch, usually by slowing the song down and loading on strings.\" It debuted at number two in the UK. In film, she has appeared in the American independent film Jack & Diane for a cameo role, and a lead role in the French film Holy Motors. Jack & Diane opened at the Tribeca Festival in April, while Holy Motors opened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival in May.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In January 2013, Minogue parted ways with manager Terry Blamey, whom managed her since the start of her singing career. The following month, she signed to entertainment agency Roc Nation for a management deal. In September, she was featured on Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini's single \"Limpido\", which was a number-one hit in Italy and received a nomination for \"World's Best Song\" at the 2013 World Music Awards. In the same month, she was hired as a coach for the third series of BBC One's talent competition television show The Voice UK, alongside American record producer and The Black Eyed Peas member, will.i.am, English singer Ricky Wilson of Kaiser Chiefs and Welsh singer Tom Jones. The show opened with 9.35 million views in the UK, an increase from the previous season. It accumulated an estimated 8.10 million viewers on average. Ed Power from The Daily Telegraph commented on Minogue for being \"glamorous, agreeably giggly [and] a card-carrying national treasure\". In November, she was hired as a coach for the third season of Nine Network's The Voice Australia.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In March 2014, Minogue released her twelfth studio album, Kiss Me Once. It featured contributions from Australian singer-songwriter Sia, American record producer Mike Del Rio, Danish record producer Cutfather, American multi-hyphenate Pharrell Williams, British record producer MNEK, American record producer Ariel Rechtshaid and Spanish singer-songwriter Enrique Iglesias. Kitty Empire from The Observer described it \"polished but kittenish... remains true to the effervescent dance-pop for which Minogue is known.\" The album peaked at number one in Australia and number two in the UK. Two singles were released, \"Into the Blue\" and \"I Was Gonna Cancel\". In August, she performed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games closing ceremony, donning a custom Jean Paul Gaultier corset. In September, she embarked on the Kiss Me Once Tour.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In March 2015, Minogue left Parlophone Records and Roc Nation. She entered into a trademark dispute with reality television personality Kylie Jenner, in Jenner's attempt to trademark the brand \"Kylie\", which Minogue has been trading under since the 1990s. The dispute was eventually resolved in Minogue's favour in 2017. In May, she appeared as Susan Riddick in the American film San Andreas, starring American actor Dwayne Johnson and American actress Carla Gugino. In September, an extended play with Mexican-American record producer Fernando Garibay titled Kylie + Garibay was released. Garibay and Moroder served as producers for the extended play.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In November, Minogue released her thirteenth studio album and first Christmas album, Kylie Christmas. It features work from actress-singer-presenter Dannii Minogue, English musician Chris Martin of Coldplay and record producing team Stargate. The album missed entering the top ten in the UK. Lauren Murphy from The Irish Times commented on her review, \"do we really need another pop star doing another bog-standard Christmas album with a sprinkling of festive cheese?... Minogue is better placed than most to do such an album, given her longevity in the business.\" The following year, it was re-released entitled as Kylie Christmas: Snow Queen Edition. A Christmas concert series in the Royal Albert Hall, London was held in both December 2015 and 2016, in support of the album. In 2016, she was engaged to British actor Joshua Sasse, with their relationship ending in 2017.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In February 2017, Minogue signed a record deal with BMG Rights Management. In December 2017, she and BMG had struck a joint-deal with Mushroom Group—under the sub-division label Liberator Music to release her next album in Australia and New Zealand. Throughout 2017, she worked with writers and producers for her fourteenth studio album, including Nigerian-German record producer Sky Adams and British record-producer Richard Stannard. It was recorded in London, Los Angeles and Nashville, with the latter profoundly influencing the record.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The album Golden was released in April 2018, with \"Dancing\" serving as its lead single. It debuted at number one in Australia and in the UK. Tim Sendra from AllMusic labelled the album a \"darn bold\" for an artist of Minogue's longevity, stating \"the amazing thing about the album, and about her, is that she pulls off the country as well as she's pulled off new wave, disco, electro, murder ballads, and everything else she's done in her long career.\" Pitchfork's Ben Cardew stated that it \"sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it.\" The album spawned several more singles such as \"Stop Me from Falling\", the title track \"Golden\", \"A Lifetime to Repair\" and \"Music's Too Sad Without You\" featuring English singer Jack Savoretti. In support of the album, she embarked on Kylie Presents Golden and Golden Tour. She was among the performers at The Queen's Birthday Party held at the Royal Albert Hall in April. In the same year, she began dating Paul Solomons, the creative director of British GQ. After five years, they split in February 2023.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In June 2019, Minogue released the greatest hits compilation album Step Back in Time: The Definitive Collection, featuring \"New York City\" as the lead single. Tim Sendra of AllMusic complimented the collection describing it as a \"truly definitive and essential for anyone who wants to look back on her [Minogue's] brilliant career.\" It reached number one in Australia and in the UK. In the same month, she embarked on her Summer 2019 tour, which included her debut performance at the Glastonbury Festival – fourteen years after her breast cancer diagnosis forced her to cancel her 2005 headlining slot. Performing in the \"Legends slot\", her set featured appearances from Australian musician Nick Cave and English musician Chris Martin. The Guardian labeled it as \"solid-gold, peerless and phenomenal\". Her set was the most watched of the BBC coverage, earning three million viewers and setting a history record for the most attended Glastonbury set. By December, she appeared in her own Christmas television special, Kylie's Secret Night on Channel 4.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "In May 2020, Minogue launched Kylie Minogue Wines in partnership with English beverages distributor Benchmark Drinks, with Rosé Vin de France serving as the debut product. Her prosecco rosé had become the number one branded prosecco in the UK, according to Nielsen Holdings data. The wine brand has sold over five million bottles by June 2022, and won a Golden Vines Award for entrepreneurship.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Following her Glastonbury performance, Minogue stated that she would like to create a \"pop-disco album\" and return to recording new material after the performance. In 2020, work continued on her fifteenth studio album during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a home studio to record throughout lockdowns, she also recorded and audio engineered her own vocals. The singles, \"Say Something\" and \"Magic\" were released in July and September respectively. In November, Disco was released, reaching number one in Australia and the UK. She became the only female artist to achieve a number one album in five consecutive decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s. In support of the album, a livestream concert titled Infinite Disco was held. Nick Levine of NME called the album her \"most consistent and enjoyable album in a decade.\" In December, \"Real Groove\" was released as a single, with a subsequent remix featuring English singer Dua Lipa. The album was reissued in November 2021, titled Disco: Guest List Edition. It contained new tracks featuring British band Years & Years, English singer Jessie Ware and American singer Gloria Gaynor.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In February 2022, after living in London since the 1990s, Minogue relocated back to Melbourne, citing a desire to be closer to her family in Australia. In the same year, she began working on her sixteenth studio album. In July, she returned to her role in Neighbours as Charlene, for a brief appearance for the show's intended series finale.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In 2023, Minogue's studio album Tension was released in September to critical acclaim. Featuring works from British record producer Lostboy, Dutch DJ Oliver Heldens, British singer-songwriter Kamille and previous collaborators Richard Stannard, Duck Blackwell and Jon Green; Minogue described the album as \"a blend of personal reflection, club abandon and melancholic high\". Hannah Mylrea of Rolling Stone UK claimed it as \"brilliantly good fun and soaring pop music, with a huge amount of heart that brings big emotions to the dancefloor, much like its creator.\" The album debuted at number one in Australia and the UK. The lead single, \"Padam Padam\" entered the top ten in the United Kingdom, and marked her as the only female artist to achieve a UK top ten entry, in the 1980s to the 2020s. The song won an ARIA Award for Best Pop Release and is nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Dance Recording. \"Tension\" and \"Hold On to Now\" served as the follow up singles.",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In November, Minogue embarked on a concert residency – More Than Just a Residency at Voltaire at The Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. The show sold out within minutes. Michael Idato of The Sydney Morning Herald said that a show was \"brief and a blast of Vegas high\". In December, a television concert special, An Audience with Kylie filmed at the Royal Albert Hall, aired on ITV. Ateeqe Bhatti of Attitude gave her performance a good review, labeling Minogue as a \"masterclass in stage performance\".",
"title": "Life and career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Minogue explained that she first became interested in pop music during her adolescence: \"I first got into pop music in 1981, I'd say. It was all about Prince, Adam + the Ants, that whole New Romantic period. Prior to that, it was the Jackson 5, Donna Summer, and my dad's records – the Stones and Beatles.\" She would also listen to the records of Olivia Newton-John and ABBA. She said that she \"wanted to be\" Newton-John while growing up. Her producer, Pete Waterman, recalled Minogue during the early years of her music career with the observation: \"She was setting her sights on becoming the new Prince or Madonna ... What I found amazing was that she was outselling Madonna four to one, but still wanted to be her.\" Minogue came to prominence in the music scene as a bubblegum pop singer and was deemed a \"product of the Stock Aitken Waterman Hit Factory\". Australian musician Nick Cave, who worked with her, was a major influence on her artistic development. She told The Guardian: \"He's definitely infiltrated my life in beautiful and profound ways.\" Throughout her career, her work was also influenced by British singer-songwriter-producer Cathy Dennis, British record producer D Mob, British band Scritti Politti, Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk, British rapper Tricky, Irish rock band U2 and Japanese pop band Pizzicato Five, among others.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Minogue has been known for her soft soprano vocal range. Tim Sendra of AllMusic reviewed her album Aphrodite and said that Minogue's \"slightly nasal, girl next door vocals serve her needs perfectly.\" According to Fiona MacDonald from Madison magazine, Minogue \"has never shied away from making some brave but questionable artistic decisions\". In musical terms, Minogue has worked with many genres in pop and dance music. However, her signature music has been contemporary disco music. Her first studio albums with Stock, Aitken, and Waterman present a more bubblegum pop influence, with many critics comparing her to American singer-songwriter Madonna. Chris True from AllMusic, reviewed her debut album, Kylie and found her music \"standard late-'80s Stock-Aitken-Waterman bubblegum\", however he stated that she presented the most personality of any 1980s recording artist. He said of her third album Rhythm of Love, from the early 1990s, \"The songwriting is stronger, the production dynamic, and Kylie seems more confident vocally.\" At the time of her third studio album, \"She began to trade in her cutesy, bubblegum pop image for a more mature one, and in turn, a more sexual one.\" Chris True stated that during her relationship with Australian singer-actor Michael Hutchence, \"her shedding of the near-virginal façade that dominated her first two albums, began to have an effect, not only on how the press and her fans treated her, but in the evolution of her music.\"",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Her self-titled fifth studio album, primarily a dance-pop album that integrates elements of R&B and adult contemporary music saw a shift in her music. Chris True of AllMusic stated the album is a \"remarkable change from Minogue's previous teen pop material\" and the \"start of a second phase\" in her music career. From her work on her sixth studio album, Impossible Princess, her songwriting and musical content began to change. She was constantly writing down words, exploring the form and meaning of sentences. She had written lyrics before, but called them \"safe, just neatly rhymed words and that's that\". Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine said that the album bears a resemblance to Madonna's Ray of Light (1998). He said that she took inspiration from \"both the Britpop and electronica movements of the mid-'90s\", saying that \"Impossible Princess is the work of an artist willing to take risks\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Her seventh studio album, Light Years is a disco-influenced dance-pop record, with AllMusic's Chris True calling it \"Arguably one of the best disco records since the '70s\". True stated that her eighth studio album, Fever, \"combines the disco-diva comeback of Light Years with simple dance rhythms\". Her ninth studio album, Body Language, was quite different from her musical experiments in the past as it was a \"successful\" attempt at broadening her sound with electro and hip-hop for instance. Incorporating styles of dance music with funk, disco and R&B, the album was listed on Q's \"Best Albums of 2003\".",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Critics said Minogue's tenth studio album X did not feature enough \"consistency\" and Chris True called the tracks \"cold, calculated dance-pop numbers.\" Tim Sendra of AllMusic said that her eleventh album, Aphrodite, \"rarely strays past sweet love songs or happy dance anthems\" and \"the main sound is the kind of glittery disco pop that really is her strong suit.\" Sendra found Aphrodite \"One of her best, in fact.\" Kiss Me Once, her twelfth studio album has been described by critics as her return to contemporary pop music.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Her fourteenth studio album, Golden was heavily influenced by country music, although maintaining her dance-pop sensibilities. Sal Cinquemani from Slant Magazine wrote that \"Golden further bolsters Minogue's reputation for taking risks—and artfully sets the stage for her inevitable disco comeback.\" For her fifteenth studio album, Disco, she began to audio engineer her own music due to the restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.",
"title": "Artistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Minogue's efforts to be taken seriously as a recording artist were initially hindered by the perception that she had not \"paid her dues\" and was no more than a manufactured pop star exploiting the image she had created during her stint on the soap opera Neighbours. She acknowledged this viewpoint, saying, \"If you're part of a record company, I think to a degree it's fair to say that you're a manufactured product. You're a product and you're selling a product. It doesn't mean that you're not talented and that you don't make creative and business decisions about what you will and won't do and where you want to go.\"",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 1993, Australian director Baz Luhrmann introduced Minogue to photographer Bert Stern, notable for his work with American actress Marilyn Monroe. Stern photographed her in Los Angeles and, comparing her to Monroe, commented that Minogue had a similar mix of vulnerability and eroticism. Throughout her career, she has chosen photographers who attempt to create a new \"look\" for her, and the resulting photographs have appeared in a variety of magazines, from the cutting edge The Face to the more traditionally sophisticated Vogue and Vanity Fair, making the Minogue face and name known to a broad range of people. Stylist William Baker has suggested that this is part of the reason she entered mainstream pop culture in Europe more successfully than many other pop singers who concentrate solely on selling records.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "By 2000, Minogue was considered to have achieved a degree of musical credibility for having maintained her career longer than her critics had expected. Her progression from the wholesome \"girl next door\" to a more sophisticated performer with a flirtatious and playful persona attracted new fans. Her music video for \"Spinning Around\" led to some media outlets referring to her as \"SexKylie\", and sex became a stronger element in her subsequent videos. In September 2002, she was ranked 27 on VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists list. She was also named one of the 100 Hottest Women of All-Time by Men's Health in 2013. William Baker described her status as a sex symbol as a \"double edged sword\", observing that \"we always attempted to use her sex appeal as an enhancement of her music and to sell a record. But now it has become in danger of eclipsing what she actually is: a pop singer.\" After 20 years as a performer, she was described by BBC's Fiona Pryor as a fashion \"trend-setter\" and a \"style icon who constantly reinvents herself\". Pointing out the several reinventions in Minogue's image, Larissa Dubecki from The Age labelled her the \"Mother of Reinvention\".",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Minogue has been inspired by and compared to American artist Madonna throughout her career. She received negative comments that her Rhythm of Love Tour in 1991 was too similar visually to Madonna's Blond Ambition World Tour, for which critics labelled her a Madonna wannabe. Writing for the Observer Music Monthly, Rufus Wainwright described her as \"the anti-Madonna. Self-knowledge is a truly beautiful thing and Kylie knows herself inside out. She is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it. She is the gay shorthand for joy.\" Kathy McCabe for The Telegraph noted that Minogue and Madonna follow similar styles in music and fashion, but concluded, \"Where they truly diverge on the pop-culture scale is in shock value. Minogue's clips might draw a gasp from some but Madonna's ignite religious and political debate unlike any other artist on the planet ... Simply, Madonna is the dark force; Kylie is the light force.\" She has said of Madonna, \"Her huge influence on the world, in pop and fashion, meant that I wasn't immune to the trends she created. I admire Madonna greatly but in the beginning she made it difficult for artists like me, she had done everything there was to be done\", and \"Madonna's the Queen of Pop, I'm the princess. I'm quite happy with that.\"",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "In January 2007, Madame Tussauds in London unveiled its fourth waxwork of Minogue. During the same week a bronze cast of her hands was added to Wembley Arena's \"Square of Fame\". In 2007, a bronze statue of Minogue was unveiled at Melbourne Docklands for permanent display.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "In March 2010, Minogue was declared by researchers as the \"most powerful celebrity in Britain\". The study examined how marketers identify celebrity and brand partnerships. Mark Husak, head of Millward Brown's UK media practice, said: \"Kylie is widely accepted as an adopted Brit. People know her, like her and she is surrounded by positive buzz\". In 2016, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, Minogue had a net worth of £55 million.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In May 2020, Alison Boshoff of The New Zealand Herald labelled her as the \"great comeback queen of Pop, for springing back from any setback\" in her life and career. In November 2020, Nick Levine of BBC described her as \"pop's most underestimated icon\", adding \"she's [Minogue] lasted more than 30 years by delivering pop songs with passion and panache, and retaining a quintessentially likeable persona along the way, in such a cutthroat industry.\" In June 2023, Barbara Ellen of The Guardian commented that \"modesty, likeability and vulnerability have aided Minogue enduring appeal\", 36 years after the 1987 single \"I Should Be So Lucky\" was released.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Minogue is regarded as a gay icon, which she has encouraged with comments including \"I am not a traditional gay icon. There's been no tragedy in my life, only tragic outfits\" and \"My gay audience has been with me from the beginning ... they kind of adopted me.\" Her status as a gay icon has been attributed to her music, fashion sense and career longevity. Author Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis wrote about Minogue's appeal to gay men in Strike a Pose, Forever: The Legacy of Vogue... and observed that she \"frequently incorporates camp-inflected themes in her extravaganzas, drawing mainly from the disco scene, the S/M culture, and the burlesque stage.\" In Beautiful Things in Popular Culture (2007), Marc Brennan stated that Minogue's work \"provides a gorgeous form of escapism\". Minogue has explained that she first became aware of her gay audience in 1988, when several drag queens performed to her music at a Sydney pub, and she later saw a similar show in Melbourne. She said that she felt \"very touched\" to have such an \"appreciative crowd\", and this encouraged her to perform at gay venues throughout the world, as well as headlining the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. Minogue has one of the largest gay followings in the world.",
"title": "Public image"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Entertainment Weekly's Ernest Macias said that, by combining \"a panache for fabulous fashion\" with \"her unequivocal disco-pop sound\", Minogue \"established herself as a timeless icon.\" Paula Joye of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that \"Minogue's fusion of fashion and music has made a huge contribution to the style zeitgeist.\" Fiona MacDonald, from fashion magazine Madison, acknowledged Minogue as \"one of the handful of singers recognised around the world by her first name alone. ... And yet despite becoming an international music superstar, style icon and honorary Brit, those two syllables still seem as Australian as the smell of eucalyptus or a barbeque on a hot day.\" In 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum \"celebrated her influence on fashion\" with an exhibition called Kylie Minogue: Image of a Pop Star.",
"title": "Impact and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In 2012, Dino Scatena of The Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Minogue: \"A quarter of a century ago, a sequence of symbiotic events altered the fabric of Australian popular culture and set in motion the transformation of a 19-year-old soap actor from Melbourne into an international pop icon.\" Scatena also described her as \"Australia's single most successful entertainer and a world-renowned style idol\". In the same year, VH1 cited Minogue among its choices on the 100 Greatest Women in Music and the 50 Greatest Women of the Video Era.",
"title": "Impact and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Minogue has been recognised with many honorific nicknames, most notably the \"Princess of Pop\". Jon O'Brien of AllMusic reviewed her box-set The Albums 2000–2010 and stated that it \"contains plenty of moments to justify her position as one of the all-time premier pop princesses.\" In January 2012, NME critics ranked her single \"Can't Get You Out of My Head\" at number four on their Greatest Pop Songs in History list. Channel 4 listed her as one of the world's greatest pop stars. In 2020, Rolling Stone Australia placed her at number three on its 50 Greatest Australian Artists of All Time list.",
"title": "Impact and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Minogue's work has influenced pop and dance artists including Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, Alice Chater, Rina Sawayama, Kim Petras, Melanie C, Ricki-Lee Coulter, Years & Years singer Olly Alexander, September, Diana Vickers, The Veronicas, Slayyyter, Pabllo Vittar, Hailee Steinfeld and Paris Hilton. In 2007, French avant-garde guitarist Noël Akchoté released So Lucky, featuring solo guitar versions of tunes recorded by Minogue.",
"title": "Impact and legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Minogue has received many accolades, including a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards, seventeen ARIA Music Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards and six Mo Awards, including the Australian Performer of the Year in 2001 and 2003. In October 2007, she was honoured with Music Industry Trust's award for recognition of her 20-year career and was hailed as \"an icon of pop and style\", becoming the first female musician to receive a Music Industry Trust award. In July 2008, she was invested by Charles III as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In April 2017, the Britain–Australia Society recognised Minogue with its 2016 award for outstanding contribution to the improving of relations and bilateral understanding between Britain and Australia. The citation reads: \"In recognition of significant contributions to the Britain-Australia relationship as an acclaimed singer, songwriter, actor and iconic personality in both countries\". The award was announced at a reception in Australia House but was personally presented the next day by Prince Philip, Patron of the Society, at Windsor Castle. In January 2019, she was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours.",
"title": "Achievements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In August 2004, she held the record for the most singles at number one in the ARIA singles chart, with nine. In November 2011, Minogue was inducted by the Australian Recording Industry Association into the ARIA Hall of Fame. In January 2011, Minogue received a Guinness World Records citation for having the most consecutive decades with top five albums in the UK, with all her albums doing so. In February 2011, she made history for having two songs inside the top three on the U.S. Dance Club Songs chart, with her singles \"Better than Today\" and \"Higher\" charting at one and three, respectively. In June 2012, Official Charts Company mentioned that Minogue is the 12th best selling singer in the United Kingdom to date, and the third best selling female artist, selling over 10.1 million singles. In December 2016, Billboard ranked her as the eighteenth most successful dance artist of all time. In November 2020, she became the only female artist to reach the top spot of the UK Albums Chart in five consecutive decades, when her studio album, Disco reached number one. In June 2023, she became the only female artist to reach the top ten of the UK Singles Chart in the 1980s to the 2020s, when her single \"Padam Padam\" entered the top ten.",
"title": "Achievements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "As of November 2020, Minogue has sold 80 million records worldwide. She is the most successful Australian female recording artist of all time. According to PRS for Music, her 2001 single \"Can't Get You Out of My Head\" was the most-played track of the 2000s, \"after receiving the most airplay and live covers\" in the decade.",
"title": "Achievements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Minogue was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36 in May 2005, leading to the postponement of the remainder of her Showgirl: The Greatest Hits Tour and her withdrawal from the Glastonbury Festival. Her hospitalisation and treatment in Melbourne resulted in a brief but intense period of media coverage, particularly in Australia, where then Prime Minister John Howard issued a statement of support. As media and fans began to congregate outside the Minogue residence in Melbourne, Victorian Premier Steve Bracks warned the international media that any disruption of the Minogue family's rights under Australian privacy laws would not be tolerated.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Minogue underwent a lumpectomy, on 21 May 2005 at Cabrini Hospital in Malvern and commenced chemotherapy treatment soon after. After the surgery, the disease \"had no recurrence\". On 8 July 2005, she made her first public appearance after surgery when she visited a children's cancer ward at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital. She returned to France where she completed her chemotherapy treatment at the Institut Gustave-Roussy in Villejuif, near Paris. In January 2006, her publicist announced that she had finished chemotherapy, and her treatment continued for the next months. On her return to Australia for her concert tour, she discussed her illness and said that her chemotherapy treatment had been like \"experiencing a nuclear bomb\". While appearing on the American television talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2008, she said that her cancer had originally been misdiagnosed. She commented, \"Because someone is in a white coat and using big medical instruments doesn't necessarily mean they're right\", but later spoke of her respect for the medical profession.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Minogue was acknowledged for the impact she made by publicly discussing her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. In May 2008, the French Cultural Minister Christine Albanel said, \"Doctors now even go as far as saying there is a \"Kylie effect\" that encourages young women to have regular checks.\" Several scientific studies have been carried out how publicity around her case resulted in more women undergoing regular checks for cancer symptoms. Television host Giuliana Rancic cited Minogue's cancer story as \"inspirational\" when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Minogue has helped fundraise on many occasions. In 1989, she participated in recording \"Do They Know It's Christmas?\" under the name Band Aid II to help raise money. She spent a week in Thailand after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. In 2008, Minogue pledged her support for a campaign to raise money for abused children, to be donated to the British charities ChildLine and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. According to the source, around $93 million was raised. She spoke out in relation to the cause, saying: \"Finding the courage to tell someone about being abused is one of the most difficult decisions a child will ever have to make.\" Since her breast cancer diagnosis in 2005, she has been a sponsor and ambassador for the cause. In May 2010, she held a breast cancer campaign for the first time. She later spoke about the cause saying \"It means so much to me to be part of this year's campaign for Fashion Targets Breast Cancer. I wholeheartedly support their efforts to raise funds for the vital work undertaken by Breakthrough Breast Cancer.\" For the cause, she \"posed in a silk sheet emblazoned with the distinctive target logo of Fashion Targets Breast Cancer\" for photographer Mario Testino. Minogue is a supporter of amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, hosting the amfAR Inspiration Gala in Los Angeles in 2010. She has also attended amfAR fundraising benefits in Cannes, and performed at galas for the charity in São Paulo and Hong Kong.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "In early 2010, Minogue along with many other artists, under the name Helping Haiti, recorded a cover version of \"Everybody Hurts\". The single was a fundraiser to help after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. During her 2011 Aphrodite World Tour, the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, which was on her itinerary. She declared she would continue to tour there, stating, \"I was here to do shows and I chose not to cancel, Why did I choose not to cancel? I thought long and hard about it and it wasn't an easy decision to make.\" While she was there, she and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard were star guests at an Australian Embassy fundraiser for the disaster. In April 2014, she launched One Note Against Cancer, a campaign to raise funds and awareness for French cancer research charity APREC (The Alliance for Cancer Research). As part of the campaign, she released the single \"Crystallize\", with the public able to bid via online auction to own each of the song's 4,408 notes. The proceeds of the auction were donated to APREC, with the names of the successful bidders appearing in the accompanying music video's credits. In January 2020, in response to the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, she announced that she and her family were donating A$500,000 towards immediate firefighting efforts and ongoing support.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
] |
Kylie Ann Minogue is an Australian singer, songwriter and actress. Minogue is the highest-selling female Australian artist of all time, having sold over 80 million records worldwide. She has been recognised for reinventing herself in music as well as fashion, and is referred to by the European press as the "Princess of Pop" and a style icon. Her accolades include a Grammy Award, three Brit Awards and eighteen ARIA Music Awards. Born and raised in Melbourne, Minogue first achieved recognition starring as Charlene Robinson in the Australian soap opera Neighbours (1986–1988). She began her music career in the late 1980s, releasing four bubblegum and dance-pop-influenced studio albums under PWL. By the early 1990s, Minogue had amassed several top ten singles in Australia and the UK, including "The Loco-Motion", "I Should Be So Lucky", "Especially for You", "Hand on Your Heart" and "Better the Devil You Know". Taking more creative control over her music, she signed with Deconstruction Records in 1993 and released the albums Kylie Minogue (1994) and Impossible Princess (1997). By joining Parlophone in 1999, Minogue returned to mainstream dance-oriented music with Light Years (2000), including the number-one hits "Spinning Around" and "On a Night Like This". The follow-up, Fever (2001), was an international breakthrough for Minogue, becoming her best-selling album to date. Its lead single, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" becoming one of the most successful singles of the 2000s, selling over five million units. Follow up singles, "In Your Eyes" and "Love at First Sight" became hits as well. She continued reinventing her image and experimenting with a range of genres on her subsequent albums, which spawned successful singles such as "Slow", "I Believe in You", "2 Hearts" and "All the Lovers". In 2017, she partnered with BMG Rights Management, with "Dancing" (2018) as their first release. In the following years, Minogue became the only female artist to have a number-one album and a top ten single, from the 1980s to the 2020s in the UK charts, with Disco (2020) and "Padam Padam" (2023) respectively. In film, Minogue made her debut in The Delinquents (1989), and appeared in Street Fighter (1994), Moulin Rouge! (2001), Holy Motors (2012) and San Andreas (2015). In reality television, she appeared as a judge on The Voice UK and The Voice Australia both in 2014. Her other ventures include product endorsements, books, perfumes, charitable work and a wine brand. Minogue's achievements include being an ARIA Hall of Fame inductee, Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), Officer of the Order of the British Empire, Chevalier (knight) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.).
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2001-10-04T13:36:43Z
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2023-12-25T22:51:40Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylie_Minogue
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16,897 |
Knight
|
A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the ancient Greek hippeis (ἱππεῖς) and Roman equites.
In the Early Middle Ages in Europe, knighthood was conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as an elite fighter or a bodyguard for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback. Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely linked with horsemanship (and especially the joust) from its origins in the 12th century until its final flowering as a fashion among the high nobility in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century. This linkage is reflected in the etymology of chivalry, cavalier and related terms such as the French title chevalier. In that sense, the special prestige accorded to mounted warriors in Christendom finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Islamic world. The Crusades brought various military orders of knights to the forefront of defending Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.
In the Late Middle Ages, new methods of warfare -- such as the introduction of the culverin as an anti-personnel, gunpowder-fired weapon -- began to render classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many countries. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I is often referred to as the "last knight" in this regard. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles known as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, relating to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Today, a number of orders of knighthood continue to exist in Christian Churches, as well as in several historically Christian countries and their former territories, such as the Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Protestant Order of Saint John, as well as the English Order of the Garter, the Swedish Royal Order of the Seraphim, the Spanish Order of Santiago, and the Norwegian Order of St. Olav. There are also dynastic orders like the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Imperial Order of the Rose, the Order of the British Empire and the Order of St. George. In modern times these are orders centered around charity and civic service, and are no longer military orders. Each of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood is generally granted by a head of state, monarch, or prelate to selected persons to recognise some meritorious achievement, as in the British honours system, often for service to the Church or country. The modern female equivalent in the English language is Dame. Knighthoods and damehoods are traditionally regarded as being one of the most prestigious awards people can obtain.
The word knight, from Old English cniht ("boy" or "servant"), is a cognate of the German word Knecht ("servant, bondsman, vassal"). This meaning, of unknown origin, is common among West Germanic languages (cf Old Frisian kniucht, Dutch knecht, Danish knægt, Swedish knekt, Norwegian knekt, Middle High German kneht, all meaning "boy, youth, lad"). Middle High German had the phrase guoter kneht, which also meant knight; but this meaning was in decline by about 1200.
The meaning of cniht changed over time from its original meaning of "boy" to "household retainer". Ælfric's homily of St. Swithun describes a mounted retainer as a cniht. While cnihtas might have fought alongside their lords, their role as household servants features more prominently in the Anglo-Saxon texts. In several Anglo-Saxon wills cnihtas are left either money or lands. In his will, King Æthelstan leaves his cniht, Aelfmar, eight hides of land.
A rādcniht, "riding-servant", was a servant on horseback.
A narrowing of the generic meaning "servant" to "military follower of a king or other superior" is visible by 1100. The specific military sense of a knight as a mounted warrior in the heavy cavalry emerges only in the Hundred Years' War. The verb "to knight" (to make someone a knight) appears around 1300; and, from the same time, the word "knighthood" shifted from "adolescence" to "rank or dignity of a knight".
An Equestrian (Latin, from eques "horseman", from equus "horse") was a member of the second highest social class in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. This class is often translated as "knight"; the medieval knight, however, was called miles in Latin (which in classical Latin meant "soldier", normally infantry).
In the later Roman Empire, the classical Latin word for horse, equus, was replaced in common parlance by the vulgar Latin caballus, sometimes thought to derive from Gaulish caballos. From caballus arose terms in the various Romance languages cognate with the (French-derived) English cavalier: Italian cavaliere, Spanish caballero, French chevalier (whence chivalry), Portuguese cavaleiro, and Romanian cavaler. The Germanic languages have terms cognate with the English rider: German Ritter, and Dutch and Scandinavian ridder. These words are derived from Germanic rīdan, "to ride", in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *reidh-.
In ancient Rome, there was a knightly class Ordo Equestris (order of mounted nobles). Some portions of the armies of Germanic peoples who occupied Europe from the 3rd century AD onward had been mounted, and some armies, such as those of the Ostrogoths, were mainly cavalry. However, it was the Franks who generally fielded armies composed of large masses of infantry, with an infantry elite, the comitatus, which often rode to battle on horseback rather than marching on foot. When the armies of the Frankish ruler Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad Arab invasion at the Battle of Tours in 732, the Frankish forces were still largely infantry armies, with elites riding to battle but dismounting to fight.
In the Early Medieval period, any well-equipped horseman could be described as a knight, or miles in Latin. The first knights appeared during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th century. As the Carolingian Age progressed, the Franks were generally on the attack, and larger numbers of warriors took to their horses to ride with the Emperor in his wide-ranging campaigns of conquest. At about this time the Franks increasingly remained on horseback to fight on the battlefield as true cavalry rather than mounted infantry, with the discovery of the stirrup, and would continue to do so for centuries afterwards. Although in some nations the knight returned to foot combat in the 14th century, the association of the knight with mounted combat with a spear, and later a lance, remained a strong one. The older Carolingian ceremony of presenting a young man with weapons influenced the emergence of knighthood ceremonies, in which a noble would be ritually given weapons and declared to be a knight, usually amid some festivities.
These mobile mounted warriors made Charlemagne's far-flung conquests possible, and to secure their service he rewarded them with grants of land called benefices. These were given to the captains directly by the Emperor to reward their efforts in the conquests, and they in turn were to grant benefices to their warrior contingents, who were a mix of free and unfree men. In the century or so following Charlemagne's death, his newly empowered warrior class grew stronger still, and Charles the Bald declared their fiefs to be hereditary, and also issued the Edict of Pîtres in 864, largely moving away from the infantry-based traditional armies and calling upon all men who could afford it to answer calls to arms on horseback to quickly repel the constant and wide-ranging Viking attacks, which is considered the beginnings of the period of knights that were to become so famous and spread throughout Europe in the following centuries. The period of chaos in the 9th and 10th centuries, between the fall of the Carolingian central authority and the rise of separate Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms (later to become France and Germany respectively) only entrenched this newly landed warrior class. This was because governing power and defense against Viking, Magyar and Saracen attack became an essentially local affair which revolved around these new hereditary local lords and their demesnes.
Clerics and the Church often opposed the practices of the Knights because of their abuses against women and civilians, and many such as St. Bernard, were convinced that the Knights served the devil and not God and needed reforming. In the course of the 12th century, knighthood became a social rank with a distinction being made between milites gregarii (non-noble cavalrymen) and milites nobiles (true knights). As the term "knight" became increasingly confined to denoting a social rank, the military role of fully armoured cavalryman gained a separate term, "man-at-arms". Although any medieval knight going to war would automatically serve as a man-at-arms, not all men-at-arms were knights.
The first military orders of knighthood were the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and the Knights Hospitaller, both founded shortly after the First Crusade of 1099, followed by the Order of Saint Lazarus (1100), Knights Templars (1118), the Order of Montesa (1128), the Order of Santiago (1170) and the Teutonic Knights (1190). At the time of their foundation, these were intended as monastic orders, whose members would act as simple soldiers protecting pilgrims.
It was only over the following century, with the successful conquest of the Holy Land and the rise of the crusader states, that these orders became powerful and prestigious.
The great European legends of warriors such as the paladins, the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain popularized the notion of chivalry among the warrior class. The ideal of chivalry as the ethos of the Christian warrior, and the transmutation of the term "knight" from the meaning "servant, soldier", and of chevalier "mounted soldier", to refer to a member of this ideal class, is significantly influenced by the Crusades, on one hand inspired by the military orders of monastic warriors, and on the other hand also cross-influenced by Islamic (Saracen) ideals of furusiyya.
The institution of knights was already well-established by the 10th century. While the knight was essentially a title denoting a military office, the term could also be used for positions of higher nobility such as landholders. The higher nobles grant the vassals their portions of land (fiefs) in return for their loyalty, protection, and service. The nobles also provided their knights with necessities, such as lodging, food, armour, weapons, horses, and money. The knight generally held his lands by military tenure which was measured through military service that usually lasted 40 days a year. The military service was the quid pro quo for each knight's fief. Vassals and lords could maintain any number of knights, although knights with more military experience were those most sought after. Thus, all petty nobles intending to become prosperous knights needed a great deal of military experience. A knight fighting under another's banner was called a knight bachelor while a knight fighting under his own banner was a knight banneret.
A knight had to be born of nobility – typically sons of knights or lords. In some cases, commoners could also be knighted as a reward for extraordinary military service. Children of the nobility were cared for by noble foster-mothers in castles until they reached the age of seven.
These seven-year-old boys were given the title of page and turned over to the care of the castle's lords. They were placed on an early training regime of hunting with huntsmen and falconers, and academic studies with priests or chaplains. Pages then become assistants to older knights in battle, carrying and cleaning armour, taking care of the horses, and packing the baggage. They would accompany the knights on expeditions, even into foreign lands. Older pages were instructed by knights in swordsmanship, equestrianism, chivalry, warfare, and combat (using wooden swords and spears).
When the boy turned 14, he became a squire. In a religious ceremony, the new squire swore on a sword consecrated by a bishop or priest, and attended to assigned duties in his lord's household. During this time, the squires continued training in combat and were allowed to own armour (rather than borrowing it).
Squires were required to master the seven points of agilities – riding, swimming and diving, shooting different types of weapons, climbing, participation in tournaments, wrestling, fencing, long jumping, and dancing – the prerequisite skills for knighthood. All of these were even performed while wearing armour.
Upon turning 21, the squire was eligible to be knighted.
The accolade or knighting ceremony was usually held during one of the great feasts or holidays, like Christmas or Easter, and sometimes at the wedding of a noble or royal. The knighting ceremony usually involved a ritual bath on the eve of the ceremony and a prayer vigil during the night. On the day of the ceremony, the would-be knight would swear an oath and the master of the ceremony would dub the new knight on the shoulders with a sword. Squires, and even soldiers, could also be conferred direct knighthood early if they showed valor and efficiency for their service; such acts may include deploying for an important quest or mission, or protecting a high diplomat or a royal relative in battle.
Knights were expected, above all, to fight bravely and to display military professionalism and courtesy. When knights were taken as prisoners of war, they were customarily held for ransom in somewhat comfortable surroundings. This same standard of conduct did not apply to non-knights (archers, peasants, foot-soldiers, etc.) who were often slaughtered after capture, and who were viewed during battle as mere impediments to knights' getting to other knights to fight them.
Chivalry developed as an early standard of professional ethics for knights, who were relatively affluent horse owners and were expected to provide military services in exchange for landed property. Early notions of chivalry entailed loyalty to one's liege lord and bravery in battle, similar to the values of the Heroic Age. During the Middle Ages, this grew from simple military professionalism into a social code including the values of gentility, nobility and treating others reasonably. In The Song of Roland (c. 1100), Roland is portrayed as the ideal knight, demonstrating unwavering loyalty, military prowess and social fellowship. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (c. 1205), chivalry had become a blend of religious duties, love and military service. Ramon Llull's Book of the Order of Chivalry (1275) demonstrates that by the end of the 13th century, chivalry entailed a litany of very specific duties, including riding warhorses, jousting, attending tournaments, holding Round Tables and hunting, as well as aspiring to the more æthereal virtues of "faith, hope, charity, justice, strength, moderation and loyalty."
Knights of the late medieval era were expected by society to maintain all these skills and many more, as outlined in Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, though the book's protagonist, Count Ludovico, states the "first and true profession" of the ideal courtier "must be that of arms." Chivalry, derived from the French word chevalier ('cavalier'), simultaneously denoted skilled horsemanship and military service, and these remained the primary occupations of knighthood throughout the Middle Ages.
Chivalry and religion were mutually influenced during the period of the Crusades. The early Crusades helped to clarify the moral code of chivalry as it related to religion. As a result, Christian armies began to devote their efforts to sacred purposes. As time passed, clergy instituted religious vows which required knights to use their weapons chiefly for the protection of the weak and defenseless, especially women and orphans, and of churches.
In peacetime, knights often demonstrated their martial skills in tournaments, which usually took place on the grounds of a castle. Knights could parade their armour and banner to the whole court as the tournament commenced. Medieval tournaments were made up of martial sports called hastiludes, and were not only a major spectator sport but also played as a real combat simulation. It usually ended with many knights either injured or even killed. One contest was a free-for-all battle called a melee, where large groups of knights numbering hundreds assembled and fought one another, and the last knight standing was the winner. The most popular and romanticized contest for knights was the joust. In this competition, two knights charge each other with blunt wooden lances in an effort to break their lance on the opponent's head or body or unhorse them completely. The loser in these tournaments had to turn his armour and horse over to the victor. The last day was filled with feasting, dancing and minstrel singing.
Besides formal tournaments, there were also unformalized judicial duels done by knights and squires to end various disputes. Countries like Germany, Britain and Ireland practiced this tradition. Judicial combat was of two forms in medieval society, the feat of arms and chivalric combat. The feat of arms were done to settle hostilities between two large parties and supervised by a judge. The chivalric combat was fought when one party's honor was disrespected or challenged and the conflict could not be resolved in court. Weapons were standardized and must be of the same caliber. The duel lasted until the other party was too weak to fight back and in early cases, the defeated party were then subsequently executed. Examples of these brutal duels were the judicial combat known as the Combat of the Thirty in 1351, and the trial by combat fought by Jean de Carrouges in 1386. A far more chivalric duel which became popular in the Late Middle Ages was the pas d'armes or "passage of arms". In this hastilude, a knight or a group of knights would claim a bridge, lane or city gate, and challenge other passing knights to fight or be disgraced. If a lady passed unescorted, she would leave behind a glove or scarf, to be rescued and returned to her by a future knight who passed that way.
One of the greatest distinguishing marks of the knightly class was the flying of coloured banners, to display power and to distinguish knights in battle and in tournaments. Knights are generally armigerous (bearing a coat of arms), and indeed they played an essential role in the development of heraldry. As heavier armour, including enlarged shields and enclosed helmets, developed in the Middle Ages, the need for marks of identification arose, and with coloured shields and surcoats, coat armoury was born. Armorial rolls were created to record the knights of various regions or those who participated in various tournaments.
Knights used a variety of weapons, including maces, axes and swords. Elements of the knightly armour included helmet, cuirass, gauntlet and shield.
The sword was a weapon designed to be used solely in combat; it was useless in hunting and impractical as a tool. Thus, the sword was a status symbol among the knightly class. Swords were effective against lightly armoured enemies, while maces and warhammers were more effective against heavily armoured ones.
One of the primary elements of a knight's armour was the shield, which could be used to block strikes and projectiles. Oval shields were used during the Dark Ages and were made of wooden boards that were roughly half an inch thick. Towards the end of the 10th century, oval shields were lengthened to cover the left knee of the mounted warrior, called the kite shield. The heater shield was used during the 13th and the first half of the 14th century. Around 1350, square shields called bouched shields appeared, which had a notch in which to place the couched lance.
Until the mid-14th century, knights wore mail armour as their main form of defence. Mail was extremely flexible and provided good protection against sword cuts, but weak against blunt weapons such as the mace and piercing weapons such as the lance. Padded undergarment known as aketon was worn to absorb shock damage and prevent chafing caused by mail. In hotter climates metal rings became too hot, so sleeveless surcoats were worn as a protection against the sun, and also to show their heraldic arms. This sort of coat also evolved to be tabards, waffenrocks and other garments with the arms of the wearer sewn into it.
Helmets of the knight of the early periods usually were more open helms such as the nasal helmet, and later forms of the spangenhelm. The lack of more facial protection lead to the evolution of more enclosing helmets to be made in the late 12th to early 13th centuries, this eventually would evolve to make the great helm. Later forms of the bascinet, which was originally a small helm worn under the larger great helm, evolved to be worn solely, and would eventually have pivoted or hinged visors, the most popular was the hounskull, also known as the "pig-face visor".
Plate armour first appeared in the 13th century, when plates were added onto the torso and mounted to a base of leather. This form of armour is known as a coat of plates. The torso was not the only part of the knight to receive this plate protection evolution, as the elbows and shoulders were covered with circular pieces of metal, commonly referred to as rondels, eventually evolving into the plate arm harness consisting of the rerebrace, vambrace, and spaulder or pauldron. The legs too were covered in plates, mainly on the shin, called schynbalds which later evolved to fully enclose the leg in the form of enclosed greaves. As for the upper legs, cuisses came about in the mid 14th century. Overall, plate armour offered better protection against piercing weapons such as arrows and especially bolts than mail armour did.
Knights' horses were also armoured in later periods; caparisons were the first form of medieval horse coverage and was used much like the surcoat. Other armours, such as the facial armouring chanfron, were made for horses.
Knights and the ideals of knighthood featured largely in medieval and Renaissance literature, and have secured a permanent place in literary romance. While chivalric romances abound, particularly notable literary portrayals of knighthood include The Song of Roland, Cantar de Mio Cid, The Twelve of England, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, as well as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and other Arthurian tales (Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc.).
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written in the 1130s, introduced the legend of King Arthur, which was to be important to the development of chivalric ideals in literature. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur), written in 1469, was important in defining the ideal of chivalry, which is essential to the modern concept of the knight, as an elite warrior sworn to uphold the values of faith, loyalty, courage, and honour.
Instructional literature was also created. Geoffroi de Charny's "Book of Chivalry" expounded upon the importance of Christian faith in every area of a knight's life, though still laying stress on the primarily military focus of knighthood.
In the early Renaissance greater emphasis was laid upon courtliness. The ideal courtier—the chivalrous knight—of Baldassarre Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier became a model of the ideal virtues of nobility. Castiglione's tale took the form of a discussion among the nobility of the court of the Duke of Urbino, in which the characters determine that the ideal knight should be renowned not only for his bravery and prowess in battle, but also as a skilled dancer, athlete, singer and orator, and he should also be well-read in the humanities and classical Greek and Latin literature.
Later Renaissance literature, such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, rejected the code of chivalry as unrealistic idealism. The rise of Christian humanism in Renaissance literature demonstrated a marked departure from the chivalric romance of late medieval literature, and the chivalric ideal ceased to influence literature over successive centuries until it saw some pockets of revival in post-Victorian literature.
By the mid to late 16th century, knights were quickly becoming obsolete as countries started creating their own professional armies that were faster to train, cheaper to equip, and easier to mobilize. The advancement of high-powered firearms contributed greatly to the decline in use of plate armour, as the time it took to train soldiers with guns was much less compared to that of the knight. The cost of equipment was also significantly lower, and guns had a reasonable chance to easily penetrate a knight's armour. In the 14th century the use of infantrymen armed with pikes and fighting in close formation also proved effective against heavy cavalry, such as during the Battle of Nancy, when Charles the Bold and his armoured cavalry were decimated by Swiss pikemen. As the feudal system came to an end, lords saw no further use of knights. Many landowners found the duties of knighthood too expensive and so contented themselves with the use of squires. Mercenaries also became an economic alternative to knights when conflicts arose.
Armies of the time started adopting a more realistic approach to warfare than the honor-bound code of chivalry. Soon, the remaining knights were absorbed into professional armies. Although they had a higher rank than most soldiers because of their valuable lineage, they lost their distinctive identity that previously set them apart from common soldiers. Some knightly orders survived into modern times. They adopted newer technology while still retaining their age-old chivalric traditions. Examples include the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights.
When chivalry had long since declined, the cavalry of the early modern era clung to the old ideals. Even the first fighter pilots of the First World War, in the 20th century, still resorted to knightly ideas in their duels in the sky, aimed at fairness and honesty. At least; such chivalry was spread in the media. This idea was then completely lost in later wars or was perverted by Nazi Germany, which awarded a "Knight's Cross" as an award. Conversely, the Austrian priest and resistance fighter Heinrich Maier is referred to as Miles Christi, a Christian knight against Nazi Germany.
While on the one hand attempts are made again and again to revive or restore old knightly orders in order to gain prestige, awards and financial advantages, on the other hand old orders continue to exist or are activated. This especially in the environment of ruling or formerly ruling noble houses. For example, the British Queen Elizabeth II regularly appointed new members to the Order of the British Empire, which also includes members such as Steven Spielberg, Nelson Mandela and Bill Gates, in the 21st century. In Central Europe, for example, the Order of St. George, whose roots go back to the so-called "last knight" Emperor Maximilian I, was reactivated by the House of Habsburg after its dissolution by Nazi Germany and the fall of the Iron Curtain. And in republican France, deserved personalities are highlighted to this day by the award of the Knight of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur - Legion of Honour). In contrast, the knights of the ecclesiastical knightly orders like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Order of Saint John mainly devote themselves to social tasks and care.
The journalist Alexander von Schönburg dealt with nature and the possible necessity of chivalry. In view of the complete social disorientation of the people he diagnosed, he calls for a return to virtues such as modesty, wisdom and, above all, loyalty. For, according to him, the common creed today is roughness, ignorance and egocentrism. Vinzenz Stimpfl-Abele, Procurator of the Habsburg Order of St. George, goes back to Bernhard von Clairvaux to consider the importance of knights in the 21st century. Accordingly, knights must take an active part in the fight against misery in society, especially today. The current activities of the Knights of the Order of Malta and the Order of St. John, who since the beginning of the 20th century have increasingly provided extensive medical and charitable services during wars and peacetime, have also developed in this direction.
In continental Europe different systems of hereditary knighthood have existed or do exist. Ridder, Dutch for "knight", is a hereditary noble title in the Netherlands. It is the lowest title within the nobility system and ranks below that of "Baron" but above "Jonkheer" (the latter is not a title, but a Dutch honorific to show that someone belongs to the untitled nobility). The collective term for its holders in a certain locality is the Ridderschap (e.g. Ridderschap van Holland, Ridderschap van Friesland, etc.). In the Netherlands no female equivalent exists. Before 1814, the history of nobility is separate for each of the eleven provinces that make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In each of these, there were in the early Middle Ages a number of feudal lords who often were just as powerful, and sometimes more so than the rulers themselves. In old times, no other title existed but that of knight. In the Netherlands only 10 knightly families are still extant, a number which steadily decreases because in that country ennoblement or incorporation into the nobility is not possible anymore.
Likewise Ridder, Dutch for "knight", or the equivalent French Chevalier is a hereditary noble title in Belgium. It is the second lowest title within the nobility system above Écuyer or Jonkheer/Jonkvrouw and below Baron. Like in the Netherlands, no female equivalent to the title exists. Belgium still does have about 232 registered knightly families.
The German and Austrian equivalent of an hereditary knight is a Ritter. This designation is used as a title of nobility in all German-speaking areas. Traditionally it denotes the second lowest rank within the nobility, standing above "Edler" (noble) and below "Freiherr" (baron). For its historical association with warfare and the landed gentry in the Middle Ages, it can be considered roughly equal to the titles of "Knight" or "Baronet".
In the Kingdom of Spain, the Royal House of Spain grants titles of knighthood to the successor of the throne. This knighthood title known as Order of the Golden Fleece is among the most prestigious and exclusive chivalric orders. This order can also be granted to persons not belonging to the Spanish Crown, as the former Emperor of Japan Akihito, Queen of United Kingdom Elizabeth II or the important Spanish politician of the Spanish democratic transition Adolfo Suárez, among others.
The Royal House of Portugal historically bestowed hereditary knighthoods to holders of the highest ranks in the Royal Orders. Today, the head of the Royal House of Portugal Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza, bestows hereditary knighthoods for extraordinary acts of sacrifice and service to the Royal House. There are very few hereditary knights and they are entitled to wear an oval neck badge with the shield of the house of Braganza. Portuguese hereditary knighthoods confer nobility.
In France, the hereditary knighthood existed similarly throughout as a title of nobility, as well as in regions formerly under Holy Roman Empire control. One family ennobled with a title in such a manner is the house of Hauteclocque (by letters patents of 1752), even if its most recent members used a pontifical title of count. In some other regions such as Normandy, a specific type of fief was granted to the lower ranked knights (French: chevaliers) called the fief de haubert, referring to the hauberk, or chain mail shirt worn almost daily by knights, as they would not only fight for their liege lords, but enforce and carry out their orders on a routine basis as well. Later the term came to officially designate the higher rank of the nobility in the Ancien Régime (the lower rank being Squire), as the romanticism and prestige associated with the term grew in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Italy and Poland also had the hereditary knighthood that existed within their respective systems of nobility. Just as with the Royal House of Portugal, the Royal House of Italy - House of Savoy, continue to confer their dynastic orders of chivalry on both Italian and non-Italian citizens, these dynastic orders include the; Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and the Civil Order of Savoy. Additionally the Royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies confers their dynastic orders of chivalry on both Italian and non-italian citizens, including the dynastic orders of; Order of Saint Januarius, Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, and the Order of Saint Ferdinand and of Merit.
There are traces of the Continental system of hereditary knighthood in Ireland. Notably all three of the following belong to the Hiberno-Norman FitzGerald dynasty, created by the Earls of Desmond, acting as Earls Palatine, for their kinsmen.
Another Irish family were the O'Shaughnessys, who were created knights in 1553 under the policy of surrender and regrant (first established by Henry VIII of England). They were attainted in 1697 for participation on the Jacobite side in the Williamite wars.
Since 1611, the British Crown has awarded a hereditary title in the form of the baronetcy. Like knights, baronets are accorded the title Sir. Baronets are not peers of the Realm, and have never been entitled to sit in the House of Lords, therefore like knights they remain commoners in the view of the British legal system. However, unlike knights, the title is hereditary and the recipient does not receive an accolade. The position is therefore more comparable with hereditary knighthoods in continental European orders of nobility, such as Ritter, than with knighthoods under the British orders of chivalry. However, unlike the continental orders, the British baronetcy system was a modern invention, designed specifically to raise money for the Crown with the purchase of the title.
Other orders were established in the Iberian peninsula, under the influence of the orders in the Holy Land and the Crusader movement of the Reconquista and generally aligned with geographical area, for example:
After the Crusades, the military orders became idealized and romanticized, resulting in the late medieval notion of chivalry, as reflected in the chivalric romances of the time. The creation of chivalric orders was fashionable among the nobility in the 14th and 15th centuries, and this is still reflected in contemporary honours systems, including the term order itself. Examples of notable orders of chivalry are:
From roughly 1560, purely honorific orders were established, as a way to confer prestige and distinction, unrelated to military service and chivalry in the more narrow sense. Such orders were particularly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, and knighthood continues to be conferred in various countries:
There are other monarchies and also republics that also follow this practice. Modern knighthoods are typically conferred in recognition for services rendered to society, which are not necessarily martial in nature. The British musician Elton John, for example, is a Knight Bachelor, thus entitled to be called Sir Elton. The female equivalent is a Dame, for example Dame Julie Andrews.
In the United Kingdom, honorific knighthood may be conferred in two different ways:
In the British honours system the knightly style of Sir and its female equivalent Dame are followed by the given name only when addressing the holder. Thus, Sir Elton John should be addressed as Sir Elton, not Sir John or Mr John. Similarly, actress Dame Judi Dench should be addressed as Dame Judi, not Dame Dench or Ms Dench.
Wives of knights, however, are entitled to the honorific pre-nominal "Lady" before their husband's surname. Thus Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife was formally styled Lady McCartney (rather than Lady Paul McCartney or Lady Heather McCartney). The style Dame Heather McCartney could be used for the wife of a knight; however, this style is largely archaic and is only used in the most formal of documents, or where the wife is a Dame in her own right (such as Dame Norma Major, who gained her title six years before her husband Sir John Major was knighted). The husbands of Dames have no honorific pre-nominal, so Dame Norma's husband remained John Major until he received his own knighthood.
Since the reign of Edward VII a clerk in holy orders in the Church of England has not normally received the accolade on being appointed to a degree of knighthood. He receives the insignia of his honour and may place the appropriate letters after his name or title but he may not be called Sir and his wife may not be called Lady. This custom is not observed in Australia and New Zealand, where knighted Anglican clergymen routinely use the title "Sir". Ministers of other Christian Churches are entitled to receive the accolade. For example, Sir Norman Cardinal Gilroy did receive the accolade on his appointment as Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1969. A knight who is subsequently ordained does not lose his title. A famous example of this situation was The Revd Sir Derek Pattinson, who was ordained just a year after he was appointed Knight Bachelor, apparently somewhat to the consternation of officials at Buckingham Palace. A woman clerk in holy orders may be made a Dame in exactly the same way as any other woman since there are no military connotations attached to the honour. A clerk in holy orders who is a baronet is entitled to use the title Sir.
Outside the British honours system it is usually considered improper to address a knighted person as 'Sir' or 'Dame' (notable exceptions are members of the Order of the Knights of Rizal in the Republic of the Philippines.) Some countries, however, historically did have equivalent honorifics for knights, such as Cavaliere in Italy (e.g. Cavaliere Benito Mussolini), and Ritter in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (e.g. Georg Ritter von Trapp).
State knighthoods in the Netherlands are issued in three orders: the Order of William, the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and the Order of Orange Nassau. Additionally there remain a few hereditary knights in the Netherlands.
In Belgium, honorific knighthood (not hereditary) can be conferred by the king on particularly meritorious individuals such as scientists or eminent businessmen, or for instance to astronaut Frank De Winne, the second Belgian in space. This practice is similar to the conferral of the dignity of Knight Bachelor in the United Kingdom. In addition, there still are a number of hereditary knights in Belgium (see below).
In France and Belgium, one of the ranks conferred in some orders of merit, such as the Légion d'Honneur, the Ordre National du Mérite, the Ordre des Palmes académiques and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the Order of Leopold, Order of the Crown and Order of Leopold II in Belgium, is that of Chevalier (in French) or Ridder (in Dutch), meaning Knight.
In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the monarchs tried to establish chivalric orders, but the hereditary lords who controlled the Union did not agree and managed to ban such assemblies. They feared the king would use orders to gain support for absolutist goals and to make formal distinctions among the peerage, which could lead to its legal breakup into two separate classes, and that the king would later play one against the other and eventually limit the legal privileges of hereditary nobility. But finally in 1705 King August II managed to establish the Order of the White Eagle which remains Poland's most prestigious order of that kind. The head of state (now the President as the acting Grand Master) confers knighthoods of the order to distinguished citizens, foreign monarchs and other heads of state. The order has its chapter. There were no particular honorifics that would accompany a knight's name, as historically all (or at least by far most) of its members would be royals or hereditary lords anyway. So today, a knight is simply referred to as "Name Surname, knight of the White Eagle (Order)".
In Nigeria, holders of religious honours like the Knighthood of St. Gregory make use of the word Sir as a pre-nominal honorific in much the same way as it is used for secular purposes in Britain and the Philippines. Wives of such individuals also typically assume the title of Lady.
Women were appointed to the Order of the Garter almost from the start. In all, 68 women were appointed between 1358 and 1488, including all consorts. Though many were women of royal blood, or wives of knights of the Garter, some women were neither. They wore the garter on the left arm, and some are shown on their tombstones with this arrangement. After 1488, no other appointments of women are known, although it is said that the Garter was conferred upon Neapolitan poet Laura Bacio Terricina, by King Edward VI. In 1638, a proposal was made to revive the use of robes for the wives of knights in ceremonies, but this did not occur. Queens consort have been made Ladies of the Garter since 1901 (Queens Alexandra in 1901, Mary in 1910 and Elizabeth in 1937). The first non-royal woman to be made Lady Companion of the Garter was The Duchess of Norfolk in 1990, the second was The Baroness Thatcher in 1995 (post-nominal: LG). On 30 November 1996, Lady Fraser was made Lady of the Thistle, the first non-royal woman (post-nominal: LT). (See Edmund Fellowes, Knights of the Garter, 1939; and Beltz: Memorials of the Order of the Garter). The first woman to be granted a knighthood in modern Britain seems to have been Nawab Sikandar Begum Sahiba, Nawab Begum of Bhopal, who became a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India (GCSI) in 1861, at the foundation of the order. Her daughter received the same honor in 1872, as well as her granddaughter in 1910. The order was open to "princes and chiefs" without distinction of gender. The first European woman to have been granted an order of knighthood was Queen Mary, when she was made a Knight Grand Commander of the same order, by special statute, in celebration of the Delhi Durbar of 1911. She was also granted a damehood in 1917 as a Dame Grand Cross, when the Order of the British Empire was created (it was the first order explicitly open to women). The Royal Victorian Order was opened to women in 1936, and the Orders of the Bath and Saint Michael and Saint George in 1965 and 1971 respectively.
Medieval French had two words, chevaleresse and chevalière, which were used in two ways: one was for the wife of a knight, and this usage goes back to the 14th century. The other was possibly for a female knight. Here is a quote from Ménestrier, a 17th-century writer on chivalry:
It was not always necessary to be the wife of a knight in order to take this title. Sometimes, when some male fiefs were conceded by special privilege to women, they took the rank of chevaleresse, as one sees plainly in Hemricourt where women who were not wives of knights are called chevaleresses.
Modern French orders of knighthood include women, for example the Légion d'Honneur (Legion of Honor) since the mid-19th century, but they are usually called chevaliers. The first documented case is that of Angélique Brûlon (1772–1859), who fought in the Revolutionary Wars, received a military disability pension in 1798, the rank of 2nd lieutenant in 1822, and the Legion of Honor in 1852. A recipient of the Ordre National du Mérite recently requested from the order's Chancery the permission to call herself "chevalière," and the request was granted.
As related in Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See by H. E. Cardinale (1983), the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary was founded by two Bolognese nobles Loderingo degli Andalò and Catalano di Guido in 1233, and approved by Pope Alexander IV in 1261. It was the first religious order of knighthood to grant the rank of militissa to women. However, this order was suppressed by Pope Sixtus V in 1558.
At the initiative of Catherine Baw in 1441, and 10 years later of Elizabeth, Mary, and Isabella of the house of Hornes, orders were founded which were open exclusively to women of noble birth, who received the French title of chevalière or the Latin title of equitissa. In his Glossarium (s.v. militissa), Du Cange notes that still in his day (17th century), the female canons of the canonical monastery of St. Gertrude in Nivelles (Brabant), after a probation of 3 years, are made knights (militissae) at the altar, by a (male) knight called in for that purpose, who gives them the accolade with a sword and pronounces the usual words.
To honour those women who defended Tortosa against an attack by the Moors, Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, created the Order of the Hatchet ("Orde de la Atxa" in catalan) in 1149.
The inhabitants [of Tortosa] being at length reduced to great streights, desired relief of the Earl, but he, being not in a condition to give them any, they entertained some thoughts of making a surrender. Which the Women hearing of, to prevent the disaster threatening their City, themselves, and Children, put on men's Clothes, and by a resolute sally, forced the Moors to raise the Siege. The Earl, finding himself obliged, by the gallentry of the action, thought fit to make his acknowlegements thereof, by granting them several Privileges and Immunities, and to perpetuate the memory of so signal an attempt, instituted an Order, somewhat like a Military Order, into which were admitted only those Brave Women, deriving the honour to their Descendants, and assigned them for a Badge, a thing like a Fryars Capouche, sharp at the top, after the form of a Torch, and of a crimson colour, to be worn upon their Head-clothes. He also ordained, that at all publick meetings, the women should have precedence of the Men. That they should be exempted from all Taxes, and that all the Apparel and Jewels, though of never so great value, left by their dead Husbands, should be their own. These Women having thus acquired this Honour by their personal Valour, carried themselves after the Military Knights of those days.
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"text": "A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the ancient Greek hippeis (ἱππεῖς) and Roman equites.",
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"text": "In the Early Middle Ages in Europe, knighthood was conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as an elite fighter or a bodyguard for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback. Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely linked with horsemanship (and especially the joust) from its origins in the 12th century until its final flowering as a fashion among the high nobility in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century. This linkage is reflected in the etymology of chivalry, cavalier and related terms such as the French title chevalier. In that sense, the special prestige accorded to mounted warriors in Christendom finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Islamic world. The Crusades brought various military orders of knights to the forefront of defending Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land.",
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"text": "In the Late Middle Ages, new methods of warfare -- such as the introduction of the culverin as an anti-personnel, gunpowder-fired weapon -- began to render classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many countries. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I is often referred to as the \"last knight\" in this regard. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles known as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, relating to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.",
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{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Today, a number of orders of knighthood continue to exist in Christian Churches, as well as in several historically Christian countries and their former territories, such as the Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Protestant Order of Saint John, as well as the English Order of the Garter, the Swedish Royal Order of the Seraphim, the Spanish Order of Santiago, and the Norwegian Order of St. Olav. There are also dynastic orders like the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Imperial Order of the Rose, the Order of the British Empire and the Order of St. George. In modern times these are orders centered around charity and civic service, and are no longer military orders. Each of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood is generally granted by a head of state, monarch, or prelate to selected persons to recognise some meritorious achievement, as in the British honours system, often for service to the Church or country. The modern female equivalent in the English language is Dame. Knighthoods and damehoods are traditionally regarded as being one of the most prestigious awards people can obtain.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The word knight, from Old English cniht (\"boy\" or \"servant\"), is a cognate of the German word Knecht (\"servant, bondsman, vassal\"). This meaning, of unknown origin, is common among West Germanic languages (cf Old Frisian kniucht, Dutch knecht, Danish knægt, Swedish knekt, Norwegian knekt, Middle High German kneht, all meaning \"boy, youth, lad\"). Middle High German had the phrase guoter kneht, which also meant knight; but this meaning was in decline by about 1200.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The meaning of cniht changed over time from its original meaning of \"boy\" to \"household retainer\". Ælfric's homily of St. Swithun describes a mounted retainer as a cniht. While cnihtas might have fought alongside their lords, their role as household servants features more prominently in the Anglo-Saxon texts. In several Anglo-Saxon wills cnihtas are left either money or lands. In his will, King Æthelstan leaves his cniht, Aelfmar, eight hides of land.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A rādcniht, \"riding-servant\", was a servant on horseback.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "A narrowing of the generic meaning \"servant\" to \"military follower of a king or other superior\" is visible by 1100. The specific military sense of a knight as a mounted warrior in the heavy cavalry emerges only in the Hundred Years' War. The verb \"to knight\" (to make someone a knight) appears around 1300; and, from the same time, the word \"knighthood\" shifted from \"adolescence\" to \"rank or dignity of a knight\".",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "An Equestrian (Latin, from eques \"horseman\", from equus \"horse\") was a member of the second highest social class in the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. This class is often translated as \"knight\"; the medieval knight, however, was called miles in Latin (which in classical Latin meant \"soldier\", normally infantry).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the later Roman Empire, the classical Latin word for horse, equus, was replaced in common parlance by the vulgar Latin caballus, sometimes thought to derive from Gaulish caballos. From caballus arose terms in the various Romance languages cognate with the (French-derived) English cavalier: Italian cavaliere, Spanish caballero, French chevalier (whence chivalry), Portuguese cavaleiro, and Romanian cavaler. The Germanic languages have terms cognate with the English rider: German Ritter, and Dutch and Scandinavian ridder. These words are derived from Germanic rīdan, \"to ride\", in turn derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *reidh-.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In ancient Rome, there was a knightly class Ordo Equestris (order of mounted nobles). Some portions of the armies of Germanic peoples who occupied Europe from the 3rd century AD onward had been mounted, and some armies, such as those of the Ostrogoths, were mainly cavalry. However, it was the Franks who generally fielded armies composed of large masses of infantry, with an infantry elite, the comitatus, which often rode to battle on horseback rather than marching on foot. When the armies of the Frankish ruler Charles Martel defeated the Umayyad Arab invasion at the Battle of Tours in 732, the Frankish forces were still largely infantry armies, with elites riding to battle but dismounting to fight.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the Early Medieval period, any well-equipped horseman could be described as a knight, or miles in Latin. The first knights appeared during the reign of Charlemagne in the 8th century. As the Carolingian Age progressed, the Franks were generally on the attack, and larger numbers of warriors took to their horses to ride with the Emperor in his wide-ranging campaigns of conquest. At about this time the Franks increasingly remained on horseback to fight on the battlefield as true cavalry rather than mounted infantry, with the discovery of the stirrup, and would continue to do so for centuries afterwards. Although in some nations the knight returned to foot combat in the 14th century, the association of the knight with mounted combat with a spear, and later a lance, remained a strong one. The older Carolingian ceremony of presenting a young man with weapons influenced the emergence of knighthood ceremonies, in which a noble would be ritually given weapons and declared to be a knight, usually amid some festivities.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "These mobile mounted warriors made Charlemagne's far-flung conquests possible, and to secure their service he rewarded them with grants of land called benefices. These were given to the captains directly by the Emperor to reward their efforts in the conquests, and they in turn were to grant benefices to their warrior contingents, who were a mix of free and unfree men. In the century or so following Charlemagne's death, his newly empowered warrior class grew stronger still, and Charles the Bald declared their fiefs to be hereditary, and also issued the Edict of Pîtres in 864, largely moving away from the infantry-based traditional armies and calling upon all men who could afford it to answer calls to arms on horseback to quickly repel the constant and wide-ranging Viking attacks, which is considered the beginnings of the period of knights that were to become so famous and spread throughout Europe in the following centuries. The period of chaos in the 9th and 10th centuries, between the fall of the Carolingian central authority and the rise of separate Western and Eastern Frankish kingdoms (later to become France and Germany respectively) only entrenched this newly landed warrior class. This was because governing power and defense against Viking, Magyar and Saracen attack became an essentially local affair which revolved around these new hereditary local lords and their demesnes.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Clerics and the Church often opposed the practices of the Knights because of their abuses against women and civilians, and many such as St. Bernard, were convinced that the Knights served the devil and not God and needed reforming. In the course of the 12th century, knighthood became a social rank with a distinction being made between milites gregarii (non-noble cavalrymen) and milites nobiles (true knights). As the term \"knight\" became increasingly confined to denoting a social rank, the military role of fully armoured cavalryman gained a separate term, \"man-at-arms\". Although any medieval knight going to war would automatically serve as a man-at-arms, not all men-at-arms were knights.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The first military orders of knighthood were the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre and the Knights Hospitaller, both founded shortly after the First Crusade of 1099, followed by the Order of Saint Lazarus (1100), Knights Templars (1118), the Order of Montesa (1128), the Order of Santiago (1170) and the Teutonic Knights (1190). At the time of their foundation, these were intended as monastic orders, whose members would act as simple soldiers protecting pilgrims.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It was only over the following century, with the successful conquest of the Holy Land and the rise of the crusader states, that these orders became powerful and prestigious.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The great European legends of warriors such as the paladins, the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain popularized the notion of chivalry among the warrior class. The ideal of chivalry as the ethos of the Christian warrior, and the transmutation of the term \"knight\" from the meaning \"servant, soldier\", and of chevalier \"mounted soldier\", to refer to a member of this ideal class, is significantly influenced by the Crusades, on one hand inspired by the military orders of monastic warriors, and on the other hand also cross-influenced by Islamic (Saracen) ideals of furusiyya.",
"title": "Evolution of medieval knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The institution of knights was already well-established by the 10th century. While the knight was essentially a title denoting a military office, the term could also be used for positions of higher nobility such as landholders. The higher nobles grant the vassals their portions of land (fiefs) in return for their loyalty, protection, and service. The nobles also provided their knights with necessities, such as lodging, food, armour, weapons, horses, and money. The knight generally held his lands by military tenure which was measured through military service that usually lasted 40 days a year. The military service was the quid pro quo for each knight's fief. Vassals and lords could maintain any number of knights, although knights with more military experience were those most sought after. Thus, all petty nobles intending to become prosperous knights needed a great deal of military experience. A knight fighting under another's banner was called a knight bachelor while a knight fighting under his own banner was a knight banneret.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "A knight had to be born of nobility – typically sons of knights or lords. In some cases, commoners could also be knighted as a reward for extraordinary military service. Children of the nobility were cared for by noble foster-mothers in castles until they reached the age of seven.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "These seven-year-old boys were given the title of page and turned over to the care of the castle's lords. They were placed on an early training regime of hunting with huntsmen and falconers, and academic studies with priests or chaplains. Pages then become assistants to older knights in battle, carrying and cleaning armour, taking care of the horses, and packing the baggage. They would accompany the knights on expeditions, even into foreign lands. Older pages were instructed by knights in swordsmanship, equestrianism, chivalry, warfare, and combat (using wooden swords and spears).",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "When the boy turned 14, he became a squire. In a religious ceremony, the new squire swore on a sword consecrated by a bishop or priest, and attended to assigned duties in his lord's household. During this time, the squires continued training in combat and were allowed to own armour (rather than borrowing it).",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Squires were required to master the seven points of agilities – riding, swimming and diving, shooting different types of weapons, climbing, participation in tournaments, wrestling, fencing, long jumping, and dancing – the prerequisite skills for knighthood. All of these were even performed while wearing armour.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Upon turning 21, the squire was eligible to be knighted.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The accolade or knighting ceremony was usually held during one of the great feasts or holidays, like Christmas or Easter, and sometimes at the wedding of a noble or royal. The knighting ceremony usually involved a ritual bath on the eve of the ceremony and a prayer vigil during the night. On the day of the ceremony, the would-be knight would swear an oath and the master of the ceremony would dub the new knight on the shoulders with a sword. Squires, and even soldiers, could also be conferred direct knighthood early if they showed valor and efficiency for their service; such acts may include deploying for an important quest or mission, or protecting a high diplomat or a royal relative in battle.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Knights were expected, above all, to fight bravely and to display military professionalism and courtesy. When knights were taken as prisoners of war, they were customarily held for ransom in somewhat comfortable surroundings. This same standard of conduct did not apply to non-knights (archers, peasants, foot-soldiers, etc.) who were often slaughtered after capture, and who were viewed during battle as mere impediments to knights' getting to other knights to fight them.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Chivalry developed as an early standard of professional ethics for knights, who were relatively affluent horse owners and were expected to provide military services in exchange for landed property. Early notions of chivalry entailed loyalty to one's liege lord and bravery in battle, similar to the values of the Heroic Age. During the Middle Ages, this grew from simple military professionalism into a social code including the values of gentility, nobility and treating others reasonably. In The Song of Roland (c. 1100), Roland is portrayed as the ideal knight, demonstrating unwavering loyalty, military prowess and social fellowship. In Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (c. 1205), chivalry had become a blend of religious duties, love and military service. Ramon Llull's Book of the Order of Chivalry (1275) demonstrates that by the end of the 13th century, chivalry entailed a litany of very specific duties, including riding warhorses, jousting, attending tournaments, holding Round Tables and hunting, as well as aspiring to the more æthereal virtues of \"faith, hope, charity, justice, strength, moderation and loyalty.\"",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Knights of the late medieval era were expected by society to maintain all these skills and many more, as outlined in Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, though the book's protagonist, Count Ludovico, states the \"first and true profession\" of the ideal courtier \"must be that of arms.\" Chivalry, derived from the French word chevalier ('cavalier'), simultaneously denoted skilled horsemanship and military service, and these remained the primary occupations of knighthood throughout the Middle Ages.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Chivalry and religion were mutually influenced during the period of the Crusades. The early Crusades helped to clarify the moral code of chivalry as it related to religion. As a result, Christian armies began to devote their efforts to sacred purposes. As time passed, clergy instituted religious vows which required knights to use their weapons chiefly for the protection of the weak and defenseless, especially women and orphans, and of churches.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In peacetime, knights often demonstrated their martial skills in tournaments, which usually took place on the grounds of a castle. Knights could parade their armour and banner to the whole court as the tournament commenced. Medieval tournaments were made up of martial sports called hastiludes, and were not only a major spectator sport but also played as a real combat simulation. It usually ended with many knights either injured or even killed. One contest was a free-for-all battle called a melee, where large groups of knights numbering hundreds assembled and fought one another, and the last knight standing was the winner. The most popular and romanticized contest for knights was the joust. In this competition, two knights charge each other with blunt wooden lances in an effort to break their lance on the opponent's head or body or unhorse them completely. The loser in these tournaments had to turn his armour and horse over to the victor. The last day was filled with feasting, dancing and minstrel singing.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Besides formal tournaments, there were also unformalized judicial duels done by knights and squires to end various disputes. Countries like Germany, Britain and Ireland practiced this tradition. Judicial combat was of two forms in medieval society, the feat of arms and chivalric combat. The feat of arms were done to settle hostilities between two large parties and supervised by a judge. The chivalric combat was fought when one party's honor was disrespected or challenged and the conflict could not be resolved in court. Weapons were standardized and must be of the same caliber. The duel lasted until the other party was too weak to fight back and in early cases, the defeated party were then subsequently executed. Examples of these brutal duels were the judicial combat known as the Combat of the Thirty in 1351, and the trial by combat fought by Jean de Carrouges in 1386. A far more chivalric duel which became popular in the Late Middle Ages was the pas d'armes or \"passage of arms\". In this hastilude, a knight or a group of knights would claim a bridge, lane or city gate, and challenge other passing knights to fight or be disgraced. If a lady passed unescorted, she would leave behind a glove or scarf, to be rescued and returned to her by a future knight who passed that way.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "One of the greatest distinguishing marks of the knightly class was the flying of coloured banners, to display power and to distinguish knights in battle and in tournaments. Knights are generally armigerous (bearing a coat of arms), and indeed they played an essential role in the development of heraldry. As heavier armour, including enlarged shields and enclosed helmets, developed in the Middle Ages, the need for marks of identification arose, and with coloured shields and surcoats, coat armoury was born. Armorial rolls were created to record the knights of various regions or those who participated in various tournaments.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Knights used a variety of weapons, including maces, axes and swords. Elements of the knightly armour included helmet, cuirass, gauntlet and shield.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The sword was a weapon designed to be used solely in combat; it was useless in hunting and impractical as a tool. Thus, the sword was a status symbol among the knightly class. Swords were effective against lightly armoured enemies, while maces and warhammers were more effective against heavily armoured ones.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "One of the primary elements of a knight's armour was the shield, which could be used to block strikes and projectiles. Oval shields were used during the Dark Ages and were made of wooden boards that were roughly half an inch thick. Towards the end of the 10th century, oval shields were lengthened to cover the left knee of the mounted warrior, called the kite shield. The heater shield was used during the 13th and the first half of the 14th century. Around 1350, square shields called bouched shields appeared, which had a notch in which to place the couched lance.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Until the mid-14th century, knights wore mail armour as their main form of defence. Mail was extremely flexible and provided good protection against sword cuts, but weak against blunt weapons such as the mace and piercing weapons such as the lance. Padded undergarment known as aketon was worn to absorb shock damage and prevent chafing caused by mail. In hotter climates metal rings became too hot, so sleeveless surcoats were worn as a protection against the sun, and also to show their heraldic arms. This sort of coat also evolved to be tabards, waffenrocks and other garments with the arms of the wearer sewn into it.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Helmets of the knight of the early periods usually were more open helms such as the nasal helmet, and later forms of the spangenhelm. The lack of more facial protection lead to the evolution of more enclosing helmets to be made in the late 12th to early 13th centuries, this eventually would evolve to make the great helm. Later forms of the bascinet, which was originally a small helm worn under the larger great helm, evolved to be worn solely, and would eventually have pivoted or hinged visors, the most popular was the hounskull, also known as the \"pig-face visor\".",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Plate armour first appeared in the 13th century, when plates were added onto the torso and mounted to a base of leather. This form of armour is known as a coat of plates. The torso was not the only part of the knight to receive this plate protection evolution, as the elbows and shoulders were covered with circular pieces of metal, commonly referred to as rondels, eventually evolving into the plate arm harness consisting of the rerebrace, vambrace, and spaulder or pauldron. The legs too were covered in plates, mainly on the shin, called schynbalds which later evolved to fully enclose the leg in the form of enclosed greaves. As for the upper legs, cuisses came about in the mid 14th century. Overall, plate armour offered better protection against piercing weapons such as arrows and especially bolts than mail armour did.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Knights' horses were also armoured in later periods; caparisons were the first form of medieval horse coverage and was used much like the surcoat. Other armours, such as the facial armouring chanfron, were made for horses.",
"title": "Knightly culture in the Middle Ages"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Knights and the ideals of knighthood featured largely in medieval and Renaissance literature, and have secured a permanent place in literary romance. While chivalric romances abound, particularly notable literary portrayals of knighthood include The Song of Roland, Cantar de Mio Cid, The Twelve of England, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, as well as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and other Arthurian tales (Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc.).",
"title": "Medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written in the 1130s, introduced the legend of King Arthur, which was to be important to the development of chivalric ideals in literature. Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur), written in 1469, was important in defining the ideal of chivalry, which is essential to the modern concept of the knight, as an elite warrior sworn to uphold the values of faith, loyalty, courage, and honour.",
"title": "Medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Instructional literature was also created. Geoffroi de Charny's \"Book of Chivalry\" expounded upon the importance of Christian faith in every area of a knight's life, though still laying stress on the primarily military focus of knighthood.",
"title": "Medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In the early Renaissance greater emphasis was laid upon courtliness. The ideal courtier—the chivalrous knight—of Baldassarre Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier became a model of the ideal virtues of nobility. Castiglione's tale took the form of a discussion among the nobility of the court of the Duke of Urbino, in which the characters determine that the ideal knight should be renowned not only for his bravery and prowess in battle, but also as a skilled dancer, athlete, singer and orator, and he should also be well-read in the humanities and classical Greek and Latin literature.",
"title": "Medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Later Renaissance literature, such as Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, rejected the code of chivalry as unrealistic idealism. The rise of Christian humanism in Renaissance literature demonstrated a marked departure from the chivalric romance of late medieval literature, and the chivalric ideal ceased to influence literature over successive centuries until it saw some pockets of revival in post-Victorian literature.",
"title": "Medieval and Renaissance chivalric literature"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "By the mid to late 16th century, knights were quickly becoming obsolete as countries started creating their own professional armies that were faster to train, cheaper to equip, and easier to mobilize. The advancement of high-powered firearms contributed greatly to the decline in use of plate armour, as the time it took to train soldiers with guns was much less compared to that of the knight. The cost of equipment was also significantly lower, and guns had a reasonable chance to easily penetrate a knight's armour. In the 14th century the use of infantrymen armed with pikes and fighting in close formation also proved effective against heavy cavalry, such as during the Battle of Nancy, when Charles the Bold and his armoured cavalry were decimated by Swiss pikemen. As the feudal system came to an end, lords saw no further use of knights. Many landowners found the duties of knighthood too expensive and so contented themselves with the use of squires. Mercenaries also became an economic alternative to knights when conflicts arose.",
"title": "Decline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Armies of the time started adopting a more realistic approach to warfare than the honor-bound code of chivalry. Soon, the remaining knights were absorbed into professional armies. Although they had a higher rank than most soldiers because of their valuable lineage, they lost their distinctive identity that previously set them apart from common soldiers. Some knightly orders survived into modern times. They adopted newer technology while still retaining their age-old chivalric traditions. Examples include the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Knights Hospitaller and Teutonic Knights.",
"title": "Decline"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "When chivalry had long since declined, the cavalry of the early modern era clung to the old ideals. Even the first fighter pilots of the First World War, in the 20th century, still resorted to knightly ideas in their duels in the sky, aimed at fairness and honesty. At least; such chivalry was spread in the media. This idea was then completely lost in later wars or was perverted by Nazi Germany, which awarded a \"Knight's Cross\" as an award. Conversely, the Austrian priest and resistance fighter Heinrich Maier is referred to as Miles Christi, a Christian knight against Nazi Germany.",
"title": "Radiance of knighthood into the 21st century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "While on the one hand attempts are made again and again to revive or restore old knightly orders in order to gain prestige, awards and financial advantages, on the other hand old orders continue to exist or are activated. This especially in the environment of ruling or formerly ruling noble houses. For example, the British Queen Elizabeth II regularly appointed new members to the Order of the British Empire, which also includes members such as Steven Spielberg, Nelson Mandela and Bill Gates, in the 21st century. In Central Europe, for example, the Order of St. George, whose roots go back to the so-called \"last knight\" Emperor Maximilian I, was reactivated by the House of Habsburg after its dissolution by Nazi Germany and the fall of the Iron Curtain. And in republican France, deserved personalities are highlighted to this day by the award of the Knight of Honor (Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur - Legion of Honour). In contrast, the knights of the ecclesiastical knightly orders like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Order of Saint John mainly devote themselves to social tasks and care.",
"title": "Radiance of knighthood into the 21st century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The journalist Alexander von Schönburg dealt with nature and the possible necessity of chivalry. In view of the complete social disorientation of the people he diagnosed, he calls for a return to virtues such as modesty, wisdom and, above all, loyalty. For, according to him, the common creed today is roughness, ignorance and egocentrism. Vinzenz Stimpfl-Abele, Procurator of the Habsburg Order of St. George, goes back to Bernhard von Clairvaux to consider the importance of knights in the 21st century. Accordingly, knights must take an active part in the fight against misery in society, especially today. The current activities of the Knights of the Order of Malta and the Order of St. John, who since the beginning of the 20th century have increasingly provided extensive medical and charitable services during wars and peacetime, have also developed in this direction.",
"title": "Radiance of knighthood into the 21st century"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "In continental Europe different systems of hereditary knighthood have existed or do exist. Ridder, Dutch for \"knight\", is a hereditary noble title in the Netherlands. It is the lowest title within the nobility system and ranks below that of \"Baron\" but above \"Jonkheer\" (the latter is not a title, but a Dutch honorific to show that someone belongs to the untitled nobility). The collective term for its holders in a certain locality is the Ridderschap (e.g. Ridderschap van Holland, Ridderschap van Friesland, etc.). In the Netherlands no female equivalent exists. Before 1814, the history of nobility is separate for each of the eleven provinces that make up the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In each of these, there were in the early Middle Ages a number of feudal lords who often were just as powerful, and sometimes more so than the rulers themselves. In old times, no other title existed but that of knight. In the Netherlands only 10 knightly families are still extant, a number which steadily decreases because in that country ennoblement or incorporation into the nobility is not possible anymore.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Likewise Ridder, Dutch for \"knight\", or the equivalent French Chevalier is a hereditary noble title in Belgium. It is the second lowest title within the nobility system above Écuyer or Jonkheer/Jonkvrouw and below Baron. Like in the Netherlands, no female equivalent to the title exists. Belgium still does have about 232 registered knightly families.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The German and Austrian equivalent of an hereditary knight is a Ritter. This designation is used as a title of nobility in all German-speaking areas. Traditionally it denotes the second lowest rank within the nobility, standing above \"Edler\" (noble) and below \"Freiherr\" (baron). For its historical association with warfare and the landed gentry in the Middle Ages, it can be considered roughly equal to the titles of \"Knight\" or \"Baronet\".",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In the Kingdom of Spain, the Royal House of Spain grants titles of knighthood to the successor of the throne. This knighthood title known as Order of the Golden Fleece is among the most prestigious and exclusive chivalric orders. This order can also be granted to persons not belonging to the Spanish Crown, as the former Emperor of Japan Akihito, Queen of United Kingdom Elizabeth II or the important Spanish politician of the Spanish democratic transition Adolfo Suárez, among others.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The Royal House of Portugal historically bestowed hereditary knighthoods to holders of the highest ranks in the Royal Orders. Today, the head of the Royal House of Portugal Duarte Pio, Duke of Braganza, bestows hereditary knighthoods for extraordinary acts of sacrifice and service to the Royal House. There are very few hereditary knights and they are entitled to wear an oval neck badge with the shield of the house of Braganza. Portuguese hereditary knighthoods confer nobility.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In France, the hereditary knighthood existed similarly throughout as a title of nobility, as well as in regions formerly under Holy Roman Empire control. One family ennobled with a title in such a manner is the house of Hauteclocque (by letters patents of 1752), even if its most recent members used a pontifical title of count. In some other regions such as Normandy, a specific type of fief was granted to the lower ranked knights (French: chevaliers) called the fief de haubert, referring to the hauberk, or chain mail shirt worn almost daily by knights, as they would not only fight for their liege lords, but enforce and carry out their orders on a routine basis as well. Later the term came to officially designate the higher rank of the nobility in the Ancien Régime (the lower rank being Squire), as the romanticism and prestige associated with the term grew in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Italy and Poland also had the hereditary knighthood that existed within their respective systems of nobility. Just as with the Royal House of Portugal, the Royal House of Italy - House of Savoy, continue to confer their dynastic orders of chivalry on both Italian and non-Italian citizens, these dynastic orders include the; Supreme Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus and the Civil Order of Savoy. Additionally the Royal House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies confers their dynastic orders of chivalry on both Italian and non-italian citizens, including the dynastic orders of; Order of Saint Januarius, Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, and the Order of Saint Ferdinand and of Merit.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "There are traces of the Continental system of hereditary knighthood in Ireland. Notably all three of the following belong to the Hiberno-Norman FitzGerald dynasty, created by the Earls of Desmond, acting as Earls Palatine, for their kinsmen.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Another Irish family were the O'Shaughnessys, who were created knights in 1553 under the policy of surrender and regrant (first established by Henry VIII of England). They were attainted in 1697 for participation on the Jacobite side in the Williamite wars.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Since 1611, the British Crown has awarded a hereditary title in the form of the baronetcy. Like knights, baronets are accorded the title Sir. Baronets are not peers of the Realm, and have never been entitled to sit in the House of Lords, therefore like knights they remain commoners in the view of the British legal system. However, unlike knights, the title is hereditary and the recipient does not receive an accolade. The position is therefore more comparable with hereditary knighthoods in continental European orders of nobility, such as Ritter, than with knighthoods under the British orders of chivalry. However, unlike the continental orders, the British baronetcy system was a modern invention, designed specifically to raise money for the Crown with the purchase of the title.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Other orders were established in the Iberian peninsula, under the influence of the orders in the Holy Land and the Crusader movement of the Reconquista and generally aligned with geographical area, for example:",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "After the Crusades, the military orders became idealized and romanticized, resulting in the late medieval notion of chivalry, as reflected in the chivalric romances of the time. The creation of chivalric orders was fashionable among the nobility in the 14th and 15th centuries, and this is still reflected in contemporary honours systems, including the term order itself. Examples of notable orders of chivalry are:",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "From roughly 1560, purely honorific orders were established, as a way to confer prestige and distinction, unrelated to military service and chivalry in the more narrow sense. Such orders were particularly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, and knighthood continues to be conferred in various countries:",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "There are other monarchies and also republics that also follow this practice. Modern knighthoods are typically conferred in recognition for services rendered to society, which are not necessarily martial in nature. The British musician Elton John, for example, is a Knight Bachelor, thus entitled to be called Sir Elton. The female equivalent is a Dame, for example Dame Julie Andrews.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In the United Kingdom, honorific knighthood may be conferred in two different ways:",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In the British honours system the knightly style of Sir and its female equivalent Dame are followed by the given name only when addressing the holder. Thus, Sir Elton John should be addressed as Sir Elton, not Sir John or Mr John. Similarly, actress Dame Judi Dench should be addressed as Dame Judi, not Dame Dench or Ms Dench.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Wives of knights, however, are entitled to the honorific pre-nominal \"Lady\" before their husband's surname. Thus Sir Paul McCartney's ex-wife was formally styled Lady McCartney (rather than Lady Paul McCartney or Lady Heather McCartney). The style Dame Heather McCartney could be used for the wife of a knight; however, this style is largely archaic and is only used in the most formal of documents, or where the wife is a Dame in her own right (such as Dame Norma Major, who gained her title six years before her husband Sir John Major was knighted). The husbands of Dames have no honorific pre-nominal, so Dame Norma's husband remained John Major until he received his own knighthood.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Since the reign of Edward VII a clerk in holy orders in the Church of England has not normally received the accolade on being appointed to a degree of knighthood. He receives the insignia of his honour and may place the appropriate letters after his name or title but he may not be called Sir and his wife may not be called Lady. This custom is not observed in Australia and New Zealand, where knighted Anglican clergymen routinely use the title \"Sir\". Ministers of other Christian Churches are entitled to receive the accolade. For example, Sir Norman Cardinal Gilroy did receive the accolade on his appointment as Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1969. A knight who is subsequently ordained does not lose his title. A famous example of this situation was The Revd Sir Derek Pattinson, who was ordained just a year after he was appointed Knight Bachelor, apparently somewhat to the consternation of officials at Buckingham Palace. A woman clerk in holy orders may be made a Dame in exactly the same way as any other woman since there are no military connotations attached to the honour. A clerk in holy orders who is a baronet is entitled to use the title Sir.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Outside the British honours system it is usually considered improper to address a knighted person as 'Sir' or 'Dame' (notable exceptions are members of the Order of the Knights of Rizal in the Republic of the Philippines.) Some countries, however, historically did have equivalent honorifics for knights, such as Cavaliere in Italy (e.g. Cavaliere Benito Mussolini), and Ritter in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (e.g. Georg Ritter von Trapp).",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "State knighthoods in the Netherlands are issued in three orders: the Order of William, the Order of the Netherlands Lion, and the Order of Orange Nassau. Additionally there remain a few hereditary knights in the Netherlands.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "In Belgium, honorific knighthood (not hereditary) can be conferred by the king on particularly meritorious individuals such as scientists or eminent businessmen, or for instance to astronaut Frank De Winne, the second Belgian in space. This practice is similar to the conferral of the dignity of Knight Bachelor in the United Kingdom. In addition, there still are a number of hereditary knights in Belgium (see below).",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "In France and Belgium, one of the ranks conferred in some orders of merit, such as the Légion d'Honneur, the Ordre National du Mérite, the Ordre des Palmes académiques and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the Order of Leopold, Order of the Crown and Order of Leopold II in Belgium, is that of Chevalier (in French) or Ridder (in Dutch), meaning Knight.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the monarchs tried to establish chivalric orders, but the hereditary lords who controlled the Union did not agree and managed to ban such assemblies. They feared the king would use orders to gain support for absolutist goals and to make formal distinctions among the peerage, which could lead to its legal breakup into two separate classes, and that the king would later play one against the other and eventually limit the legal privileges of hereditary nobility. But finally in 1705 King August II managed to establish the Order of the White Eagle which remains Poland's most prestigious order of that kind. The head of state (now the President as the acting Grand Master) confers knighthoods of the order to distinguished citizens, foreign monarchs and other heads of state. The order has its chapter. There were no particular honorifics that would accompany a knight's name, as historically all (or at least by far most) of its members would be royals or hereditary lords anyway. So today, a knight is simply referred to as \"Name Surname, knight of the White Eagle (Order)\".",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "In Nigeria, holders of religious honours like the Knighthood of St. Gregory make use of the word Sir as a pre-nominal honorific in much the same way as it is used for secular purposes in Britain and the Philippines. Wives of such individuals also typically assume the title of Lady.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Women were appointed to the Order of the Garter almost from the start. In all, 68 women were appointed between 1358 and 1488, including all consorts. Though many were women of royal blood, or wives of knights of the Garter, some women were neither. They wore the garter on the left arm, and some are shown on their tombstones with this arrangement. After 1488, no other appointments of women are known, although it is said that the Garter was conferred upon Neapolitan poet Laura Bacio Terricina, by King Edward VI. In 1638, a proposal was made to revive the use of robes for the wives of knights in ceremonies, but this did not occur. Queens consort have been made Ladies of the Garter since 1901 (Queens Alexandra in 1901, Mary in 1910 and Elizabeth in 1937). The first non-royal woman to be made Lady Companion of the Garter was The Duchess of Norfolk in 1990, the second was The Baroness Thatcher in 1995 (post-nominal: LG). On 30 November 1996, Lady Fraser was made Lady of the Thistle, the first non-royal woman (post-nominal: LT). (See Edmund Fellowes, Knights of the Garter, 1939; and Beltz: Memorials of the Order of the Garter). The first woman to be granted a knighthood in modern Britain seems to have been Nawab Sikandar Begum Sahiba, Nawab Begum of Bhopal, who became a Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India (GCSI) in 1861, at the foundation of the order. Her daughter received the same honor in 1872, as well as her granddaughter in 1910. The order was open to \"princes and chiefs\" without distinction of gender. The first European woman to have been granted an order of knighthood was Queen Mary, when she was made a Knight Grand Commander of the same order, by special statute, in celebration of the Delhi Durbar of 1911. She was also granted a damehood in 1917 as a Dame Grand Cross, when the Order of the British Empire was created (it was the first order explicitly open to women). The Royal Victorian Order was opened to women in 1936, and the Orders of the Bath and Saint Michael and Saint George in 1965 and 1971 respectively.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Medieval French had two words, chevaleresse and chevalière, which were used in two ways: one was for the wife of a knight, and this usage goes back to the 14th century. The other was possibly for a female knight. Here is a quote from Ménestrier, a 17th-century writer on chivalry:",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "It was not always necessary to be the wife of a knight in order to take this title. Sometimes, when some male fiefs were conceded by special privilege to women, they took the rank of chevaleresse, as one sees plainly in Hemricourt where women who were not wives of knights are called chevaleresses.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Modern French orders of knighthood include women, for example the Légion d'Honneur (Legion of Honor) since the mid-19th century, but they are usually called chevaliers. The first documented case is that of Angélique Brûlon (1772–1859), who fought in the Revolutionary Wars, received a military disability pension in 1798, the rank of 2nd lieutenant in 1822, and the Legion of Honor in 1852. A recipient of the Ordre National du Mérite recently requested from the order's Chancery the permission to call herself \"chevalière,\" and the request was granted.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "As related in Orders of Knighthood, Awards and the Holy See by H. E. Cardinale (1983), the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary was founded by two Bolognese nobles Loderingo degli Andalò and Catalano di Guido in 1233, and approved by Pope Alexander IV in 1261. It was the first religious order of knighthood to grant the rank of militissa to women. However, this order was suppressed by Pope Sixtus V in 1558.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "At the initiative of Catherine Baw in 1441, and 10 years later of Elizabeth, Mary, and Isabella of the house of Hornes, orders were founded which were open exclusively to women of noble birth, who received the French title of chevalière or the Latin title of equitissa. In his Glossarium (s.v. militissa), Du Cange notes that still in his day (17th century), the female canons of the canonical monastery of St. Gertrude in Nivelles (Brabant), after a probation of 3 years, are made knights (militissae) at the altar, by a (male) knight called in for that purpose, who gives them the accolade with a sword and pronounces the usual words.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "To honour those women who defended Tortosa against an attack by the Moors, Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, created the Order of the Hatchet (\"Orde de la Atxa\" in catalan) in 1149.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The inhabitants [of Tortosa] being at length reduced to great streights, desired relief of the Earl, but he, being not in a condition to give them any, they entertained some thoughts of making a surrender. Which the Women hearing of, to prevent the disaster threatening their City, themselves, and Children, put on men's Clothes, and by a resolute sally, forced the Moors to raise the Siege. The Earl, finding himself obliged, by the gallentry of the action, thought fit to make his acknowlegements thereof, by granting them several Privileges and Immunities, and to perpetuate the memory of so signal an attempt, instituted an Order, somewhat like a Military Order, into which were admitted only those Brave Women, deriving the honour to their Descendants, and assigned them for a Badge, a thing like a Fryars Capouche, sharp at the top, after the form of a Torch, and of a crimson colour, to be worn upon their Head-clothes. He also ordained, that at all publick meetings, the women should have precedence of the Men. That they should be exempted from all Taxes, and that all the Apparel and Jewels, though of never so great value, left by their dead Husbands, should be their own. These Women having thus acquired this Honour by their personal Valour, carried themselves after the Military Knights of those days.",
"title": "Types of knighthood"
}
] |
A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the ancient Greek hippeis (ἱππεῖς) and Roman equites. In the Early Middle Ages in Europe, knighthood was conferred upon mounted warriors. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. By the Late Middle Ages, the rank had become associated with the ideals of chivalry, a code of conduct for the perfect courtly Christian warrior. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as an elite fighter or a bodyguard for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. The lords trusted the knights, who were skilled in battle on horseback. Knighthood in the Middle Ages was closely linked with horsemanship from its origins in the 12th century until its final flowering as a fashion among the high nobility in the Duchy of Burgundy in the 15th century. This linkage is reflected in the etymology of chivalry, cavalier and related terms such as the French title chevalier. In that sense, the special prestige accorded to mounted warriors in Christendom finds a parallel in the furusiyya in the Islamic world. The Crusades brought various military orders of knights to the forefront of defending Christian pilgrims traveling to the Holy Land. In the Late Middle Ages, new methods of warfare -- such as the introduction of the culverin as an anti-personnel, gunpowder-fired weapon -- began to render classical knights in armour obsolete, but the titles remained in many countries. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I is often referred to as the "last knight" in this regard. The ideals of chivalry were popularized in medieval literature, particularly the literary cycles known as the Matter of France, relating to the legendary companions of Charlemagne and his men-at-arms, the paladins, and the Matter of Britain, relating to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Today, a number of orders of knighthood continue to exist in Christian Churches, as well as in several historically Christian countries and their former territories, such as the Roman Catholic Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Protestant Order of Saint John, as well as the English Order of the Garter, the Swedish Royal Order of the Seraphim, the Spanish Order of Santiago, and the Norwegian Order of St. Olav. There are also dynastic orders like the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Imperial Order of the Rose, the Order of the British Empire and the Order of St. George. In modern times these are orders centered around charity and civic service, and are no longer military orders. Each of these orders has its own criteria for eligibility, but knighthood is generally granted by a head of state, monarch, or prelate to selected persons to recognise some meritorious achievement, as in the British honours system, often for service to the Church or country. The modern female equivalent in the English language is Dame. Knighthoods and damehoods are traditionally regarded as being one of the most prestigious awards people can obtain.
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2001-10-05T08:40:22Z
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2023-12-21T21:39:47Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight
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16,898 |
Kara Sea
|
The Kara Sea is a marginal sea, separated from the Barents Sea to the west by the Kara Strait and Novaya Zemlya, and from the Laptev Sea to the east by the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. Ultimately the Kara, Barents and Laptev Seas are all extensions of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia.
The Kara Sea's northern limit is marked geographically by a line running from Cape Kohlsaat in Graham Bell Island, Franz Josef Land, to Cape Molotov (Arctic Cape), the northernmost point of Komsomolets Island in Severnaya Zemlya.
The Kara Sea is roughly 1,450 km (900 mi) long and 970 km (600 mi) wide with an area of around 880,000 km (339,770 sq mi) and a mean depth of 110 metres (360 ft).
Its main ports are Novy Port and Dikson and it is important as a fishing ground although the sea is ice-bound for all but two months of the year. The Kara Sea contains the East-Prinovozemelsky field (an extension of the West Siberian Oil Basin), containing significant undeveloped petroleum and natural gas. In 2014, US government sanctions resulted in Exxon having until September 26 to discontinue its operations in the Kara Sea.
It is named after the Kara river (flowing into Baydaratskaya Bay), which is now relatively insignificant but which played an important role in the Russian conquest of northern Siberia. The Kara river name is derived from a Nenets word meaning 'hummocked ice'.
In Turkic languages, for example, in Turkish, Tatar and Bashkir and others, the name of the sea is an exonym and literally translated as 'the Black Sea' (Turkish: Kara Denizi). By analogy with the Black Sea, Kara Deniz is also used to designate the Kara Sea. Thus, in the Turkic languages there are two black seas (one in the North of Turkey, the other in the North of Eurasia). This is due to the fact that color definitions are associated with the symbolic color characteristic of the countries of the world, where kara ('black') is north. The Black Sea is therefore alternately known as "the Euxinic Sea", a term borrowed from Greek.
The International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Kara Sea as follows:
There are many islands and island groups in the Kara Sea. Unlike the other marginal seas of the Arctic, where most islands lie along the coasts, in the Kara Sea many islands, like the Arkticheskiy Institut Islands, the Izvesti Tsik Islands, the Kirov Islands, Uedineniya or Lonely Island, Wiese Island, and Voronina Island are located in the open sea of its central regions.
The largest group in the Kara Sea is by far the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, with five large subgroups and over ninety islands. Other important islands in the Kara Sea are Bely Island, Dikson Island, Taymyr Island, the Kamennyye Islands and Oleni Island. Despite the high latitude, all islands are unglaciated except for Ushakov Island at the extreme northern limit of the Kara Sea.
Water circulation patterns in the Kara Sea are complex. The Kara Sea tends to be sea ice covered between September and May, and between May and August heavily influenced by freshwater run-off (roughly 1200 km yr) from the Russian rivers (e.g., Ob, Yenisei, Pyasina, Pur, and Taz). The Kara Sea is also affected by the water inflow from the Barents Sea, which brings 0.6 Sv in August and 2.6 Sv in December. The advected water originates from the Atlantic, but it was cooled and mixed with freshwater in the Barents Sea before it reaches the Kara Sea. Simulations with the Hamburg shelf ocean model (HAMSOM) suggest that no typical water current pattern consists in the Kara Sea throughout the year. Depending on the freshwater run-off, the dominant wind patterns, and the sea ice formation, the water currents change.
Barents Sea is the fastest-warming part of the Arctic, and some assessments now treat Barents sea ice as a separate tipping point from the rest of the Arctic sea ice, suggesting that it could permanently disappear once the global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. This rapid warming also makes it easier to detect any potential connections between the state of sea ice and weather conditions elsewhere than in any other area. The first study proposing a connection between floating ice decline in the Barents Sea and the neighbouring Kara Sea and more intense winters in Europe was published in 2010, and there has been extensive research into this subject since then. For instance, a 2019 paper holds BKS ice decline responsible for 44% of the 1995–2014 central Eurasian cooling trend, far more than indicated by the models, while another study from that year suggests that the decline in BKS ice reduces snow cover in the North Eurasia but increases it in central Europe. There are also potential links to summer precipitation: a connection has been proposed between the reduced BKS ice extent in November–December and greater June rainfall over South China. One paper even identified a connection between Kara Sea ice extent and the ice cover of Lake Qinghai on the Tibetan Plateau.
The Kara Sea was formerly known as Oceanus Scythicus or Mare Glaciale and it appears with these names in 16th century maps. Since it is closed by ice most of the year it remained largely unexplored until the late nineteenth century.
In 1556 Stephen Borough sailed in the Searchthrift to try to reach the Ob River, but he was stopped by ice and fog at the entrance to the Kara Sea. Not until 1580 did another English expedition, under Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman, attempt its passage. They too failed to penetrate it, and England lost interest in searching for the Northeast Passage.
In 1736–1737 Russian Admiral Stepan Malygin undertook a voyage from Dolgy Island in the Barents Sea. The two ships in this early expedition were the Perviy, under Malygin's command and the Vtoroy under Captain A. Skuratov. After entering the little-explored Kara Sea, they sailed to the mouth of the Ob River. Malygin took careful observations of these hitherto almost unknown areas of the Russian Arctic coastline. With this knowledge he was able to draw the first somewhat accurate map of the Arctic shores between the Pechora River and the Ob River.
In 1878, Finnish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld on ship Vega sailed across the Kara Sea from Gothenburg, along the coast of Siberia, and despite the ice packs, got to 180° longitude by early September. Frozen in for the winter in the Chukchi Sea, Nordenskiöld waited and bartered with the local Chukchi people. The following July, the Vega was freed from the ice, and continued to Yokohama, Japan. He became the first to force the Northeast Passage. The largest group of islands in the Kara Sea, the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, has been named in his honour. The year 1912 was a tragic one for Russian explorers in the Kara Sea. In that fateful year unbroken consolidated ice blocked the way for the Northern Sea Route and three expeditions that had to cross the Kara Sea became trapped and failed: Sedov's on vessel St. Foka, Brusilov's on the St. Anna, and Rusanov's on the Gercules. Georgy Sedov intended to reach Franz Josef Land on ship, leave a depot over there, and sledge to the pole. Due to the heavy ice the vessel could only reach Novaya Zemlya the first summer and wintered in Franz Josef Land. In February 1914 Sedov headed to the North Pole with two sailors and three sledges, but he fell ill and died on Rudolf Island. Georgy Brusilov attempted to navigate the Northeast Passage, was trapped in the Kara Sea, and drifted northward for more than two years reaching latitude 83° 17' N. Thirteen men, headed by Valerian Albanov, left the vessel and started across the ice to Franz Josef Land, but only Albanov and one sailor (Alexander Konrad) survived after a gruesome three-month ordeal. The survivors brought the ship log of St. Anna, the map of her drift, and daily meteorological records, but the destiny of those who stayed on board remains unknown. In the same year the expedition of Vladimir Rusanov was lost in the Kara Sea. The prolonged absence of those three expeditions stirred public attention, and a few small rescue expeditions were launched, including Jan Nagórski's five air flights over the sea and ice from the NW coast of Novaya Zemlya.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the scale and scope of exploration of the Kara Sea increased greatly as part of the work of developing the Northern Sea Route. Polar stations, of which five already existed in 1917, increased in number, providing meteorologic, ice reconnaissance, and radio facilities. By 1932 there were 24 stations, by 1948 about 80, and by the 1970s more than 100. The use of icebreakers and, later, aircraft as platforms for scientific work were developed. In 1929 and 1930 the Icebreaker Sedov carried groups of scientists to Severnaya Zemlya, the last major piece of unsurveyed territory in the Soviet Arctic; the archipelago was completely mapped under Georgy Ushakov between 1930 and 1932.
Particularly worth noting are three cruises of the Icebreaker Sadko, which went farther north than most; in 1935 and 1936 the last unexplored areas in the northern Kara Sea were examined and the small and elusive Ushakov Island was discovered.
In the summer of 1942, German Kriegsmarine warships and submarines entered the Kara Sea to destroy as many Russian vessels as possible. This naval campaign was named "Operation Wunderland". Its success was limited by the presence of ice floes, as well as bad weather and fog. These effectively protected the Soviet ships, preventing the damage that could have been inflicted on the Soviet fleet under fair weather conditions.
In October 2010, the Russian government awarded a license to Russian oil company Rosneft for developing the East-Prinovozemelsky oil and gas structure in the Kara Sea.
There is concern about radioactive contamination from nuclear waste the former Soviet Union dumped in the sea and the effect this will have on the marine environment. According to an official "White Paper" report compiled and released by the Russian government in March 1993, the Soviet Union dumped six nuclear submarine reactors and ten nuclear reactors into the Kara Sea between 1965 and 1988. Solid high- and low-level wastes unloaded from Northern Fleet nuclear submarines during reactor refuelings were dumped in the Kara Sea, mainly in the shallow fjords of Novaya Zemlya, where the depths of the dumping sites range from 12 to 135 meters, and in the Novaya Zemlya Trough at depths of up to 380 meters. Liquid low-level wastes were released in the open Barents and Kara Seas. A subsequent appraisal by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that releases are low and localized from the 16 naval reactors (reported by the IAEA as having come from seven submarines and the icebreaker Lenin) which were dumped at five sites in the Kara Sea. Most of the dumped reactors had suffered an accident.
The Soviet submarine K-27 was scuttled in Stepovogo Bay with its two reactors filled with spent nuclear fuel. At a seminar in February 2012 it was revealed that the reactors on board the submarine could re-achieve criticality and explode (a buildup of heat leading to a steam explosion vs. nuclear). The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radioactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.
The Great Arctic State Nature Reserve—the largest nature reserve of Russia—was founded on May 11, 1993, by Resolution No. 431 of the Government of the Russian Federation (RF). The Kara Sea Islands section (4,000 km) of the Great Arctic Nature Reserve includes: the Sergei Kirov Archipelago, the Voronina Island, the Izvestiy TSIK Islands, the Arctic Institute Islands, the Svordrup Island, Uedineniya (Ensomheden) and a number of smaller islands. This section represents rather fully the natural and biological diversity of Arctic sea islands of the eastern part of the Kara Sea.
Nearby, the Franz Josef Land and Severny Island in northern Novaya Zemlya are also registered as a sanctuary, the Russian Arctic National Park.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kara Sea is a marginal sea, separated from the Barents Sea to the west by the Kara Strait and Novaya Zemlya, and from the Laptev Sea to the east by the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. Ultimately the Kara, Barents and Laptev Seas are all extensions of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Kara Sea's northern limit is marked geographically by a line running from Cape Kohlsaat in Graham Bell Island, Franz Josef Land, to Cape Molotov (Arctic Cape), the northernmost point of Komsomolets Island in Severnaya Zemlya.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Kara Sea is roughly 1,450 km (900 mi) long and 970 km (600 mi) wide with an area of around 880,000 km (339,770 sq mi) and a mean depth of 110 metres (360 ft).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Its main ports are Novy Port and Dikson and it is important as a fishing ground although the sea is ice-bound for all but two months of the year. The Kara Sea contains the East-Prinovozemelsky field (an extension of the West Siberian Oil Basin), containing significant undeveloped petroleum and natural gas. In 2014, US government sanctions resulted in Exxon having until September 26 to discontinue its operations in the Kara Sea.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "It is named after the Kara river (flowing into Baydaratskaya Bay), which is now relatively insignificant but which played an important role in the Russian conquest of northern Siberia. The Kara river name is derived from a Nenets word meaning 'hummocked ice'.",
"title": "Name origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In Turkic languages, for example, in Turkish, Tatar and Bashkir and others, the name of the sea is an exonym and literally translated as 'the Black Sea' (Turkish: Kara Denizi). By analogy with the Black Sea, Kara Deniz is also used to designate the Kara Sea. Thus, in the Turkic languages there are two black seas (one in the North of Turkey, the other in the North of Eurasia). This is due to the fact that color definitions are associated with the symbolic color characteristic of the countries of the world, where kara ('black') is north. The Black Sea is therefore alternately known as \"the Euxinic Sea\", a term borrowed from Greek.",
"title": "Name origin"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The International Hydrographic Organization defines the limits of the Kara Sea as follows:",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There are many islands and island groups in the Kara Sea. Unlike the other marginal seas of the Arctic, where most islands lie along the coasts, in the Kara Sea many islands, like the Arkticheskiy Institut Islands, the Izvesti Tsik Islands, the Kirov Islands, Uedineniya or Lonely Island, Wiese Island, and Voronina Island are located in the open sea of its central regions.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The largest group in the Kara Sea is by far the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, with five large subgroups and over ninety islands. Other important islands in the Kara Sea are Bely Island, Dikson Island, Taymyr Island, the Kamennyye Islands and Oleni Island. Despite the high latitude, all islands are unglaciated except for Ushakov Island at the extreme northern limit of the Kara Sea.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Water circulation patterns in the Kara Sea are complex. The Kara Sea tends to be sea ice covered between September and May, and between May and August heavily influenced by freshwater run-off (roughly 1200 km yr) from the Russian rivers (e.g., Ob, Yenisei, Pyasina, Pur, and Taz). The Kara Sea is also affected by the water inflow from the Barents Sea, which brings 0.6 Sv in August and 2.6 Sv in December. The advected water originates from the Atlantic, but it was cooled and mixed with freshwater in the Barents Sea before it reaches the Kara Sea. Simulations with the Hamburg shelf ocean model (HAMSOM) suggest that no typical water current pattern consists in the Kara Sea throughout the year. Depending on the freshwater run-off, the dominant wind patterns, and the sea ice formation, the water currents change.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Barents Sea is the fastest-warming part of the Arctic, and some assessments now treat Barents sea ice as a separate tipping point from the rest of the Arctic sea ice, suggesting that it could permanently disappear once the global warming exceeds 1.5 degrees. This rapid warming also makes it easier to detect any potential connections between the state of sea ice and weather conditions elsewhere than in any other area. The first study proposing a connection between floating ice decline in the Barents Sea and the neighbouring Kara Sea and more intense winters in Europe was published in 2010, and there has been extensive research into this subject since then. For instance, a 2019 paper holds BKS ice decline responsible for 44% of the 1995–2014 central Eurasian cooling trend, far more than indicated by the models, while another study from that year suggests that the decline in BKS ice reduces snow cover in the North Eurasia but increases it in central Europe. There are also potential links to summer precipitation: a connection has been proposed between the reduced BKS ice extent in November–December and greater June rainfall over South China. One paper even identified a connection between Kara Sea ice extent and the ice cover of Lake Qinghai on the Tibetan Plateau.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The Kara Sea was formerly known as Oceanus Scythicus or Mare Glaciale and it appears with these names in 16th century maps. Since it is closed by ice most of the year it remained largely unexplored until the late nineteenth century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1556 Stephen Borough sailed in the Searchthrift to try to reach the Ob River, but he was stopped by ice and fog at the entrance to the Kara Sea. Not until 1580 did another English expedition, under Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman, attempt its passage. They too failed to penetrate it, and England lost interest in searching for the Northeast Passage.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1736–1737 Russian Admiral Stepan Malygin undertook a voyage from Dolgy Island in the Barents Sea. The two ships in this early expedition were the Perviy, under Malygin's command and the Vtoroy under Captain A. Skuratov. After entering the little-explored Kara Sea, they sailed to the mouth of the Ob River. Malygin took careful observations of these hitherto almost unknown areas of the Russian Arctic coastline. With this knowledge he was able to draw the first somewhat accurate map of the Arctic shores between the Pechora River and the Ob River.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In 1878, Finnish explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld on ship Vega sailed across the Kara Sea from Gothenburg, along the coast of Siberia, and despite the ice packs, got to 180° longitude by early September. Frozen in for the winter in the Chukchi Sea, Nordenskiöld waited and bartered with the local Chukchi people. The following July, the Vega was freed from the ice, and continued to Yokohama, Japan. He became the first to force the Northeast Passage. The largest group of islands in the Kara Sea, the Nordenskiöld Archipelago, has been named in his honour. The year 1912 was a tragic one for Russian explorers in the Kara Sea. In that fateful year unbroken consolidated ice blocked the way for the Northern Sea Route and three expeditions that had to cross the Kara Sea became trapped and failed: Sedov's on vessel St. Foka, Brusilov's on the St. Anna, and Rusanov's on the Gercules. Georgy Sedov intended to reach Franz Josef Land on ship, leave a depot over there, and sledge to the pole. Due to the heavy ice the vessel could only reach Novaya Zemlya the first summer and wintered in Franz Josef Land. In February 1914 Sedov headed to the North Pole with two sailors and three sledges, but he fell ill and died on Rudolf Island. Georgy Brusilov attempted to navigate the Northeast Passage, was trapped in the Kara Sea, and drifted northward for more than two years reaching latitude 83° 17' N. Thirteen men, headed by Valerian Albanov, left the vessel and started across the ice to Franz Josef Land, but only Albanov and one sailor (Alexander Konrad) survived after a gruesome three-month ordeal. The survivors brought the ship log of St. Anna, the map of her drift, and daily meteorological records, but the destiny of those who stayed on board remains unknown. In the same year the expedition of Vladimir Rusanov was lost in the Kara Sea. The prolonged absence of those three expeditions stirred public attention, and a few small rescue expeditions were launched, including Jan Nagórski's five air flights over the sea and ice from the NW coast of Novaya Zemlya.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the scale and scope of exploration of the Kara Sea increased greatly as part of the work of developing the Northern Sea Route. Polar stations, of which five already existed in 1917, increased in number, providing meteorologic, ice reconnaissance, and radio facilities. By 1932 there were 24 stations, by 1948 about 80, and by the 1970s more than 100. The use of icebreakers and, later, aircraft as platforms for scientific work were developed. In 1929 and 1930 the Icebreaker Sedov carried groups of scientists to Severnaya Zemlya, the last major piece of unsurveyed territory in the Soviet Arctic; the archipelago was completely mapped under Georgy Ushakov between 1930 and 1932.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Particularly worth noting are three cruises of the Icebreaker Sadko, which went farther north than most; in 1935 and 1936 the last unexplored areas in the northern Kara Sea were examined and the small and elusive Ushakov Island was discovered.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the summer of 1942, German Kriegsmarine warships and submarines entered the Kara Sea to destroy as many Russian vessels as possible. This naval campaign was named \"Operation Wunderland\". Its success was limited by the presence of ice floes, as well as bad weather and fog. These effectively protected the Soviet ships, preventing the damage that could have been inflicted on the Soviet fleet under fair weather conditions.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In October 2010, the Russian government awarded a license to Russian oil company Rosneft for developing the East-Prinovozemelsky oil and gas structure in the Kara Sea.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "There is concern about radioactive contamination from nuclear waste the former Soviet Union dumped in the sea and the effect this will have on the marine environment. According to an official \"White Paper\" report compiled and released by the Russian government in March 1993, the Soviet Union dumped six nuclear submarine reactors and ten nuclear reactors into the Kara Sea between 1965 and 1988. Solid high- and low-level wastes unloaded from Northern Fleet nuclear submarines during reactor refuelings were dumped in the Kara Sea, mainly in the shallow fjords of Novaya Zemlya, where the depths of the dumping sites range from 12 to 135 meters, and in the Novaya Zemlya Trough at depths of up to 380 meters. Liquid low-level wastes were released in the open Barents and Kara Seas. A subsequent appraisal by the International Atomic Energy Agency showed that releases are low and localized from the 16 naval reactors (reported by the IAEA as having come from seven submarines and the icebreaker Lenin) which were dumped at five sites in the Kara Sea. Most of the dumped reactors had suffered an accident.",
"title": "Nuclear dumping"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Soviet submarine K-27 was scuttled in Stepovogo Bay with its two reactors filled with spent nuclear fuel. At a seminar in February 2012 it was revealed that the reactors on board the submarine could re-achieve criticality and explode (a buildup of heat leading to a steam explosion vs. nuclear). The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radioactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.",
"title": "Nuclear dumping"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Great Arctic State Nature Reserve—the largest nature reserve of Russia—was founded on May 11, 1993, by Resolution No. 431 of the Government of the Russian Federation (RF). The Kara Sea Islands section (4,000 km) of the Great Arctic Nature Reserve includes: the Sergei Kirov Archipelago, the Voronina Island, the Izvestiy TSIK Islands, the Arctic Institute Islands, the Svordrup Island, Uedineniya (Ensomheden) and a number of smaller islands. This section represents rather fully the natural and biological diversity of Arctic sea islands of the eastern part of the Kara Sea.",
"title": "Nature reserve"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Nearby, the Franz Josef Land and Severny Island in northern Novaya Zemlya are also registered as a sanctuary, the Russian Arctic National Park.",
"title": "Nature reserve"
}
] |
The Kara Sea is a marginal sea, separated from the Barents Sea to the west by the Kara Strait and Novaya Zemlya, and from the Laptev Sea to the east by the Severnaya Zemlya archipelago. Ultimately the Kara, Barents and Laptev Seas are all extensions of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia. The Kara Sea's northern limit is marked geographically by a line running from Cape Kohlsaat in Graham Bell Island, Franz Josef Land, to Cape Molotov, the northernmost point of Komsomolets Island in Severnaya Zemlya. The Kara Sea is roughly 1,450 km (900 mi) long and 970 km (600 mi) wide with an area of around 880,000 km2 (339,770 sq mi) and a mean depth of 110 metres (360 ft). Its main ports are Novy Port and Dikson and it is important as a fishing ground although the sea is ice-bound for all but two months of the year. The Kara Sea contains the East-Prinovozemelsky field, containing significant undeveloped petroleum and natural gas. In 2014, US government sanctions resulted in Exxon having until September 26 to discontinue its operations in the Kara Sea.
|
2001-10-05T20:44:02Z
|
2023-10-29T16:06:33Z
|
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"Template:Kara Sea Islands",
"Template:Short description",
"Template:Convert",
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Sea
|
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
|
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (/kəˈriːm æbˈduːl dʒəˈbɑːr/ kə-REEM ab-DOOL jə-BAR; born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. (/ælˈsɪndər/ al-SIN-dər); April 16, 1947) is an American former professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP). He was a 19-time NBA All-Star—tied for the most ever—a 15-time All-NBA Team member, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection. He was a member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, and was twice voted the NBA Finals MVP. He was named to three NBA anniversary teams (35th, 50th, and 75th). Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he was called the greatest basketball player of all time by Pat Riley, Isiah Thomas, and Julius Erving. Abdul-Jabbar broke the NBA's career scoring record in 1984 and held it until it was broken in 2023 by LeBron James.
Abdul-Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor when he played at parochial high school Power Memorial in New York City, where he led their team to 71 consecutive wins. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins, winning three consecutive national championships under head coach John Wooden. Alcindor was a record three-time most outstanding player of the NCAA tournament. Drafted with the first overall pick by the one-season-old Bucks franchise in the 1969 NBA draft, he spent six seasons in Milwaukee. After leading the Bucks to its first NBA championship at age 24 in 1971, he took the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Using his trademark skyhook shot, he established himself as one of the league's top scorers. In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career in which they won five additional NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the Showtime era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and got past the first round 14 times; his teams reached the NBA Finals on ten occasions.
At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's regular season career leader in points (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), and personal fouls (4,657). He remains the all-time leader in minutes played and field goals made. He ranks second in career points and field goal attempts, and is third all-time in both total rebounds (17,440) and blocked shots. ESPN named him the greatest center of all time in 2007, the greatest player in college basketball history in 2008, and the second best player in NBA history (behind Michael Jordan) in 2016. Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist, having trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in his film Game of Death (1972). In 2012, Abdul-Jabbar was selected by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be a U.S. global cultural ambassador. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Abdul-Jabbar was born in Harlem, New York City, the only child of Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz musician. Cora was born in North Carolina but would end up in Harlem as part of the Great Migration. Ferdinand Sr. was the child of immigrants from Trinidad. Abdul-Jabbar grew up in the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, which he moved to at the age of 3 in 1950. At birth, Abdul-Jabbar weighed 12 lb 11 oz (5.75 kg) and was 22+1⁄2 inches (57 cm) long. Always very tall for his age, he was already 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) by the age of nine. Abdul-Jabbar was often depressed as a teenager because of the stares and comments about his height. By the eighth grade (age 13–14), he had grown to 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m) and could already slam dunk a basketball.
Abdul-Jabbar began his record-breaking basketball accomplishments when he was in high school, where he led coach Jack Donohue's Power Memorial Academy team to three straight New York City Catholic championships, a 71–game winning streak, and a 79–2 overall record. This earned him "The Tower from Power" nickname. His 2,067 total points were a New York City high school record. The team won the national high school boys basketball championship when Abdul-Jabbar was in 10th and 11th grade and was runner-up his senior year. He had a strained relationship in his final year with Donohue after the coach called him a nigger.
Abdul-Jabbar wrote for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper. The Harlem riot of 1964, which was prompted by the fatal shooting of 15-year old black boy James Powell by a New York police officer, triggered Alcindor's interest in racial politics. "Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be. I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh", he said.
Abdul-Jabbar was not able to play professionally in the National Basketball Association (NBA) out of high school. At the time, the league only accepted players beginning with the year that they could have hypothetically graduated from college. His other options to play basketball professionally would have been to join the Harlem Globetrotters or play overseas. However, Abdul-Jabbar's goal was to attend college. Recruited by hundreds of schools, he was the most sought-after prospect since Wilt Chamberlain. Southern teams that were segregated were willing to break the color line to acquire Abdul-Jabbar. He chose to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, after being recruited by Bruins assistant coach Jerry Norman.
By now 7-foot-1-inch (2.16 m) tall, Abdul-Jabbar was relegated to the freshman team in his first year with the Bruins, as freshman were ineligible to play varsity until 1972. The freshman squad included Lucius Allen, Kenny Heitz, and Lynn Shackelford, who were fellow high-school All-Americans. On November 27, 1965, Abdul-Jabbar made his first public performance in UCLA's annual varsity–freshman exhibition game, attended by 12,051 fans in the inaugural game at the Bruins' new Pauley Pavilion. The 1965–66 varsity team was the two-time defending national champions and the top-ranked team in preseason polls. The freshman team won 75–60 behind Abdul-Jabbar's 31 points and 21 rebounds. It was the first time a freshman team had beaten the UCLA varsity squad. The varsity had lost Gail Goodrich and Keith Erickson from the championship squad to graduation, and starting guard Freddie Goss was out sick. After the game, UPI wrote: "UCLA's Bruins open defense of their national basketball title this week, but right now they're only the second best team on campus." The freshman team was 21–0 that year, dominating against junior college and other freshman teams.
Abdul-Jabbar made his varsity debut as a sophomore in 1966 and received national coverage. Sports Illustrated described him as "The New Superstar" after he scored 56 points in his first game, which broke the UCLA single-game record held by Gail Goodrich. He averaged 29 points per game during the season and led UCLA to an undefeated 30–0 record and a national championship, their third title in four years. After the season, the dunk was banned in college basketball in an attempt to curtail his dominance; critics dubbed it the "Alcindor Rule". It was not rescinded until the 1976–77 season. Abdul-Jabbar was the main contributor to the team's three-year record of 88 wins and only two losses: one to the University of Houston in which Abdul-Jabbar had an eye injury, and the other to crosstown rival USC who played a "stall game"; there was no shot clock in that era, allowing the Trojans to hold the ball as long as it wanted before attempting to score. They limited Alcindor to only four shots and 10 points.
During his college career, Abdul-Jabbar was a three-time national player of the year (1967–1969), a three-time unanimous first-team All-American (1967–1969), played on three NCAA basketball champion teams (1967, 1968, and 1969), was honored as the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament three times, and became the first-ever Naismith College Player of the Year in 1969. He was the only player to win the Helms Foundation Player of the Year award three times. He had considered transferring to Michigan because of unfulfilled recruiting promises. UCLA player Willie Naulls introduced Abdul-Jabbar and teammate Lucius Allen to athletic booster Sam Gilbert, who convinced the pair to remain at UCLA.
During his junior year, Abdul-Jabbar suffered a scratched left cornea on January 12, 1968, in a game against Cal when he was struck by Tom Henderson in a rebound battle. He would miss the next two games against Stanford and Portland. His cornea would again be scratched during his pro career, which subsequently caused him to wear goggles for eye protection. On January 20, the Bruins faced coach Guy Lewis's Houston Cougars in the first-ever nationally televised regular-season college basketball game, with 52,693 in attendance at the Astrodome. In a contest billed as the "Game of the Century", Cougar forward Elvin Hayes scored 39 points and had 15 rebounds, while Abdul-Jabbar, suffering from his eye injury, was held to just 15 points as Houston won 71–69, ending UCLA's 47-game winning streak. Hayes and Abdul-Jabbar had a rematch in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, where UCLA, with a healthy Alcindor, defeated Houston 101–69 en route to the national championship. UCLA limited Hayes, who was averaging 37.7 points per game, to only ten points. Wooden credited his assistant, Jerry Norman, for devising the diamond-and-one defense that contained Hayes. Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on the game and used the headline: "Lew's Revenge: The Rout of Houston." As a senior in 1968–69, Abdul-Jabbar led the Bruins to their third consecutive national title.
During the summer of 1968, Abdul-Jabbar took the shahada twice and converted to Sunni Islam from Catholicism. He adopted the Arabic name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though he did not begin using it publicly until 1971. He boycotted the 1968 Summer Olympics, deciding not to try out for U.S. Olympic basketball team, who went on to easily win the gold medal. Abdul-Jabbar was protesting the unequal treatment of African Americans in the United States, stating that he was "trying to point out to the world the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression."
As the NBA did not allow college underclassmen to make an early NBA draft declaration, Abdul-Jabbar completed his studies and earned a Bachelor of Arts with a major in history in 1969. In his free time, he practiced martial arts. He studied aikido in New York between his sophomore and junior year before learning Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee in Los Angeles.
As of the 2019–20 UCLA Bruins men's basketball team season, he still holds or shares a number of individual records at UCLA:
He is represented in the top ten in a number of other school records, including season and career rebounds, second only to Bill Walton.
The Globetrotters offered Abdul-Jabbar $1 million to play for them, but he declined and was picked first overall in the 1969 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, who were in only their second season of existence. The Bucks had won a coin toss with the Phoenix Suns for the first pick. He was also chosen first overall in the 1969 American Basketball Association draft by the New York Nets. The Nets believed that they had the upper hand in securing Abdul-Jabbar's services because he was from New York; however, when Abdul-Jabbar told both the Bucks and the Nets that he would accept only one offer from each team, he rejected the Nets' bid as too low. Sam Gilbert negotiated the contract along with Los Angeles businessman Ralph Shapiro at no charge. After Abdul-Jabbar chose the Milwaukee Bucks' offer of $1.4 million, the Nets offered a guaranteed $3.25 million. Abdul-Jabbar declined the offer, saying: "A bidding war degrades the people involved. It would make me feel like a flesh peddler, and I don't want to think like that."
Abdul-Jabbar's presence enabled the Bucks to claim second place in the NBA's Eastern Division with a 56–26 record (improved from 27–55 the previous year). On February 21, 1970, he scored 51 points in a 140–127 win over the SuperSonics. Abdul-Jabbar was an instant star, ranking second in the league in scoring (28.8 ppg) and third in rebounding (14.5 rpg), for which he was awarded the title of NBA Rookie of the Year. In the series-clinching game against the Philadelphia 76ers, he recorded 46 points and 25 rebounds. He was the second rookie to score at least 40 points and 25 rebounds in a playoff game, the first being Wilt Chamberlain. He also set an NBA rookie record with 10 or more games of 20+ points scored during the playoffs, tied by Jayson Tatum in 2018.
The next season, the Bucks acquired All-Star guard Oscar Robertson. Milwaukee went on to record the best record in the league with 66 victories in the 1970–71 season, including a then-record 20 straight wins. Abdul-Jabbar was awarded his first of six NBA Most Valuable Player Awards, along with his first scoring title (31.7 ppg). He also led the league in total points, with 2,596. The Bucks won the NBA title, sweeping the Baltimore Bullets 4–0 in the 1971 NBA Finals. Abdul-Jabbar posted 27 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists in Game 4, and he was named the Finals MVP after averaging 27 points per game on 60.5% shooting in the series.
During the offseason, Abdul-Jabbar and Robertson joined Bucks head coach Larry Costello on a three-week basketball tour of Africa on behalf of the State Department. In a press conference at the State Department on June 3, 1971, he stated that going forward he wanted to be called by his Muslim name, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, its translation roughly "noble one, servant of the Almighty [i.e., servant of Allah]".
Abdul-Jabbar remained a dominant force for the Bucks. The following year, he repeated as scoring champion (34.8 ppg and 2,822 total points) and became the first player to be named the NBA Most Valuable Player twice in his first three years. In 1974, Abdul-Jabbar led the Bucks to their fourth consecutive Midwest Division title, and he won his third MVP Award in four years. He was among the top five NBA players in scoring (27.0 ppg, third), rebounding (14.5 rpg, fourth), blocked shots (283, second), and field goal percentage (.539, second). Milwaukee advanced to the 1974 finals, losing to the Boston Celtics in seven games.
Robertson, who became a free agent in the offseason, retired in September 1974 after he was unable to agree on a contract with the Bucks. On October 3, Abdul-Jabbar privately requested a trade to the New York Knicks, with his second choice being the Washington Bullets (now the Wizards) and his third, the Los Angeles Lakers. He had never spoken negatively of the city of Milwaukee or its fans, but he said that being in the Midwest did not fit his cultural needs. Two days later in a pre-season game before the 1974–75 season against the Celtics in Buffalo, New York, Abdul-Jabbar caught a fingernail in his left eye from Don Nelson and suffered a corneal abrasion; this angered him enough to punch the backboard stanchion, breaking two bones in his right hand. He missed the first 16 games of the season, during which the Bucks were 3–13, and returned in late November wearing protective goggles. On March 13, 1975, sportscaster Marv Albert reported that Abdul-Jabbar requested a trade to either New York or Los Angeles, preferably to the Knicks. The following day after a loss in Milwaukee to the Lakers, Abdul-Jabbar confirmed to reporters his desire to play in another city. He averaged 30.0 points during the season, but Milwaukee finished in last place in the division at 38–44.
In 1975, the Lakers acquired Abdul-Jabbar and reserve center Walt Wesley from the Bucks for center Elmore Smith, guard Brian Winters, blue-chip rookies Dave Meyers and Junior Bridgeman, and cash. In the 1975–76 season, his first with the Lakers, he had a dominating season, averaging 27.7 points per game and leading the league in rebounding (16.9), blocked shots (4.12), and total minutes played (3,379). His 1,111 defensive rebounds remains the NBA single-season record (defensive rebounds were not recorded prior to the 1973–74 season). He earned his fourth MVP award, becoming the first winner in Lakers' franchise history, but missed the post-season for the second straight year as the Lakers finished 40–42.
After acquiring a cast of no-name free agents, the Lakers were projected to finished near the bottom of the Pacific Division in 1976–77. Abdul-Jabbar helped lead the team to the best record (53–29) in the NBA, and he won his fifth MVP award, tying Bill Russell's record. Abdul-Jabbar led the league in field goal percentage (.579), was third in scoring (26.2), and was second in rebounds (13.3) and blocked shots (3.18). In the playoffs, the Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference semifinals, setting up a confrontation with the Portland Trail Blazers. The result was a memorable matchup, pitting Abdul-Jabbar against a young, injury-free Bill Walton. Although Abdul-Jabbar dominated the series statistically, Walton and the Trail Blazers (who were experiencing their first-ever run in the playoffs) swept the Lakers, behind Walton's skillful passing and timely plays.
Two minutes into the opening game of the 1977–78 season, Abdul-Jabbar broke his right hand punching Milwaukee's Kent Benson in retaliation to the rookie's elbow to his stomach. Benson suffered a black right eye and required two stitches. According to Benson, Abdul-Jabbar initiated the elbowing, but there were no witnesses and it was not captured on replays. Abdul-Jabbar, who broke the same bone in 1975 after he punched the backboard support, was out for almost two months and missed 20 games. He was fined a then-league record $5,000 but was not suspended. Benson missed one game but was not punished by the league. The Lakers were 8–13 when Abdul-Jabbar returned. He was not named to the 1978 NBA All-Star Game, the only time in his 20-year career he was not selected to an All-Star Game. Chicago's Artis Gilmore and Detroit's Bob Lanier were chosen as reserves for the West, with Walton starting at center. Amid criticism from the media over his performance, Abdul-Jabbar had 39 points, 20 rebounds, six assists and four blocks in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers the day the All-Star rosters were announced. He added 37 points and 30 rebounds in a victory over the New Jersey Nets (now Brooklyn) in the final game before the All-Star break.
Abdul-Jabbar's play remained strong during the next two seasons, being named to the All-NBA Second Team twice, the All-Defense First Team once, and the All-Defense Second Team once. The Lakers, however, continued to be stymied in the playoffs, being eliminated by the Seattle SuperSonics in both 1978 (first round) and 1979 (semifinals).
The Lakers selected Magic Johnson with the first overall pick of 1979 NBA draft. They had acquired the pick from the New Orleans Jazz (later Utah) in 1976, when league rules required that they compensate Los Angeles for their signing of free agent Gail Goodrich. The addition of Johnson paved the way for the Lakers' Showtime dynasty of the 1980s, appearing in the finals eight times and winning five NBA championships. While less dominant than in his younger years, Abdul-Jabbar reinforced his status as one of the greatest basketball players ever, adding an additional four All-NBA First Team selections and two All-Defense First Team honors. He won his record sixth MVP award in his first season with Johnson in 1979–80. In the 1980 finals, Abdul-Jabbar averaged 33.4 points in five games, spraining his ankle in Game 5, but returning to finish the contest with 40 points and leading the team to a win. He missed Game 6, when the Lakers clinched the title, and Johnson was named the Finals MVP after recording 42 points, 15 rebounds, and seven assists in the finale.
Abdul-Jabbar continued to average 20 or more points per game in the following six seasons. The Lakers won another championship in 1981–82, but he suffered migraines in the finals, averaging just 18 points per game against Philadelphia. In 14 playoff games, he finished with a 20.4 point average, the lowest of his career at the time. The Lakers advanced to the 1983 NBA Finals in a rematch against the 76ers, who had acquired Moses Malone to shore up their center position after Abdul-Jabbar had outplayed their big-man duo of Darryl Dawkins and Caldwell Jones in the previous finals. The 76ers swept the Lakers 4–0, and Malone was named the Finals MVP after outrebounding Abdul-Jabbar 72–30 in the series. Malone had 27 offensive rebounds, which nearly equaled Abdul-Jabbar's total rebounds (30). On the road against Utah on April 5, 1984, Abdul-Jabbar broke Chamberlain's record for most career points in the NBA. He received a pass from Johnson and scored from 15 feet (4.6 m) on his patent skyhook over the 7-foot-4-inch (2.24 m) shot-blocking specialist Mark Eaton. The game was played at the Thomas & Mack Center, one of 11 home games for the Jazz in the Las Vegas Valley that season. The contest drew 18,389 fans, the Jazz's largest home crowd since moving from New Orleans before the 1979–80 season.
Abdul-Jabbar won his second Finals MVP in 1985, when he became the oldest to win the award at 38 years and 54 days old. He averaged 25.7 points, 9 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 1.5 blocks in the series against Boston. He was initially outplayed in Game 1, scoring 12 points with three rebounds against 30-year-old Celtics center Robert Parish, who had 18 points and eight rebounds in a 148–114 win over the Lakers, dubbed the "Memorial Day Massacre". At the team's film session the following day, Abdul-Jabbar—who normally sat near the back—was seated in the front row, and accepted all of head coach Pat Riley's criticism. Before Game 2, Abdul-Jabbar asked if his father could ride on the team bus to the game. Typically a hard-liner on rules, Riley agreed to make an exception. Abdul-Jabbar bounced back with 30 points, 17 rebounds, eight assists and three blocks in a 109–102 victory. In the Lakers’ four wins, he averaged 30.2 points, 11.3 rebounds, 6.5 assists and 2.0 blocks. The title ended the Celtics' streak of eight consecutive championships against the Lakers.
Abdul-Jabbar played in his 17th season in 1985–86, breaking the previous NBA record for seasons played of 16, held by Dolph Schayes, John Havlicek, Paul Silas, and Elvin Hayes. Prior to the 1986–87 season, he gained 13 pounds (5.9 kg), reaching close to 270 pounds (120 kg), to compete against the growing number of 7-footers (2.1 m) in the league. The Lakers advanced to the NBA Finals in each of his final three seasons, defeating Boston in 1987, and Detroit in 1988. The Lakers lost to the Pistons in a four-game sweep in his final season. After winning Game 7 of the 1988 finals, the 41-year-old Abdul-Jabbar announced in the locker room that he would return for one more season before retiring. His points, rebounds, and minutes had dropped in his 19th season, and there were reports prior to the game that he was retiring after the contest. On his "retirement tour" he received standing ovations at games, both home and away, and gifts ranging from a yacht that said "Captain Skyhook" to framed jerseys from his career to a Persian rug. At the Forum against Seattle in his final regular season game, every Laker came onto the court wearing Abdul-Jabbar's trademark goggles.
At the time of his retirement, Abdul-Jabbar held the record for most career games played in the NBA. He was also the all-time record holder for most field goals made (15,837) and most minutes played (57,446), as well as most points (38,387) until LeBron James broke the record in 2023.
In 1995, Abdul-Jabbar began expressing an interest in coaching and imparting knowledge from his playing days. His opportunities were limited despite the success he enjoyed during his playing days. During his playing years, Abdul-Jabbar had developed a reputation for being introverted and sullen. He was often unfriendly with the media. His sensitivity and shyness created a perception of him being aloof and surly. At the time, his mentality was that he either did not have the time or did not owe anything to anyone. Magic Johnson recalled as a kid being brushed off after asking him for an autograph. Abdul-Jabbar might freeze out a reporter if they touched him, and he once refused to stop reading the newspaper while giving an interview.
Abdul-Jabbar had spent most of his career with a reserved attitude towards media attention (since he did not have to deal with it as a star at UCLA) before he softened up near the end of his career. Abdul-Jabbar said: "I didn't understand that I also had affected people that way and that's what it was all about. I always saw it like they were trying to pry. I was way too suspicious and I paid a price for it." However, he believes it was his reputation as a "difficult person", alongside his attempts at trying to break into coaching while nearing the age of fifty, that affected his chances of becoming a head coach within the NBA or NCAA.
Abdul-Jabbar worked as an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Seattle SuperSonics, helping mentor, among others, their young centers, Michael Olowokandi and Jerome James. Abdul-Jabbar was the head coach of the Oklahoma Storm of the United States Basketball League in 2002, leading the team to the league's championship that season, but he failed to land the head coaching position at Columbia University a year later. He then worked as a scout for the New York Knicks. He returned to the Lakers as a special assistant coach to Phil Jackson for six seasons (2005–2011). Early on, he mentored their young center, Andrew Bynum. Abdul-Jabbar also served as a volunteer coach at Alchesay High School on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona, in 1998. He moved on from coaching in 2013 after unsuccessfully lobbying for open head coach positions with UCLA and the Milwaukee Bucks.
On offense, Abdul-Jabbar was a dominant low-post threat. In contrast to other low-post specialists like Wilt Chamberlain or Shaquille O'Neal, he was a slender giant, standing 7 ft 2 in (2.18 m) tall while weighing around 240 pounds (110 kg) to 250 lb (115 kg), although he bulked to 270 lb (120 kg) in 1986; in his early years, he used that frame for agility and speed while in later years he utilized a bigger frame for trying to guard under the basket. Abdul-Jabbar was famous for his ambidextrous skyhook shot. It contributed to his high .5595 field goal accuracy, making him the 21st most accurate scorer of all time, as well as a feared clutch shooter. He shot above 50% in every season but his last.
Abdul-Jabbar maintained a dominant presence on defense. He was selected to the NBA All-Defensive Team eleven times. He frustrated opponents with his superior shot-blocking ability and denied an average of 2.6 shots a game. He was not an aggressive rebounder, relying more on his size as a 7-footer instead of positioning. After the pounding he endured early in his career, his rebounding average fell to between six or eight a game in his latter years. As a teammate, Abdul-Jabbar exuded natural leadership and was affectionately called "Cap", or "Captain", by his colleagues. He had an even temperament, which Riley said made him coachable.
A strict fitness regime made Abdul-Jabbar one of the most durable players of all time. He began a year-around conditioning program at age 26. While in Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar started doing yoga in 1976 to improve his flexibility, and was notable for his physical fitness regimen. He said: "There is no way I could have played as long as I did without yoga." Because of his metabolism, he had difficulty putting on weight. Prior to the 1979–80 season, he gained 10 pounds (4.5 kg) from 240 to 250 pounds (110 kg) after switching from free weights to Nautilus equipment. He also switched that offseason from tai chi to yoga. To reduce wear during his later years, Riley did not have him inbound the ball on made baskets, and had him wait at the opposite end of the court on free throws. In what he described as playing a "smarter game" to conserve energy, Abdul-Jabbar sometimes would be the last player to set up on offense by several seconds after staying behind on defense to see if the Lakers scored on a fast break. In 1981, he responded to criticism that he did not hustle: "You have to understand I have to play 42 to 45 minutes a night, and it's like mowing a huge estate lawn. If you rush out and run around furiously, it's self-defeating. You'll be worn out just at the point when you're most needed." Addul-Jabbar finished his career with then-NBA records of 20 seasons and 1,560 games played, later broken by former Celtics center Robert Parish.
Abdul-Jabbar began wearing his trademark goggles after getting poked in the eye during preseason in 1974. He continued wearing them for years until abandoning them in the 1979 playoffs. He resumed wearing goggles in October 1980 after being accidentally poked in the right eye by Houston's Rudy Tomjanovich. After years of being jabbed in the eyes, Abdul-Jabbar developed corneal erosion syndrome, occasionally experiencing pain when his eyes dry up. He missed three games in December 1986 due to the condition.
Abdul-Jabbar was well known for his trademark skyhook, a hook shot in which he raised the ball and released it at the highest point of his arm's arching motion. He could shoot the skyhook from up to 16 feet (4.9 m). With his long arms and great height, he released the ball so high that it was difficult for a defender to block without committing a goaltending violation. His body being between the defender and the ball made it further difficult to block, as did extending his non-shooting arm to fend off opponents. He was stronger shooting the skyhook with his right hand than he was with his left, which he developed in his later years.
According to Abdul-Jabbar, he learned the move in fifth grade after practicing with the ambidextrious Mikan Drill and soon learned to value it, as it was "the only shot I could use that didn't get smashed back in my face". He also watched Cliff Hagan shoot the hook with the St. Louis Hawks. To prevent his hook from being blocked from behind, he was advised by Wooden to do away with the typical sweeping motion of a hook shot, instead keeping the ball close to his body and shooting with a straighter motion. Addul-Jabbar's hook shot improved in his junior year at UCLA, after the dunk was banned. In his final college years, he often released the ball several feet above the rim.
Abdul-Jabbar won a record six MVP awards. His 38,387 career points remained the NBA's career scoring record until February 7, 2023, when he was surpassed by LeBron James of the Lakers in Los Angeles. Abdul-Jabbar attended the game, and passed the game ball to James during the in-game ceremony after the record was broken. James did not play college ball, entering the league straight out of high school at age 18 in 2003. Abdul-Jabbar held the scoring mark for nearly 39 years, the longest span in league history. His skyhook is considered one of the most unstoppable shots ever. He won six NBA championships and two Finals MVP awards, was voted to 15 All-NBA and 11 All-Defensive Teams, and was selected to a record 19 All-Star teams, tied by James in 2023. He was named to the NBA's 35th, 50th, and 75th anniversary teams. He averaged 24.6 points, 11.2 rebounds, 3.6 assists, and 2.6 blocks per game. Abdul-Jabbar is ranked as the NBA's third leading all-time rebounder (17,440). He is the third all-time in registered blocks (3,189), which is impressive because this basketball statistic was not recorded until the fourth year of his career (1974). He had three straight seasons where he averaged at least 30 points and 16 rebounds, and six times he averaged at least 27 points and 14.5 rebounds in the same season.
Abdul-Jabbar combined dominance during his career peak with the longevity and sustained excellence of his later years. A pioneer in using yoga in the NBA, he also credited Bruce Lee with teaching him "the discipline and spirituality of martial arts, which was greatly responsible for me being able to play competitively in the NBA for 20 years with very few injuries". Abdul-Jabbar played in 95 percent of his team's regular-season games during his career, including 80 or more games in 11 of his 20 seasons. Five times he played in all 82 games. After claiming his sixth and final MVP in 1980, he continued to average above 20 points in the following six seasons, including 23 points per game in his 17th season at age 38. He earned first-team All-NBA selections that were 15 years apart and Finals MVPs 14 seasons from each other.
Among the most graceful basketball players ever, Abdul-Jabbar is regarded as one of the best centers ever and one of the greatest players in NBA history; he was voted the best center of all time by ESPN ahead of Wilt Chamberlain in 2007, and ranked No. 4 in Slam's "Top 100 Players Of All-Time" in 2018, and No. 3 in ESPN's list of the top 74 NBA players of all time in 2020, the best center ever ahead of Bill Russell and Chamberlain. League experts and basketball legends frequently mentioned him when considering the greatest player of all time. Riley said in 1985: "Why judge anymore? When a man has broken records, won championships, endured tremendous criticism and responsibility, why judge? Let's toast him as the greatest player ever." In 2023, as James was on the verge of breaking the NBA career scoring record, Abdul-Jabbar remained as Riley's choice as the greatest: "We don't win championships without the greatest player in the history of the game, who had the greatest weapon in the history of the game. The skyhook was unstoppable. Last minute of the game, it's going to one guy". As president of the Miami Heat, Riley had won two NBA titles with James on their roster. Isiah Thomas remarked: "If they say the numbers don't lie, then Kareem is the greatest ever to play the game." In 2013, Julius Erving said: "In terms of players all-time, Kareem is still the number one guy. He's the guy you gotta start your franchise with." In 2015, ESPN named Abdul-Jabbar the best center in NBA history, and ranked him No. 2 behind Michael Jordan among the greatest NBA players ever. While Jordan's shots were enthralling and considered unfathomable, Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook appeared automatic, and he himself called the shot "unsexy". In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar's only recognized rookie card became the most expensive basketball card ever sold (the record has since been surpassed) when it went for $501,900 at auction. In 2022, he was ranked No. 3 (first in his position) in ESPN's NBA 75th Anniversary Team list, and No. 3 (behind Jordan and James) in a similar list by The Athletic.
Playing in Los Angeles facilitated Abdul-Jabbar's trying his hand at acting. He made his film debut in Bruce Lee's 1972 film Game of Death.
In 1980, Abdul-Jabbar played co-pilot Roger Murdock in Airplane! He has a scene in which a little boy looks at him and remarks that he is in fact Abdul-Jabbar, spoofing the appearance of football star Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch as an airplane pilot in the 1957 drama that served as the inspiration for Airplane!, Zero Hour! Staying in character, Abdul-Jabbar states that he is merely Roger Murdock, an airline co-pilot; the boy continues to insist that Abdul-Jabbar is "the greatest", but that according to his father he does not "work hard on defense" and that he does not "really try, except during the playoffs". This causes Abdul-Jabbar's character to snap: "The hell I don't!" He then grabs the boy and snarls that he has "been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA" and been "busting my buns every night!" He instructs the boy: "Tell your old man to drag [Bill] Walton and [Bob] Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes." When Murdock loses consciousness later in the film, he collapses at the controls wearing Abdul-Jabbar's goggles and yellow Lakers' shorts. In 2014, Abdul-Jabbar and Airplane! co-star Robert Hays (character Ted Striker) reprised their Airplane! roles in a parody commercial promoting Wisconsin tourism.
Abdul-Jabbar has had numerous other television and film appearances, often playing himself. He has had roles in movies such as Fletch, Troop Beverly Hills and Forget Paris, and television series such as Full House, Living Single, Amen, Everybody Loves Raymond, Martin, Diff'rent Strokes (his height humorously contrasted with that of diminutive child star Gary Coleman), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Scrubs, 21 Jump Street, Emergency!, Man from Atlantis, and New Girl. Abdul-Jabbar played a genie in a lamp in a 1984 episode of Tales from the Darkside. He also played himself on the February 10, 1994, episode of the sketch comedy television series In Living Color.
Abdul-Jabbar appeared in the television version of Stephen King's The Stand, played the Archangel of Basketball in Slam Dunk Ernest, and had a brief non-speaking cameo appearance in BASEketball. Abdul-Jabbar was also the co-executive producer of the 1994 TV film The Vernon Johns Story. He has also made appearances on The Colbert Report in a 2006 skit called "HipHopKetball II: The ReJazzebration Remix '06", and in 2008 as a stage manager who is sent out on a mission to find Nazi gold. Abdul-Jabbar also voiced himself in a 2011 episode of The Simpsons titled "Love Is a Many Strangled Thing". He had a recurring role as himself on the NBC series Guys with Kids, which aired from 2012 to 2013. On Al Jazeera English he expressed his desire to be remembered not just as a player, but also as somebody who used their mind and made other contributions.
In February 2019, he appeared in season 12 episode 16 of The Big Bang Theory, "The D&D Vortex". In 2021, Abdul-Jabbar made a guest appearance as himself in a season 2 episode of Dave. The episode he appeared in was also named after him. Abdul-Jabbar makes a cameo appearance as himself in the 2022 Netflix film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. In 2023, Abdul-Jabbar appeared as himself in season 7, episode 3 of the Showtime series Billions
In September 2018, Abdul-Jabbar was announced as one of the writers for the July 2019 revival of Veronica Mars.
On February 10, 2011, Abdul-Jabbar debuted his film On the Shoulders of Giants, documenting the tumultuous journey of the famed yet often-overlooked New York Renaissance professional basketball team, at Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey. The event was simulcast live throughout the school, city, and state. In 2015, he appeared in Kareem: Minority of One, an HBO documentary on his life. In 2020, Abdul-Jabbar was the executive producer and narrator of the History channel special Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his narration.
Abdul-Jabbar participated in the 2013 ABC reality series Splash, a celebrity diving competition. In April 2018, Abdul-Jabbar competed in the all-athlete season of season 26 of Dancing with the Stars and partnered with professional dancer Lindsay Arnold.
In 1967, Abdul-Jabbar was the only college athlete to attend the Cleveland Summit, a meeting of prominent black athletes who convened in support of Muhammad Ali's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. The following year, Abdul-Jabbar boycotted the Summer Olympics to protest American racism, drawing death threats for his decision.
Abdul-Jabbar became a best-selling author and cultural critic. He published several books, mostly on African-American history. His first book, his autobiography Giant Steps, was written in 1983 with co-author Peter Knobler. The book's title is an homage to jazz great John Coltrane, referring to his album Giant Steps. Others include On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, co-written with Raymond Obstfeld, and Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, World War II's Forgotten Heroes, co-written with Anthony Walton, which is a history of the first black armored unit to fight in World War II.
A regular contributor to discussions about issues of race and religion, among other topics, in national magazines and on television, Abdul-Jabbar has written a regular column for Time. He appeared on Meet the Press on January 25, 2015, to talk about a column saying that Islam should not be blamed for the actions of violent extremists, just as Christianity has not been blamed for the actions of violent extremists who profess Christianity. When asked about being Muslim, he said: "I don't have any misgiving about my faith. I'm very concerned about the people who claim to be Muslims that are murdering people and creating all this mayhem in the world. That is not what Islam is about, and that should not be what people think of when they think about Muslims. But it's up to all of us to do something about all of it."
In November 2014, Abdul-Jabbar published an essay in Jacobin calling for just compensation for college athletes, writing that "in the name of fairness, we must bring an end to the indentured servitude of college athletes and start paying them what they are worth." Commenting on Donald Trump's 2017 travel ban, he condemned it, saying: "The absence of reason and compassion is the very definition of pure evil because it is a rejection of our sacred values, distilled from millennia of struggle." In June 2021, he published an essay in Jacobin on the negative impact on public health of those refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, criticizing Kyrie Irving, among others.
In January 2012, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Abdul-Jabbar had accepted a position as a cultural ambassador for the United States. During the announcement press conference, Abdul-Jabbar commented on the historical legacy of African-Americans as representatives of U.S. culture: "I remember when Louis Armstrong first did it back for President Kennedy, one of my heroes. So it's nice to be following in his footsteps." As part of this role, Abdul-Jabbar has traveled to Brazil to promote education for local youths.
Former President Barack Obama announced in his last days of office that he has appointed Abdul-Jabbar along with Gabrielle Douglas and Carli Lloyd to the President's Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition.
In January 2017, Abdul-Jabbar was appointed to the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee by United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. According to the United States Mint, Abdul-Jabbar is a keen coin collector whose interest in the life of Alexander Hamilton had led him into the hobby. He resigned in 2018 due to what the Mint described as "increasing personal obligations".
Abdul-Jabbar met Habiba Abdul-Jabbar (born Janice Brown) at a Lakers game during his senior year at UCLA. They married in 1971, and together had three children: daughters Habiba and Sultana and son Kareem Jr., who played basketball at Western Kentucky after attending Valparaiso. Abdul-Jabbar and Janice divorced in 1978. He has another son, Amir, with Cheryl Pistono. Another son, Adam, made an appearance on the TV sitcom Full House with him.
In 1983, Abdul-Jabbar's house burned down. Many of his belongings, including his beloved jazz LP collection of about 3,000 albums, were destroyed. Many Lakers fans sent and brought him albums, which he found uplifting.
In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar performed a tribute to friend Muhammad Ali along with Chance the Rapper.
At age 24 in 1971, he converted to Islam and legally became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which means "noble one, servant of the Almighty." He was named by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis. Abdul-Jabbar purchased and donated 7700 16th Street NW, a house in Washington, D.C., for Khaalis to use as the Hanafi Madh-Hab Center; a few years later, the location would become the place of the 1973 Hanafi Muslim massacre. Eventually, Kareem "found that [he] disagreed with some of Hamaas' teachings about the Quran, and [they] parted ways." He then studied the Quran on his own, and "emerged from this pilgrimage with [his] beliefs clarified and [his] faith renewed." Abdul-Jabbar was also heavily influenced by Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam. Abdul-Jabbar was invited to join the group, but he declined.
Abdul-Jabbar has spoken about the thinking that was behind his name change when he converted to Islam. He stated that he was "latching on to something that was part of my heritage, because many of the slaves who were brought here were Muslims. My family was brought to America by a French planter named Alcindor, who came here from Trinidad in the 18th century. My people were Yoruba, and their culture survived slavery ... My father found out about that when I was a kid, and it gave me all I needed to know that, hey, I was somebody, even if nobody else knew about it. When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. And that's a terrible burden on black people, because they don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted." His name change further eroded his public image in the United States, mostly in white areas.
In 1998, Abdul-Jabbar reached a settlement after he sued Miami Dolphins running back Karim Abdul-Jabbar (now Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar, born Sharmon Shah) because he felt Karim was profiting off the name he made famous by having the Abdul-Jabbar moniker and number 33 on his Dolphins jersey. As a result, the younger Abdul-Jabbar had to change his jersey nameplate to "Abdul" while playing for the Dolphins. The football player had also been an athlete at UCLA.
Abdul-Jabbar suffers from migraines, and his use of cannabis to reduce the symptoms has had legal ramifications. In November 2009, Abdul-Jabbar announced that he was suffering from a form of leukemia, Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. The disease was diagnosed in December 2008, but Abdul-Jabbar said his condition could be managed by taking oral medication daily, seeing his specialist every other month, and having his blood analyzed regularly. He expressed in a 2009 press conference that he did not believe the illness would stop him from leading a normal life. Abdul-Jabbar is a spokesman for Novartis, the company that produces Gleevec, his cancer medication.
In February 2011, Abdul-Jabbar announced via Twitter that his leukemia was gone and he was "100% cancer free". A few days later, he clarified his misstatement: "You're never really cancer-free and I should have known that. My cancer right now is at an absolute minimum." In April 2015, Abdul-Jabbar was admitted to hospital when he was diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. Later that week, on his 68th birthday, he underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery at the UCLA Medical Center.
In February 2023, he spoke out about his atrial fibrillation diagnosis. He partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer's "No Time to Wait" to raise awareness of the symptoms of the irregular and rapid heart rhythm condition which increase the risk of stroke. In December 2023, he was hospitalized after he fell and broke his hip while attending a concert.
In 2011, Abdul-Jabbar was awarded the Double Helix Medal for his work in raising awareness for cancer research. Also in 2011, Abdul-Jabbar received an honorary degree from New York Institute of Technology. In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama. In 2020, Abdul-Jabbar was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator for his work on the documentary special Black Patriots: Heroes of The Revolution.
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"text": "Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (/kəˈriːm æbˈduːl dʒəˈbɑːr/ kə-REEM ab-DOOL jə-BAR; born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. (/ælˈsɪndər/ al-SIN-dər); April 16, 1947) is an American former professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP). He was a 19-time NBA All-Star—tied for the most ever—a 15-time All-NBA Team member, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection. He was a member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, and was twice voted the NBA Finals MVP. He was named to three NBA anniversary teams (35th, 50th, and 75th). Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he was called the greatest basketball player of all time by Pat Riley, Isiah Thomas, and Julius Erving. Abdul-Jabbar broke the NBA's career scoring record in 1984 and held it until it was broken in 2023 by LeBron James.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor when he played at parochial high school Power Memorial in New York City, where he led their team to 71 consecutive wins. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins, winning three consecutive national championships under head coach John Wooden. Alcindor was a record three-time most outstanding player of the NCAA tournament. Drafted with the first overall pick by the one-season-old Bucks franchise in the 1969 NBA draft, he spent six seasons in Milwaukee. After leading the Bucks to its first NBA championship at age 24 in 1971, he took the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Using his trademark skyhook shot, he established himself as one of the league's top scorers. In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career in which they won five additional NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the Showtime era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and got past the first round 14 times; his teams reached the NBA Finals on ten occasions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's regular season career leader in points (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), and personal fouls (4,657). He remains the all-time leader in minutes played and field goals made. He ranks second in career points and field goal attempts, and is third all-time in both total rebounds (17,440) and blocked shots. ESPN named him the greatest center of all time in 2007, the greatest player in college basketball history in 2008, and the second best player in NBA history (behind Michael Jordan) in 2016. Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist, having trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in his film Game of Death (1972). In 2012, Abdul-Jabbar was selected by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be a U.S. global cultural ambassador. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar was born in Harlem, New York City, the only child of Cora Lillian, a department store price checker, and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr., a transit police officer and jazz musician. Cora was born in North Carolina but would end up in Harlem as part of the Great Migration. Ferdinand Sr. was the child of immigrants from Trinidad. Abdul-Jabbar grew up in the Dyckman Street projects in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, which he moved to at the age of 3 in 1950. At birth, Abdul-Jabbar weighed 12 lb 11 oz (5.75 kg) and was 22+1⁄2 inches (57 cm) long. Always very tall for his age, he was already 5 ft 8 in (1.73 m) by the age of nine. Abdul-Jabbar was often depressed as a teenager because of the stares and comments about his height. By the eighth grade (age 13–14), he had grown to 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m) and could already slam dunk a basketball.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar began his record-breaking basketball accomplishments when he was in high school, where he led coach Jack Donohue's Power Memorial Academy team to three straight New York City Catholic championships, a 71–game winning streak, and a 79–2 overall record. This earned him \"The Tower from Power\" nickname. His 2,067 total points were a New York City high school record. The team won the national high school boys basketball championship when Abdul-Jabbar was in 10th and 11th grade and was runner-up his senior year. He had a strained relationship in his final year with Donohue after the coach called him a nigger.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar wrote for the Harlem Youth Action Project newspaper. The Harlem riot of 1964, which was prompted by the fatal shooting of 15-year old black boy James Powell by a New York police officer, triggered Alcindor's interest in racial politics. \"Right then and there, I knew who I was, who I had to be. I was going to be black rage personified, Black Power in the flesh\", he said.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar was not able to play professionally in the National Basketball Association (NBA) out of high school. At the time, the league only accepted players beginning with the year that they could have hypothetically graduated from college. His other options to play basketball professionally would have been to join the Harlem Globetrotters or play overseas. However, Abdul-Jabbar's goal was to attend college. Recruited by hundreds of schools, he was the most sought-after prospect since Wilt Chamberlain. Southern teams that were segregated were willing to break the color line to acquire Abdul-Jabbar. He chose to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, after being recruited by Bruins assistant coach Jerry Norman.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "By now 7-foot-1-inch (2.16 m) tall, Abdul-Jabbar was relegated to the freshman team in his first year with the Bruins, as freshman were ineligible to play varsity until 1972. The freshman squad included Lucius Allen, Kenny Heitz, and Lynn Shackelford, who were fellow high-school All-Americans. On November 27, 1965, Abdul-Jabbar made his first public performance in UCLA's annual varsity–freshman exhibition game, attended by 12,051 fans in the inaugural game at the Bruins' new Pauley Pavilion. The 1965–66 varsity team was the two-time defending national champions and the top-ranked team in preseason polls. The freshman team won 75–60 behind Abdul-Jabbar's 31 points and 21 rebounds. It was the first time a freshman team had beaten the UCLA varsity squad. The varsity had lost Gail Goodrich and Keith Erickson from the championship squad to graduation, and starting guard Freddie Goss was out sick. After the game, UPI wrote: \"UCLA's Bruins open defense of their national basketball title this week, but right now they're only the second best team on campus.\" The freshman team was 21–0 that year, dominating against junior college and other freshman teams.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar made his varsity debut as a sophomore in 1966 and received national coverage. Sports Illustrated described him as \"The New Superstar\" after he scored 56 points in his first game, which broke the UCLA single-game record held by Gail Goodrich. He averaged 29 points per game during the season and led UCLA to an undefeated 30–0 record and a national championship, their third title in four years. After the season, the dunk was banned in college basketball in an attempt to curtail his dominance; critics dubbed it the \"Alcindor Rule\". It was not rescinded until the 1976–77 season. Abdul-Jabbar was the main contributor to the team's three-year record of 88 wins and only two losses: one to the University of Houston in which Abdul-Jabbar had an eye injury, and the other to crosstown rival USC who played a \"stall game\"; there was no shot clock in that era, allowing the Trojans to hold the ball as long as it wanted before attempting to score. They limited Alcindor to only four shots and 10 points.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During his college career, Abdul-Jabbar was a three-time national player of the year (1967–1969), a three-time unanimous first-team All-American (1967–1969), played on three NCAA basketball champion teams (1967, 1968, and 1969), was honored as the Most Outstanding Player in the NCAA Tournament three times, and became the first-ever Naismith College Player of the Year in 1969. He was the only player to win the Helms Foundation Player of the Year award three times. He had considered transferring to Michigan because of unfulfilled recruiting promises. UCLA player Willie Naulls introduced Abdul-Jabbar and teammate Lucius Allen to athletic booster Sam Gilbert, who convinced the pair to remain at UCLA.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "During his junior year, Abdul-Jabbar suffered a scratched left cornea on January 12, 1968, in a game against Cal when he was struck by Tom Henderson in a rebound battle. He would miss the next two games against Stanford and Portland. His cornea would again be scratched during his pro career, which subsequently caused him to wear goggles for eye protection. On January 20, the Bruins faced coach Guy Lewis's Houston Cougars in the first-ever nationally televised regular-season college basketball game, with 52,693 in attendance at the Astrodome. In a contest billed as the \"Game of the Century\", Cougar forward Elvin Hayes scored 39 points and had 15 rebounds, while Abdul-Jabbar, suffering from his eye injury, was held to just 15 points as Houston won 71–69, ending UCLA's 47-game winning streak. Hayes and Abdul-Jabbar had a rematch in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament, where UCLA, with a healthy Alcindor, defeated Houston 101–69 en route to the national championship. UCLA limited Hayes, who was averaging 37.7 points per game, to only ten points. Wooden credited his assistant, Jerry Norman, for devising the diamond-and-one defense that contained Hayes. Sports Illustrated ran a cover story on the game and used the headline: \"Lew's Revenge: The Rout of Houston.\" As a senior in 1968–69, Abdul-Jabbar led the Bruins to their third consecutive national title.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the summer of 1968, Abdul-Jabbar took the shahada twice and converted to Sunni Islam from Catholicism. He adopted the Arabic name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, though he did not begin using it publicly until 1971. He boycotted the 1968 Summer Olympics, deciding not to try out for U.S. Olympic basketball team, who went on to easily win the gold medal. Abdul-Jabbar was protesting the unequal treatment of African Americans in the United States, stating that he was \"trying to point out to the world the futility of winning the gold medal for this country and then coming back to live under oppression.\"",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "As the NBA did not allow college underclassmen to make an early NBA draft declaration, Abdul-Jabbar completed his studies and earned a Bachelor of Arts with a major in history in 1969. In his free time, he practiced martial arts. He studied aikido in New York between his sophomore and junior year before learning Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee in Los Angeles.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "As of the 2019–20 UCLA Bruins men's basketball team season, he still holds or shares a number of individual records at UCLA:",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "He is represented in the top ten in a number of other school records, including season and career rebounds, second only to Bill Walton.",
"title": "College career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The Globetrotters offered Abdul-Jabbar $1 million to play for them, but he declined and was picked first overall in the 1969 NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks, who were in only their second season of existence. The Bucks had won a coin toss with the Phoenix Suns for the first pick. He was also chosen first overall in the 1969 American Basketball Association draft by the New York Nets. The Nets believed that they had the upper hand in securing Abdul-Jabbar's services because he was from New York; however, when Abdul-Jabbar told both the Bucks and the Nets that he would accept only one offer from each team, he rejected the Nets' bid as too low. Sam Gilbert negotiated the contract along with Los Angeles businessman Ralph Shapiro at no charge. After Abdul-Jabbar chose the Milwaukee Bucks' offer of $1.4 million, the Nets offered a guaranteed $3.25 million. Abdul-Jabbar declined the offer, saying: \"A bidding war degrades the people involved. It would make me feel like a flesh peddler, and I don't want to think like that.\"",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar's presence enabled the Bucks to claim second place in the NBA's Eastern Division with a 56–26 record (improved from 27–55 the previous year). On February 21, 1970, he scored 51 points in a 140–127 win over the SuperSonics. Abdul-Jabbar was an instant star, ranking second in the league in scoring (28.8 ppg) and third in rebounding (14.5 rpg), for which he was awarded the title of NBA Rookie of the Year. In the series-clinching game against the Philadelphia 76ers, he recorded 46 points and 25 rebounds. He was the second rookie to score at least 40 points and 25 rebounds in a playoff game, the first being Wilt Chamberlain. He also set an NBA rookie record with 10 or more games of 20+ points scored during the playoffs, tied by Jayson Tatum in 2018.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The next season, the Bucks acquired All-Star guard Oscar Robertson. Milwaukee went on to record the best record in the league with 66 victories in the 1970–71 season, including a then-record 20 straight wins. Abdul-Jabbar was awarded his first of six NBA Most Valuable Player Awards, along with his first scoring title (31.7 ppg). He also led the league in total points, with 2,596. The Bucks won the NBA title, sweeping the Baltimore Bullets 4–0 in the 1971 NBA Finals. Abdul-Jabbar posted 27 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists in Game 4, and he was named the Finals MVP after averaging 27 points per game on 60.5% shooting in the series.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "During the offseason, Abdul-Jabbar and Robertson joined Bucks head coach Larry Costello on a three-week basketball tour of Africa on behalf of the State Department. In a press conference at the State Department on June 3, 1971, he stated that going forward he wanted to be called by his Muslim name, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, its translation roughly \"noble one, servant of the Almighty [i.e., servant of Allah]\".",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar remained a dominant force for the Bucks. The following year, he repeated as scoring champion (34.8 ppg and 2,822 total points) and became the first player to be named the NBA Most Valuable Player twice in his first three years. In 1974, Abdul-Jabbar led the Bucks to their fourth consecutive Midwest Division title, and he won his third MVP Award in four years. He was among the top five NBA players in scoring (27.0 ppg, third), rebounding (14.5 rpg, fourth), blocked shots (283, second), and field goal percentage (.539, second). Milwaukee advanced to the 1974 finals, losing to the Boston Celtics in seven games.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Robertson, who became a free agent in the offseason, retired in September 1974 after he was unable to agree on a contract with the Bucks. On October 3, Abdul-Jabbar privately requested a trade to the New York Knicks, with his second choice being the Washington Bullets (now the Wizards) and his third, the Los Angeles Lakers. He had never spoken negatively of the city of Milwaukee or its fans, but he said that being in the Midwest did not fit his cultural needs. Two days later in a pre-season game before the 1974–75 season against the Celtics in Buffalo, New York, Abdul-Jabbar caught a fingernail in his left eye from Don Nelson and suffered a corneal abrasion; this angered him enough to punch the backboard stanchion, breaking two bones in his right hand. He missed the first 16 games of the season, during which the Bucks were 3–13, and returned in late November wearing protective goggles. On March 13, 1975, sportscaster Marv Albert reported that Abdul-Jabbar requested a trade to either New York or Los Angeles, preferably to the Knicks. The following day after a loss in Milwaukee to the Lakers, Abdul-Jabbar confirmed to reporters his desire to play in another city. He averaged 30.0 points during the season, but Milwaukee finished in last place in the division at 38–44.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 1975, the Lakers acquired Abdul-Jabbar and reserve center Walt Wesley from the Bucks for center Elmore Smith, guard Brian Winters, blue-chip rookies Dave Meyers and Junior Bridgeman, and cash. In the 1975–76 season, his first with the Lakers, he had a dominating season, averaging 27.7 points per game and leading the league in rebounding (16.9), blocked shots (4.12), and total minutes played (3,379). His 1,111 defensive rebounds remains the NBA single-season record (defensive rebounds were not recorded prior to the 1973–74 season). He earned his fourth MVP award, becoming the first winner in Lakers' franchise history, but missed the post-season for the second straight year as the Lakers finished 40–42.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "After acquiring a cast of no-name free agents, the Lakers were projected to finished near the bottom of the Pacific Division in 1976–77. Abdul-Jabbar helped lead the team to the best record (53–29) in the NBA, and he won his fifth MVP award, tying Bill Russell's record. Abdul-Jabbar led the league in field goal percentage (.579), was third in scoring (26.2), and was second in rebounds (13.3) and blocked shots (3.18). In the playoffs, the Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference semifinals, setting up a confrontation with the Portland Trail Blazers. The result was a memorable matchup, pitting Abdul-Jabbar against a young, injury-free Bill Walton. Although Abdul-Jabbar dominated the series statistically, Walton and the Trail Blazers (who were experiencing their first-ever run in the playoffs) swept the Lakers, behind Walton's skillful passing and timely plays.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Two minutes into the opening game of the 1977–78 season, Abdul-Jabbar broke his right hand punching Milwaukee's Kent Benson in retaliation to the rookie's elbow to his stomach. Benson suffered a black right eye and required two stitches. According to Benson, Abdul-Jabbar initiated the elbowing, but there were no witnesses and it was not captured on replays. Abdul-Jabbar, who broke the same bone in 1975 after he punched the backboard support, was out for almost two months and missed 20 games. He was fined a then-league record $5,000 but was not suspended. Benson missed one game but was not punished by the league. The Lakers were 8–13 when Abdul-Jabbar returned. He was not named to the 1978 NBA All-Star Game, the only time in his 20-year career he was not selected to an All-Star Game. Chicago's Artis Gilmore and Detroit's Bob Lanier were chosen as reserves for the West, with Walton starting at center. Amid criticism from the media over his performance, Abdul-Jabbar had 39 points, 20 rebounds, six assists and four blocks in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers the day the All-Star rosters were announced. He added 37 points and 30 rebounds in a victory over the New Jersey Nets (now Brooklyn) in the final game before the All-Star break.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar's play remained strong during the next two seasons, being named to the All-NBA Second Team twice, the All-Defense First Team once, and the All-Defense Second Team once. The Lakers, however, continued to be stymied in the playoffs, being eliminated by the Seattle SuperSonics in both 1978 (first round) and 1979 (semifinals).",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The Lakers selected Magic Johnson with the first overall pick of 1979 NBA draft. They had acquired the pick from the New Orleans Jazz (later Utah) in 1976, when league rules required that they compensate Los Angeles for their signing of free agent Gail Goodrich. The addition of Johnson paved the way for the Lakers' Showtime dynasty of the 1980s, appearing in the finals eight times and winning five NBA championships. While less dominant than in his younger years, Abdul-Jabbar reinforced his status as one of the greatest basketball players ever, adding an additional four All-NBA First Team selections and two All-Defense First Team honors. He won his record sixth MVP award in his first season with Johnson in 1979–80. In the 1980 finals, Abdul-Jabbar averaged 33.4 points in five games, spraining his ankle in Game 5, but returning to finish the contest with 40 points and leading the team to a win. He missed Game 6, when the Lakers clinched the title, and Johnson was named the Finals MVP after recording 42 points, 15 rebounds, and seven assists in the finale.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar continued to average 20 or more points per game in the following six seasons. The Lakers won another championship in 1981–82, but he suffered migraines in the finals, averaging just 18 points per game against Philadelphia. In 14 playoff games, he finished with a 20.4 point average, the lowest of his career at the time. The Lakers advanced to the 1983 NBA Finals in a rematch against the 76ers, who had acquired Moses Malone to shore up their center position after Abdul-Jabbar had outplayed their big-man duo of Darryl Dawkins and Caldwell Jones in the previous finals. The 76ers swept the Lakers 4–0, and Malone was named the Finals MVP after outrebounding Abdul-Jabbar 72–30 in the series. Malone had 27 offensive rebounds, which nearly equaled Abdul-Jabbar's total rebounds (30). On the road against Utah on April 5, 1984, Abdul-Jabbar broke Chamberlain's record for most career points in the NBA. He received a pass from Johnson and scored from 15 feet (4.6 m) on his patent skyhook over the 7-foot-4-inch (2.24 m) shot-blocking specialist Mark Eaton. The game was played at the Thomas & Mack Center, one of 11 home games for the Jazz in the Las Vegas Valley that season. The contest drew 18,389 fans, the Jazz's largest home crowd since moving from New Orleans before the 1979–80 season.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar won his second Finals MVP in 1985, when he became the oldest to win the award at 38 years and 54 days old. He averaged 25.7 points, 9 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 1.5 blocks in the series against Boston. He was initially outplayed in Game 1, scoring 12 points with three rebounds against 30-year-old Celtics center Robert Parish, who had 18 points and eight rebounds in a 148–114 win over the Lakers, dubbed the \"Memorial Day Massacre\". At the team's film session the following day, Abdul-Jabbar—who normally sat near the back—was seated in the front row, and accepted all of head coach Pat Riley's criticism. Before Game 2, Abdul-Jabbar asked if his father could ride on the team bus to the game. Typically a hard-liner on rules, Riley agreed to make an exception. Abdul-Jabbar bounced back with 30 points, 17 rebounds, eight assists and three blocks in a 109–102 victory. In the Lakers’ four wins, he averaged 30.2 points, 11.3 rebounds, 6.5 assists and 2.0 blocks. The title ended the Celtics' streak of eight consecutive championships against the Lakers.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar played in his 17th season in 1985–86, breaking the previous NBA record for seasons played of 16, held by Dolph Schayes, John Havlicek, Paul Silas, and Elvin Hayes. Prior to the 1986–87 season, he gained 13 pounds (5.9 kg), reaching close to 270 pounds (120 kg), to compete against the growing number of 7-footers (2.1 m) in the league. The Lakers advanced to the NBA Finals in each of his final three seasons, defeating Boston in 1987, and Detroit in 1988. The Lakers lost to the Pistons in a four-game sweep in his final season. After winning Game 7 of the 1988 finals, the 41-year-old Abdul-Jabbar announced in the locker room that he would return for one more season before retiring. His points, rebounds, and minutes had dropped in his 19th season, and there were reports prior to the game that he was retiring after the contest. On his \"retirement tour\" he received standing ovations at games, both home and away, and gifts ranging from a yacht that said \"Captain Skyhook\" to framed jerseys from his career to a Persian rug. At the Forum against Seattle in his final regular season game, every Laker came onto the court wearing Abdul-Jabbar's trademark goggles.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "At the time of his retirement, Abdul-Jabbar held the record for most career games played in the NBA. He was also the all-time record holder for most field goals made (15,837) and most minutes played (57,446), as well as most points (38,387) until LeBron James broke the record in 2023.",
"title": "Professional career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1995, Abdul-Jabbar began expressing an interest in coaching and imparting knowledge from his playing days. His opportunities were limited despite the success he enjoyed during his playing days. During his playing years, Abdul-Jabbar had developed a reputation for being introverted and sullen. He was often unfriendly with the media. His sensitivity and shyness created a perception of him being aloof and surly. At the time, his mentality was that he either did not have the time or did not owe anything to anyone. Magic Johnson recalled as a kid being brushed off after asking him for an autograph. Abdul-Jabbar might freeze out a reporter if they touched him, and he once refused to stop reading the newspaper while giving an interview.",
"title": "Coaching career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar had spent most of his career with a reserved attitude towards media attention (since he did not have to deal with it as a star at UCLA) before he softened up near the end of his career. Abdul-Jabbar said: \"I didn't understand that I also had affected people that way and that's what it was all about. I always saw it like they were trying to pry. I was way too suspicious and I paid a price for it.\" However, he believes it was his reputation as a \"difficult person\", alongside his attempts at trying to break into coaching while nearing the age of fifty, that affected his chances of becoming a head coach within the NBA or NCAA.",
"title": "Coaching career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar worked as an assistant for the Los Angeles Clippers and the Seattle SuperSonics, helping mentor, among others, their young centers, Michael Olowokandi and Jerome James. Abdul-Jabbar was the head coach of the Oklahoma Storm of the United States Basketball League in 2002, leading the team to the league's championship that season, but he failed to land the head coaching position at Columbia University a year later. He then worked as a scout for the New York Knicks. He returned to the Lakers as a special assistant coach to Phil Jackson for six seasons (2005–2011). Early on, he mentored their young center, Andrew Bynum. Abdul-Jabbar also served as a volunteer coach at Alchesay High School on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona, in 1998. He moved on from coaching in 2013 after unsuccessfully lobbying for open head coach positions with UCLA and the Milwaukee Bucks.",
"title": "Coaching career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On offense, Abdul-Jabbar was a dominant low-post threat. In contrast to other low-post specialists like Wilt Chamberlain or Shaquille O'Neal, he was a slender giant, standing 7 ft 2 in (2.18 m) tall while weighing around 240 pounds (110 kg) to 250 lb (115 kg), although he bulked to 270 lb (120 kg) in 1986; in his early years, he used that frame for agility and speed while in later years he utilized a bigger frame for trying to guard under the basket. Abdul-Jabbar was famous for his ambidextrous skyhook shot. It contributed to his high .5595 field goal accuracy, making him the 21st most accurate scorer of all time, as well as a feared clutch shooter. He shot above 50% in every season but his last.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar maintained a dominant presence on defense. He was selected to the NBA All-Defensive Team eleven times. He frustrated opponents with his superior shot-blocking ability and denied an average of 2.6 shots a game. He was not an aggressive rebounder, relying more on his size as a 7-footer instead of positioning. After the pounding he endured early in his career, his rebounding average fell to between six or eight a game in his latter years. As a teammate, Abdul-Jabbar exuded natural leadership and was affectionately called \"Cap\", or \"Captain\", by his colleagues. He had an even temperament, which Riley said made him coachable.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "A strict fitness regime made Abdul-Jabbar one of the most durable players of all time. He began a year-around conditioning program at age 26. While in Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar started doing yoga in 1976 to improve his flexibility, and was notable for his physical fitness regimen. He said: \"There is no way I could have played as long as I did without yoga.\" Because of his metabolism, he had difficulty putting on weight. Prior to the 1979–80 season, he gained 10 pounds (4.5 kg) from 240 to 250 pounds (110 kg) after switching from free weights to Nautilus equipment. He also switched that offseason from tai chi to yoga. To reduce wear during his later years, Riley did not have him inbound the ball on made baskets, and had him wait at the opposite end of the court on free throws. In what he described as playing a \"smarter game\" to conserve energy, Abdul-Jabbar sometimes would be the last player to set up on offense by several seconds after staying behind on defense to see if the Lakers scored on a fast break. In 1981, he responded to criticism that he did not hustle: \"You have to understand I have to play 42 to 45 minutes a night, and it's like mowing a huge estate lawn. If you rush out and run around furiously, it's self-defeating. You'll be worn out just at the point when you're most needed.\" Addul-Jabbar finished his career with then-NBA records of 20 seasons and 1,560 games played, later broken by former Celtics center Robert Parish.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar began wearing his trademark goggles after getting poked in the eye during preseason in 1974. He continued wearing them for years until abandoning them in the 1979 playoffs. He resumed wearing goggles in October 1980 after being accidentally poked in the right eye by Houston's Rudy Tomjanovich. After years of being jabbed in the eyes, Abdul-Jabbar developed corneal erosion syndrome, occasionally experiencing pain when his eyes dry up. He missed three games in December 1986 due to the condition.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar was well known for his trademark skyhook, a hook shot in which he raised the ball and released it at the highest point of his arm's arching motion. He could shoot the skyhook from up to 16 feet (4.9 m). With his long arms and great height, he released the ball so high that it was difficult for a defender to block without committing a goaltending violation. His body being between the defender and the ball made it further difficult to block, as did extending his non-shooting arm to fend off opponents. He was stronger shooting the skyhook with his right hand than he was with his left, which he developed in his later years.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "According to Abdul-Jabbar, he learned the move in fifth grade after practicing with the ambidextrious Mikan Drill and soon learned to value it, as it was \"the only shot I could use that didn't get smashed back in my face\". He also watched Cliff Hagan shoot the hook with the St. Louis Hawks. To prevent his hook from being blocked from behind, he was advised by Wooden to do away with the typical sweeping motion of a hook shot, instead keeping the ball close to his body and shooting with a straighter motion. Addul-Jabbar's hook shot improved in his junior year at UCLA, after the dunk was banned. In his final college years, he often released the ball several feet above the rim.",
"title": "Player profile"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar won a record six MVP awards. His 38,387 career points remained the NBA's career scoring record until February 7, 2023, when he was surpassed by LeBron James of the Lakers in Los Angeles. Abdul-Jabbar attended the game, and passed the game ball to James during the in-game ceremony after the record was broken. James did not play college ball, entering the league straight out of high school at age 18 in 2003. Abdul-Jabbar held the scoring mark for nearly 39 years, the longest span in league history. His skyhook is considered one of the most unstoppable shots ever. He won six NBA championships and two Finals MVP awards, was voted to 15 All-NBA and 11 All-Defensive Teams, and was selected to a record 19 All-Star teams, tied by James in 2023. He was named to the NBA's 35th, 50th, and 75th anniversary teams. He averaged 24.6 points, 11.2 rebounds, 3.6 assists, and 2.6 blocks per game. Abdul-Jabbar is ranked as the NBA's third leading all-time rebounder (17,440). He is the third all-time in registered blocks (3,189), which is impressive because this basketball statistic was not recorded until the fourth year of his career (1974). He had three straight seasons where he averaged at least 30 points and 16 rebounds, and six times he averaged at least 27 points and 14.5 rebounds in the same season.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar combined dominance during his career peak with the longevity and sustained excellence of his later years. A pioneer in using yoga in the NBA, he also credited Bruce Lee with teaching him \"the discipline and spirituality of martial arts, which was greatly responsible for me being able to play competitively in the NBA for 20 years with very few injuries\". Abdul-Jabbar played in 95 percent of his team's regular-season games during his career, including 80 or more games in 11 of his 20 seasons. Five times he played in all 82 games. After claiming his sixth and final MVP in 1980, he continued to average above 20 points in the following six seasons, including 23 points per game in his 17th season at age 38. He earned first-team All-NBA selections that were 15 years apart and Finals MVPs 14 seasons from each other.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Among the most graceful basketball players ever, Abdul-Jabbar is regarded as one of the best centers ever and one of the greatest players in NBA history; he was voted the best center of all time by ESPN ahead of Wilt Chamberlain in 2007, and ranked No. 4 in Slam's \"Top 100 Players Of All-Time\" in 2018, and No. 3 in ESPN's list of the top 74 NBA players of all time in 2020, the best center ever ahead of Bill Russell and Chamberlain. League experts and basketball legends frequently mentioned him when considering the greatest player of all time. Riley said in 1985: \"Why judge anymore? When a man has broken records, won championships, endured tremendous criticism and responsibility, why judge? Let's toast him as the greatest player ever.\" In 2023, as James was on the verge of breaking the NBA career scoring record, Abdul-Jabbar remained as Riley's choice as the greatest: \"We don't win championships without the greatest player in the history of the game, who had the greatest weapon in the history of the game. The skyhook was unstoppable. Last minute of the game, it's going to one guy\". As president of the Miami Heat, Riley had won two NBA titles with James on their roster. Isiah Thomas remarked: \"If they say the numbers don't lie, then Kareem is the greatest ever to play the game.\" In 2013, Julius Erving said: \"In terms of players all-time, Kareem is still the number one guy. He's the guy you gotta start your franchise with.\" In 2015, ESPN named Abdul-Jabbar the best center in NBA history, and ranked him No. 2 behind Michael Jordan among the greatest NBA players ever. While Jordan's shots were enthralling and considered unfathomable, Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook appeared automatic, and he himself called the shot \"unsexy\". In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar's only recognized rookie card became the most expensive basketball card ever sold (the record has since been surpassed) when it went for $501,900 at auction. In 2022, he was ranked No. 3 (first in his position) in ESPN's NBA 75th Anniversary Team list, and No. 3 (behind Jordan and James) in a similar list by The Athletic.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Playing in Los Angeles facilitated Abdul-Jabbar's trying his hand at acting. He made his film debut in Bruce Lee's 1972 film Game of Death.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1980, Abdul-Jabbar played co-pilot Roger Murdock in Airplane! He has a scene in which a little boy looks at him and remarks that he is in fact Abdul-Jabbar, spoofing the appearance of football star Elroy \"Crazylegs\" Hirsch as an airplane pilot in the 1957 drama that served as the inspiration for Airplane!, Zero Hour! Staying in character, Abdul-Jabbar states that he is merely Roger Murdock, an airline co-pilot; the boy continues to insist that Abdul-Jabbar is \"the greatest\", but that according to his father he does not \"work hard on defense\" and that he does not \"really try, except during the playoffs\". This causes Abdul-Jabbar's character to snap: \"The hell I don't!\" He then grabs the boy and snarls that he has \"been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA\" and been \"busting my buns every night!\" He instructs the boy: \"Tell your old man to drag [Bill] Walton and [Bob] Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.\" When Murdock loses consciousness later in the film, he collapses at the controls wearing Abdul-Jabbar's goggles and yellow Lakers' shorts. In 2014, Abdul-Jabbar and Airplane! co-star Robert Hays (character Ted Striker) reprised their Airplane! roles in a parody commercial promoting Wisconsin tourism.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar has had numerous other television and film appearances, often playing himself. He has had roles in movies such as Fletch, Troop Beverly Hills and Forget Paris, and television series such as Full House, Living Single, Amen, Everybody Loves Raymond, Martin, Diff'rent Strokes (his height humorously contrasted with that of diminutive child star Gary Coleman), The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Scrubs, 21 Jump Street, Emergency!, Man from Atlantis, and New Girl. Abdul-Jabbar played a genie in a lamp in a 1984 episode of Tales from the Darkside. He also played himself on the February 10, 1994, episode of the sketch comedy television series In Living Color.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar appeared in the television version of Stephen King's The Stand, played the Archangel of Basketball in Slam Dunk Ernest, and had a brief non-speaking cameo appearance in BASEketball. Abdul-Jabbar was also the co-executive producer of the 1994 TV film The Vernon Johns Story. He has also made appearances on The Colbert Report in a 2006 skit called \"HipHopKetball II: The ReJazzebration Remix '06\", and in 2008 as a stage manager who is sent out on a mission to find Nazi gold. Abdul-Jabbar also voiced himself in a 2011 episode of The Simpsons titled \"Love Is a Many Strangled Thing\". He had a recurring role as himself on the NBC series Guys with Kids, which aired from 2012 to 2013. On Al Jazeera English he expressed his desire to be remembered not just as a player, but also as somebody who used their mind and made other contributions.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In February 2019, he appeared in season 12 episode 16 of The Big Bang Theory, \"The D&D Vortex\". In 2021, Abdul-Jabbar made a guest appearance as himself in a season 2 episode of Dave. The episode he appeared in was also named after him. Abdul-Jabbar makes a cameo appearance as himself in the 2022 Netflix film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. In 2023, Abdul-Jabbar appeared as himself in season 7, episode 3 of the Showtime series Billions",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "In September 2018, Abdul-Jabbar was announced as one of the writers for the July 2019 revival of Veronica Mars.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "On February 10, 2011, Abdul-Jabbar debuted his film On the Shoulders of Giants, documenting the tumultuous journey of the famed yet often-overlooked New York Renaissance professional basketball team, at Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey. The event was simulcast live throughout the school, city, and state. In 2015, he appeared in Kareem: Minority of One, an HBO documentary on his life. In 2020, Abdul-Jabbar was the executive producer and narrator of the History channel special Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution. He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his narration.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar participated in the 2013 ABC reality series Splash, a celebrity diving competition. In April 2018, Abdul-Jabbar competed in the all-athlete season of season 26 of Dancing with the Stars and partnered with professional dancer Lindsay Arnold.",
"title": "Film and television"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In 1967, Abdul-Jabbar was the only college athlete to attend the Cleveland Summit, a meeting of prominent black athletes who convened in support of Muhammad Ali's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. The following year, Abdul-Jabbar boycotted the Summer Olympics to protest American racism, drawing death threats for his decision.",
"title": "Writing and activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar became a best-selling author and cultural critic. He published several books, mostly on African-American history. His first book, his autobiography Giant Steps, was written in 1983 with co-author Peter Knobler. The book's title is an homage to jazz great John Coltrane, referring to his album Giant Steps. Others include On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance, co-written with Raymond Obstfeld, and Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, World War II's Forgotten Heroes, co-written with Anthony Walton, which is a history of the first black armored unit to fight in World War II.",
"title": "Writing and activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "A regular contributor to discussions about issues of race and religion, among other topics, in national magazines and on television, Abdul-Jabbar has written a regular column for Time. He appeared on Meet the Press on January 25, 2015, to talk about a column saying that Islam should not be blamed for the actions of violent extremists, just as Christianity has not been blamed for the actions of violent extremists who profess Christianity. When asked about being Muslim, he said: \"I don't have any misgiving about my faith. I'm very concerned about the people who claim to be Muslims that are murdering people and creating all this mayhem in the world. That is not what Islam is about, and that should not be what people think of when they think about Muslims. But it's up to all of us to do something about all of it.\"",
"title": "Writing and activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "In November 2014, Abdul-Jabbar published an essay in Jacobin calling for just compensation for college athletes, writing that \"in the name of fairness, we must bring an end to the indentured servitude of college athletes and start paying them what they are worth.\" Commenting on Donald Trump's 2017 travel ban, he condemned it, saying: \"The absence of reason and compassion is the very definition of pure evil because it is a rejection of our sacred values, distilled from millennia of struggle.\" In June 2021, he published an essay in Jacobin on the negative impact on public health of those refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, criticizing Kyrie Irving, among others.",
"title": "Writing and activism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In January 2012, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Abdul-Jabbar had accepted a position as a cultural ambassador for the United States. During the announcement press conference, Abdul-Jabbar commented on the historical legacy of African-Americans as representatives of U.S. culture: \"I remember when Louis Armstrong first did it back for President Kennedy, one of my heroes. So it's nice to be following in his footsteps.\" As part of this role, Abdul-Jabbar has traveled to Brazil to promote education for local youths.",
"title": "Government appointments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Former President Barack Obama announced in his last days of office that he has appointed Abdul-Jabbar along with Gabrielle Douglas and Carli Lloyd to the President's Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition.",
"title": "Government appointments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In January 2017, Abdul-Jabbar was appointed to the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee by United States Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. According to the United States Mint, Abdul-Jabbar is a keen coin collector whose interest in the life of Alexander Hamilton had led him into the hobby. He resigned in 2018 due to what the Mint described as \"increasing personal obligations\".",
"title": "Government appointments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar met Habiba Abdul-Jabbar (born Janice Brown) at a Lakers game during his senior year at UCLA. They married in 1971, and together had three children: daughters Habiba and Sultana and son Kareem Jr., who played basketball at Western Kentucky after attending Valparaiso. Abdul-Jabbar and Janice divorced in 1978. He has another son, Amir, with Cheryl Pistono. Another son, Adam, made an appearance on the TV sitcom Full House with him.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In 1983, Abdul-Jabbar's house burned down. Many of his belongings, including his beloved jazz LP collection of about 3,000 albums, were destroyed. Many Lakers fans sent and brought him albums, which he found uplifting.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar performed a tribute to friend Muhammad Ali along with Chance the Rapper.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "At age 24 in 1971, he converted to Islam and legally became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which means \"noble one, servant of the Almighty.\" He was named by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis. Abdul-Jabbar purchased and donated 7700 16th Street NW, a house in Washington, D.C., for Khaalis to use as the Hanafi Madh-Hab Center; a few years later, the location would become the place of the 1973 Hanafi Muslim massacre. Eventually, Kareem \"found that [he] disagreed with some of Hamaas' teachings about the Quran, and [they] parted ways.\" He then studied the Quran on his own, and \"emerged from this pilgrimage with [his] beliefs clarified and [his] faith renewed.\" Abdul-Jabbar was also heavily influenced by Malcolm X, a leader of the Nation of Islam. Abdul-Jabbar was invited to join the group, but he declined.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar has spoken about the thinking that was behind his name change when he converted to Islam. He stated that he was \"latching on to something that was part of my heritage, because many of the slaves who were brought here were Muslims. My family was brought to America by a French planter named Alcindor, who came here from Trinidad in the 18th century. My people were Yoruba, and their culture survived slavery ... My father found out about that when I was a kid, and it gave me all I needed to know that, hey, I was somebody, even if nobody else knew about it. When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. And that's a terrible burden on black people, because they don't have an accurate idea of their history, which has been either suppressed or distorted.\" His name change further eroded his public image in the United States, mostly in white areas.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "In 1998, Abdul-Jabbar reached a settlement after he sued Miami Dolphins running back Karim Abdul-Jabbar (now Abdul-Karim al-Jabbar, born Sharmon Shah) because he felt Karim was profiting off the name he made famous by having the Abdul-Jabbar moniker and number 33 on his Dolphins jersey. As a result, the younger Abdul-Jabbar had to change his jersey nameplate to \"Abdul\" while playing for the Dolphins. The football player had also been an athlete at UCLA.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Abdul-Jabbar suffers from migraines, and his use of cannabis to reduce the symptoms has had legal ramifications. In November 2009, Abdul-Jabbar announced that he was suffering from a form of leukemia, Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. The disease was diagnosed in December 2008, but Abdul-Jabbar said his condition could be managed by taking oral medication daily, seeing his specialist every other month, and having his blood analyzed regularly. He expressed in a 2009 press conference that he did not believe the illness would stop him from leading a normal life. Abdul-Jabbar is a spokesman for Novartis, the company that produces Gleevec, his cancer medication.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "In February 2011, Abdul-Jabbar announced via Twitter that his leukemia was gone and he was \"100% cancer free\". A few days later, he clarified his misstatement: \"You're never really cancer-free and I should have known that. My cancer right now is at an absolute minimum.\" In April 2015, Abdul-Jabbar was admitted to hospital when he was diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. Later that week, on his 68th birthday, he underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery at the UCLA Medical Center.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "In February 2023, he spoke out about his atrial fibrillation diagnosis. He partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer's \"No Time to Wait\" to raise awareness of the symptoms of the irregular and rapid heart rhythm condition which increase the risk of stroke. In December 2023, he was hospitalized after he fell and broke his hip while attending a concert.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "In 2011, Abdul-Jabbar was awarded the Double Helix Medal for his work in raising awareness for cancer research. Also in 2011, Abdul-Jabbar received an honorary degree from New York Institute of Technology. In 2016, Abdul-Jabbar was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama. In 2020, Abdul-Jabbar was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Narrator for his work on the documentary special Black Patriots: Heroes of The Revolution.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
] |
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is an American former professional basketball player who played 20 seasons in the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers. During his career as a center, Abdul-Jabbar was a record six-time NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP). He was a 19-time NBA All-Star—tied for the most ever—a 15-time All-NBA Team member, and an 11-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection. He was a member of six NBA championship teams as a player and two more as an assistant coach, and was twice voted the NBA Finals MVP. He was named to three NBA anniversary teams. Widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time, he was called the greatest basketball player of all time by Pat Riley, Isiah Thomas, and Julius Erving. Abdul-Jabbar broke the NBA's career scoring record in 1984 and held it until it was broken in 2023 by LeBron James. Abdul-Jabbar was known as Lew Alcindor when he played at parochial high school Power Memorial in New York City, where he led their team to 71 consecutive wins. He played college basketball for the UCLA Bruins, winning three consecutive national championships under head coach John Wooden. Alcindor was a record three-time most outstanding player of the NCAA tournament. Drafted with the first overall pick by the one-season-old Bucks franchise in the 1969 NBA draft, he spent six seasons in Milwaukee. After leading the Bucks to its first NBA championship at age 24 in 1971, he took the Muslim name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Using his trademark skyhook shot, he established himself as one of the league's top scorers. In 1975, he was traded to the Lakers, with whom he played the final 14 seasons of his career in which they won five additional NBA championships. Abdul-Jabbar's contributions were a key component in the Showtime era of Lakers basketball. Over his 20-year NBA career, his teams succeeded in making the playoffs 18 times and got past the first round 14 times; his teams reached the NBA Finals on ten occasions. At the time of his retirement at age 42 in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA's regular season career leader in points (38,387), games played (1,560), minutes (57,446), field goals made (15,837), field goal attempts (28,307), blocked shots (3,189), defensive rebounds (9,394), and personal fouls (4,657). He remains the all-time leader in minutes played and field goals made. He ranks second in career points and field goal attempts, and is third all-time in both total rebounds (17,440) and blocked shots. ESPN named him the greatest center of all time in 2007, the greatest player in college basketball history in 2008, and the second best player in NBA history in 2016. Abdul-Jabbar has also been an actor, a basketball coach, a best-selling author, and a martial artist, having trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in his film Game of Death (1972). In 2012, Abdul-Jabbar was selected by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be a U.S. global cultural ambassador. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
|
2001-10-05T11:05:10Z
|
2023-12-30T17:11:17Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kareem_Abdul-Jabbar
|
16,900 |
Kung fu (term)
|
In general, kung fu or kungfu (/ˌkʌŋˈfuː/ or /ˌkʊŋˈfuː/; pinyin: gōngfu pronounced [kʊ́ŋfu]) refers to the Chinese martial arts also called wushu and quanfa. In China, it refers to any study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and time to complete. In its original meaning, kung fu can refer to any discipline or skill achieved through hard work and practice, not necessarily martial arts (for example, the discipline of tea making is called the gongfu tea ceremony). The literal equivalent of "Chinese martial art" in Mandarin would be 中國武術 zhōngguó wǔshù.
There are many forms of kung fu, such as Shaolin kung fu, Wing Chun, and tai chi, and they are practiced all over the world. Each form of kung fu has its own principles and techniques, but is best known for its trickery and quickness, which is where the word kung fu is derived. It is only in the late twentieth century that this term was used in relation to Chinese martial arts by the Chinese community. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term "kung-fu" as "a primarily unarmed Chinese martial art resembling karate" and attributes the first use of "kung fu" in print to Punch magazine in 1966. This illustrates how the meaning of this term has been changed in English. The origin of this change can be attributed to the misunderstanding or mistranslation of the term through movie subtitles or dubbing.
References to the concepts and use of Chinese martial arts can be found in popular culture. Historically, the influence of Chinese martial arts can be found in books and in the performance arts specific to Asia. Recently, those influences have extended to the movies and television that targets a much wider audience. As a result, Chinese martial arts have spread beyond its ethnic roots and have a global appeal.
Martial arts play a prominent role in the literature genre known as wuxia (武俠小說). This type of fiction is based on Chinese concepts of chivalry, a separate martial arts society (武林; Wulin) and a central theme involving martial arts. Wuxia stories can be traced as far back as the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, becoming popular by the Tang dynasty and evolving into novel form by the Ming dynasty. This genre is still extremely popular in much of Asia and provides a major influence for the public perception of the martial arts.
Martial arts influences can also be found in dance, theater and especially Chinese opera, of which Beijing opera is one of the best-known examples. This popular form of drama dates back to the Tang dynasty and continues to be an example of Chinese culture. Some martial arts movements can be found in Chinese opera and some martial artists can be found as performers in Chinese operas.
In modern times, Chinese martial arts have spawned the genre of cinema known as the kung fu film. The films of Bruce Lee were instrumental in the initial burst of Chinese martial arts' popularity in the West in the 1970s, following a famous demonstration of "Chinese Boxing" to the US karate community the Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1964. Martial artists and actors such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Donnie Yen have continued the appeal of movies of this genre. Jackie Chan successfully brought in a sense of humor in his fighting style into his movies. Martial arts films from China are often referred to as "kung fu movies" (功夫片), or "wire-fu" if extensive wire work is performed for special effects, and are still best known as part of the tradition of kung fu theater. (see also: wuxia, Hong Kong action cinema). In 2003, the Fuse (TV channel) began airing episodes of a half-hour television show titled Kung Faux that married classic kung fu films with hip hop sensibilities and comic affects to gain resilient critical success.
"Bitter Work," the literal Cantonese translation of "kung fu," is the title of the ninth episode of season 2 of Avatar. The episode entails the protagonist and nemesis of the show mastering different aspects of kung fu.
In the 1970s, Bruce Lee was beginning to gain popularity in Hollywood for his martial arts movies. The fact that he was a non-white male who portrayed self-reliance and righteous self-discipline resonated with black audiences and made him an important figure in this community. With the release of Enter the Dragon in 1973, kung fu movies became a hit in America across all backgrounds; however, black audiences maintained the films’ popularity well after the general public lost interest. Urban youth from every borough in New York City were attending movies in Manhattan's Times Square every night to watch the latest movies.
Among these individuals were those coming from the Bronx where, during this time, hip hop was beginning to take form. One of the pioneers responsible for the development of the foundational aspects of hip-hop was DJ Kool Herc, who began creating this new form of music by taking rhythmic breakdowns of songs and looping them. From the new music came a new form of dance known as b-boying or breakdancing, a style of street dance consisting of improvised acrobatic moves. The pioneers of this dance credit kung fu as one of its influences.
Moves such as the crouching low leg sweep and "up rocking" (standing combat moves) are influenced by choreographed kung fu fights. The dancers’ ability to improvise these moves led way to battles, which were dance competitions between two dancers or crews judged on their creativity, skills and musicality. In a documentary, Crazy Legs, a member of breakdancing group Rock Steady Crew, described the breakdancing battle being like an old kung fu movie, "where the one kung fu master says something along the lines of ‘hun your kung fu is good, but mine is better,’ then a fight erupts."
Media related to Kung fu at Wikimedia Commons
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "In general, kung fu or kungfu (/ˌkʌŋˈfuː/ or /ˌkʊŋˈfuː/; pinyin: gōngfu pronounced [kʊ́ŋfu]) refers to the Chinese martial arts also called wushu and quanfa. In China, it refers to any study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and time to complete. In its original meaning, kung fu can refer to any discipline or skill achieved through hard work and practice, not necessarily martial arts (for example, the discipline of tea making is called the gongfu tea ceremony). The literal equivalent of \"Chinese martial art\" in Mandarin would be 中國武術 zhōngguó wǔshù.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There are many forms of kung fu, such as Shaolin kung fu, Wing Chun, and tai chi, and they are practiced all over the world. Each form of kung fu has its own principles and techniques, but is best known for its trickery and quickness, which is where the word kung fu is derived. It is only in the late twentieth century that this term was used in relation to Chinese martial arts by the Chinese community. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term \"kung-fu\" as \"a primarily unarmed Chinese martial art resembling karate\" and attributes the first use of \"kung fu\" in print to Punch magazine in 1966. This illustrates how the meaning of this term has been changed in English. The origin of this change can be attributed to the misunderstanding or mistranslation of the term through movie subtitles or dubbing.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "References to the concepts and use of Chinese martial arts can be found in popular culture. Historically, the influence of Chinese martial arts can be found in books and in the performance arts specific to Asia. Recently, those influences have extended to the movies and television that targets a much wider audience. As a result, Chinese martial arts have spread beyond its ethnic roots and have a global appeal.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Martial arts play a prominent role in the literature genre known as wuxia (武俠小說). This type of fiction is based on Chinese concepts of chivalry, a separate martial arts society (武林; Wulin) and a central theme involving martial arts. Wuxia stories can be traced as far back as the 2nd and 3rd centuries BCE, becoming popular by the Tang dynasty and evolving into novel form by the Ming dynasty. This genre is still extremely popular in much of Asia and provides a major influence for the public perception of the martial arts.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Martial arts influences can also be found in dance, theater and especially Chinese opera, of which Beijing opera is one of the best-known examples. This popular form of drama dates back to the Tang dynasty and continues to be an example of Chinese culture. Some martial arts movements can be found in Chinese opera and some martial artists can be found as performers in Chinese operas.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In modern times, Chinese martial arts have spawned the genre of cinema known as the kung fu film. The films of Bruce Lee were instrumental in the initial burst of Chinese martial arts' popularity in the West in the 1970s, following a famous demonstration of \"Chinese Boxing\" to the US karate community the Long Beach International Karate Championships in 1964. Martial artists and actors such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Donnie Yen have continued the appeal of movies of this genre. Jackie Chan successfully brought in a sense of humor in his fighting style into his movies. Martial arts films from China are often referred to as \"kung fu movies\" (功夫片), or \"wire-fu\" if extensive wire work is performed for special effects, and are still best known as part of the tradition of kung fu theater. (see also: wuxia, Hong Kong action cinema). In 2003, the Fuse (TV channel) began airing episodes of a half-hour television show titled Kung Faux that married classic kung fu films with hip hop sensibilities and comic affects to gain resilient critical success.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "\"Bitter Work,\" the literal Cantonese translation of \"kung fu,\" is the title of the ninth episode of season 2 of Avatar. The episode entails the protagonist and nemesis of the show mastering different aspects of kung fu.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In the 1970s, Bruce Lee was beginning to gain popularity in Hollywood for his martial arts movies. The fact that he was a non-white male who portrayed self-reliance and righteous self-discipline resonated with black audiences and made him an important figure in this community. With the release of Enter the Dragon in 1973, kung fu movies became a hit in America across all backgrounds; however, black audiences maintained the films’ popularity well after the general public lost interest. Urban youth from every borough in New York City were attending movies in Manhattan's Times Square every night to watch the latest movies.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Among these individuals were those coming from the Bronx where, during this time, hip hop was beginning to take form. One of the pioneers responsible for the development of the foundational aspects of hip-hop was DJ Kool Herc, who began creating this new form of music by taking rhythmic breakdowns of songs and looping them. From the new music came a new form of dance known as b-boying or breakdancing, a style of street dance consisting of improvised acrobatic moves. The pioneers of this dance credit kung fu as one of its influences.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Moves such as the crouching low leg sweep and \"up rocking\" (standing combat moves) are influenced by choreographed kung fu fights. The dancers’ ability to improvise these moves led way to battles, which were dance competitions between two dancers or crews judged on their creativity, skills and musicality. In a documentary, Crazy Legs, a member of breakdancing group Rock Steady Crew, described the breakdancing battle being like an old kung fu movie, \"where the one kung fu master says something along the lines of ‘hun your kung fu is good, but mine is better,’ then a fight erupts.\"",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Media related to Kung fu at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
In general, kung fu or kungfu refers to the Chinese martial arts also called wushu and quanfa. In China, it refers to any study, learning, or practice that requires patience, energy, and time to complete. In its original meaning, kung fu can refer to any discipline or skill achieved through hard work and practice, not necessarily martial arts. The literal equivalent of "Chinese martial art" in Mandarin would be 中國武術 zhōngguó wǔshù. There are many forms of kung fu, such as Shaolin kung fu, Wing Chun, and tai chi, and they are practiced all over the world. Each form of kung fu has its own principles and techniques, but is best known for its trickery and quickness, which is where the word kung fu is derived. It is only in the late twentieth century that this term was used in relation to Chinese martial arts by the Chinese community. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term "kung-fu" as "a primarily unarmed Chinese martial art resembling karate" and attributes the first use of "kung fu" in print to Punch magazine in 1966. This illustrates how the meaning of this term has been changed in English. The origin of this change can be attributed to the misunderstanding or mistranslation of the term through movie subtitles or dubbing.
|
2001-10-20T01:05:53Z
|
2023-10-15T02:12:07Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_fu_(term)
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16,903 |
Kuomintang
|
The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially based on the Chinese mainland and then in Taiwan since 1949. It was the sole ruling party in China during the Republican Era from 1928 to 1949, when most of the Chinese mainland was under its control. The party retreated from the mainland to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-shek declared martial law and retained his authoritarian rule over Taiwan under the Dang Guo system until democratic reforms were enacted in the 1980s and full democratization in the 1990s. In Taiwanese politics today, the KMT is a centre-right to right-wing party and is the largest party in the Pan-Blue Coalition. The KMT's primary rival in elections is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its allies in the Pan-Green Coalition. As of 2023, the KMT is the largest opposition party in the Legislative Yuan. The current chairman is Eric Chu.
The party originated as the Revive China Society, founded by Sun Yat-sen on 24 November 1894 in Honolulu. From there, the party underwent major reorganization changes that occurred before and after the Xinhai Revolution, which resulted in the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Provisional Republic Government, with Sun as the first president of the Republic. In 1919, Sun re-established the party under the name "Kuomintang" in the Shanghai French Concession. From 1926 to 1928, the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek successfully led the Northern Expedition against regional warlords and unified the fragmented nation. From 1937 to 1945, the KMT-ruled Nationalist government led China through the Second Sino-Japanese War against Japan. By 1949, the KMT was decisively defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War (in which the People's Republic of China was established by the CCP on 1 October 1949) and withdrew the ROC government to Taiwan, a former Qing territory annexed by the Empire of Japan from 1895 to 1945.
From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled Taiwan as an authoritarian one-party state after the February 28 incident. During this period, martial law was in effect and civil liberties were curtailed under the guise of anti-communism, with the period being known as the White Terror. The party oversaw Taiwan's economic development, but also experienced diplomatic setbacks, including the ROC losing its United Nations seat and most of the world including its ally the United States switching diplomatic recognition to the CCP-led People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son and the next KMT leader in turn, lifted martial law and the ban of opposition parties. His successor Lee Teng-hui continued pursuing democratic reforms and constitutional amendments and was re-elected in 1996 through a direct presidential election, the first time in the ROC history. The 2000 presidential election put an end to 72 years of the KMT's political dominance in the ROC. The KMT reclaimed power from 2008 to 2016, with the landslide victory of Ma Ying-jeou in the 2008 presidential election, whose presidency significantly loosened restrictions placed on cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges. The KMT again lost the presidency and its legislative majority in the 2016 election, returning to the opposition.
The KMT is a member of the International Democracy Union. The party's guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, advocated by Sun Yat-sen and historically organized on a basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that entailed open discussion of policy on the condition of unity among party members in upholding the agreed-upon decisions. The KMT opposes de jure Taiwan independence, Chinese unification under the "one country, two systems" framework, and any non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes. Originally placing high priority on reclaiming the Chinese mainland through Project National Glory, the KMT now favors a closer relation with the PRC and seeks to maintain Taiwan's status quo under the Constitution of the Republic of China. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.
The KMT traces its ideological and organizational roots to the work of Sun Yat-sen, a proponent of Chinese nationalism and democracy who founded the Revive China Society at the capital of the Republic of Hawaii, Honolulu, on 24 November 1894. On 20 August 1905, Sun joined forces with other anti-monarchist societies in Tokyo, Empire of Japan, to form the Tongmenghui, a group committed to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and to establish a republic in China.
The group supported the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912. Although Sun and the Tongmenghui are often depicted as the principal organizers of the Xinhai Revolution, this view is disputed by scholars who argue that the Revolution broke out in a leaderless and decentralized way and that Sun was only later elected provisional president of the new Chinese republic. However, Sun did not have military power and ceded the provisional presidency of the republic to Yuan Shikai, who arranged for the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor, on 12 February.
On 25 August 1912, the Nationalist Party was established at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, where the Tongmenghui and five smaller pro-revolution parties merged to contest the first national elections. Sun was chosen as the party chairman with Huang Xing as his deputy.
The most influential member of the party was the third ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the Nationalists to advocate a constitutional parliamentary democracy. The party opposed constitutional monarchists and sought to check the power of Yuan. The Nationalists won an overwhelming majority in the first National Assembly election in December 1912.
However, Yuan soon began to ignore the parliament in making presidential decisions. Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the Nationalists, led by Sun Yat-sen, suspected that Yuan was behind the plot and thus staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed rising to overthrow Yuan, and failed. Yuan, claiming subversiveness and betrayal, expelled adherents of the KMT from the parliament. Yuan dissolved the Nationalists, whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan, in November and dismissed the parliament early in 1914.
Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan in 1914, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party on 8 July 1914, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan. To join the Revolutionary Party, members had to take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. As a result, he became largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period.
Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a military junta at Canton to oppose the Beiyang government but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on 10 October 1919, under the name Kuomintang of China (中國國民黨) and established its headquarters in Canton in 1920.
In 1923, the KMT and its Canton government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers—the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern—arrived in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties. Mao Zedong and early members of the CCP also joined the KMT in 1923.
Soviet advisers also helped the KMT to set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months' military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924 in Guangzhou, Guangdong, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CCP, they adopted Sun's political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood.
When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, the political leadership of the KMT fell to Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, respectively the left-wing and right-wing leaders of the party. However, the real power was in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was in near complete control of the military as the superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy. With their military superiority, the KMT confirmed their rule on Canton, the provincial capital of Guangdong. The Guangxi warlords pledged loyalty to the KMT. The KMT now became a rival government in opposition to the warlord Beiyang government based in Beijing.
Chiang assumed leadership of the KMT on 6 July 1926. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, whom he admired greatly and who forged all his political, economic, and revolutionary ideas primarily from what he had learned in Hawaii and indirectly through Hong Kong and Japan under the Meiji Restoration, Chiang knew relatively little about the West. He also studied in Japan, but he was firmly rooted in his ancient Han Chinese identity and was steeped in Chinese culture. As his life progressed, he became increasingly attached to ancient Chinese culture and traditions. His few trips to the West confirmed his pro-ancient Chinese outlook and he studied the ancient Chinese classics and ancient Chinese history assiduously. In 1923, after the formation of the First United Front, Sun Yat-sen sent Chiang to spend three months in Moscow studying the political and military system of the Soviet Union. Although Chiang did not follow the Soviet Communist doctrine, he, like the Communist Party, sought to destroy warlordism and foreign imperialism in China, and upon his return established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, following the Soviet Model.
Chiang was also particularly committed to Sun's idea of "political tutelage". Sun believed that the only hope for a unified and better China lay in a military conquest, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. Using this ideology, Chiang built himself into the dictator of the Republic of China, both in the Chinese mainland and after the national government relocated to Taiwan.
Following the death of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the KMT leader and launched the Northern Expedition to defeat the northern warlords and unite China under the party. With its power confirmed in the southeast, the Nationalist Government appointed Chiang Kai-shek commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), and the Northern Expedition to suppress the warlords began. Chiang had to defeat three separate warlords and two independent armies. Chiang, with Soviet supplies, conquered the southern half of China in nine months.
A split erupted between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT, which threatened the Northern Expedition. Wang Jing Wei, who led the KMT leftist allies, took the city of Wuhan in January 1927. With the support of the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the National Government as having moved to Wuhan. Having taken Nanjing in March, Chiang halted his campaign and prepared a violent break with Wang and his communist allies. Chiang's expulsion of the CCP and their Soviet advisers, marked by the Shanghai massacre on 12 April, led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang finally surrendered his power to Chiang. Once this split had been healed, Chiang resumed his Northern Expedition and managed to take Shanghai.
During the Nanjing incident in March 1927, the NRA stormed the consulates of the United States, the United Kingdom and Imperial Japan, looted foreign properties and almost assassinated the Japanese consul. An American, two British, one French, an Italian and a Japanese were killed. These looters also stormed and seized millions of dollars' worth of British concessions in Hankou, refusing to hand them back to the UK government. Both Nationalists and Communist soldiers within the army participated in the rioting and looting of foreign residents in Nanjing.
NRA took Beijing in 1928. The city was the internationally recognized capital, even when it was previously controlled by warlords. This event allowed the KMT to receive widespread diplomatic recognition in the same year. The capital was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, the original capital of the Ming dynasty, and thus a symbolic purge of the final Qing elements. This period of KMT rule in China between 1927 and 1937 was relatively stable and prosperous and is still known as the Nanjing decade.
After the Northern Expedition in 1928, the Nationalist government under the KMT declared that China had been exploited for decades under the unequal treaties signed between the foreign powers and the Qing dynasty. The KMT government demanded that the foreign powers renegotiate the treaties on equal terms.
Before the Northern Expedition, the KMT began as a heterogeneous group advocating American-inspired federalism and provincial autonomy. However, the KMT under Chiang's leadership aimed at establishing a centralized one-party state with one ideology. This was even more evident following Sun's elevation into a cult figure after his death. The control by one single party began the period of "political tutelage", whereby the party was to lead the government while instructing the people on how to participate in a democratic system. The topic of reorganizing the army, brought up at a military conference in 1929, sparked the Central Plains War. The cliques, some of them former warlords, demanded to retain their army and political power within their own territories. Although Chiang finally won the war, the conflicts among the cliques would have a devastating effect on the survival of the KMT. Muslim Generals in Gansu waged war against the Guominjun in favor of the KMT during the conflict in Gansu in 1927–1930.
In 1931, Japanese aggression resumed with the Mukden Incident and occupation of Manchuria, and the CCP founded the Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) in Jiangxi while secretly recruiting within the KMT government and military. Chiang was alarmed by the expansion of communist influence; he wanted to suppress internal conflicts before confronting foreign aggression. The KMT were aided by German military advisors. The CSR was destroyed in 1934 after a series of KMT offensives. The communists abandoned bases in southeast China for Shaanxi in a military retreat called the Long March; less than 10% of the communist army survived. A new base, the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, was created with Soviet aid.
KMT secret police persecuted suspected communists and political opponents with terror. In The Birth of Communist China, C.P. Fitzgerald describes China under the rule of the KMT thus: "the Chinese people groaned under a regime Fascist in every quality except efficiency."
In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang in the Xi'an Incident and forced into the Second United Front, an anti-Japanese alliance with the CCP; the Second Sino-Japanese War started the following year. The alliance brought little coordination and was treated as a temporary cease fire in the civil war. The New Fourth Army Incident in 1941 ended the alliance.
Japan surrendered in 1945, and Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China on 25 October of that year. The brief period of celebration was soon shadowed by the possibility of a civil war between the KMT and CCP. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan just before it surrendered and occupied Manchuria, the north eastern part of China. The Soviet Union denied the KMT army the right to enter the region but allowed the CCP to take control of the Japanese factories and their supplies.
Full-scale civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists erupted in 1946. The Communist Chinese armies, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), previously a minor faction, grew rapidly in influence and power due to several errors on the KMT's part. First, the KMT reduced troop levels precipitously after the Japanese surrender, leaving large numbers of able-bodied, trained fighting men who became unemployed and disgruntled with the KMT as prime recruits for the PLA. Second, the KMT government proved thoroughly unable to manage the economy, allowing hyperinflation to result. Among the most despised and ineffective efforts it undertook to contain inflation was the conversion to the gold standard for the national treasury and the Chinese gold yuan in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold, silver and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals and foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold Standard Scrip in exchange. As most farmland in the north were under CCP's control, the cities governed by the KMT lacked food supply and this added to the hyperinflation. The new scrip became worthless in only ten months and greatly reinforced the nationwide perception of the KMT as a corrupt or at best inept entity. Third, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his forces to defend the urbanized cities. This decision gave CCP a chance to move freely through the countryside. At first, the KMT had the edge with the aid of weapons and ammunition from the United States (US). However, with the country suffering from hyperinflation, widespread corruption and other economic ills, the KMT continued to lose popular support. Some leading officials and military leaders of the KMT hoarded material, armament and military-aid funding provided by the US. This became an issue which proved to be a hindrance of its relationship with US government. US President Harry S. Truman wrote that "the Chiangs, the Kungs and the Soongs (were) all thieves", having taken $750 million in US aid.
At the same time, the suspension of American aid and tens of thousands of deserted or decommissioned soldiers being recruited to the PLA cause tipped the balance of power quickly to the CCP side, and the overwhelming popular support for the CCP in most of the country made it all but impossible for the KMT forces to carry out successful assaults against the Communists.
By the end of 1949, the CCP controlled almost all of mainland China, as the KMT retreated to Taiwan with a significant amount of China's national treasures and 2 million people, including military forces and refugees. Some party members stayed in the mainland and broke away from the main KMT to found the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang (also known as the Left Kuomintang), which still currently exists as one of the eight minor registered parties of the People's Republic of China.
In 1895, Formosa (now called Taiwan), including the Penghu islands, became a Japanese colony via the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the First Sino-Japanese War.
After Japan's defeat at the end of World War II in 1945, General Order No. 1 instructed Japan to surrender its troops in Taiwan to Chiang Kai-shek. On 25 October 1945, KMT general Chen Yi acted on behalf of the Allied Powers to accept Japan's surrender and proclaimed that day as Taiwan Retrocession Day.
Tensions between the local Taiwanese and mainlanders from mainland China increased in the intervening years, culminating in a flashpoint on 27 February 1947 in Taipei when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an anti-smuggling officer in front of Tianma Tea House triggered civil disorder and protests that would last for days. The uprising turned bloody and was shortly put down by the ROC Army in the February 28 Incident. As a result of the 28 February Incident in 1947, Taiwanese people endured what is called the "White Terror", a KMT-led political repression that resulted in the death or disappearance of over 30,000 Taiwanese intellectuals, activists, and people suspected of opposition to the KMT.
Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949, the commanders of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) believed that Kinmen and Matsu had to be taken before a final assault on Taiwan. The KMT fought the Battle of Guningtou on 25–27 October 1949 and stopped the PLA invasion. The KMT headquarters was set up on 10 December 1949 at No. 11 Zhongshan South Road. In 1950, Chiang took office in Taipei under the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. The provision declared martial law in Taiwan and halted some democratic processes, including presidential and parliamentary elections, until the mainland could be recovered from the CCP. The KMT estimated it would take 3 years to defeat the Communists. The slogan was "prepare in the first year, start fighting in the second, and conquer in the third year." Chiang also initiated the Project National Glory to retake back the mainland in 1965, but was eventually dropped in July 1972 after many unsuccessful attempts.
However, various factors, including international pressure, are believed to have prevented the KMT from militarily engaging the CCP full-scale. The KMT backed Muslim insurgents formerly belonging to the National Revolutionary Army during the KMT Islamic insurgency in 1950–1958 in mainland China. A cold war with a couple of minor military conflicts was resulted in the early years. The various government bodies previously in Nanjing, that were re-established in Taipei as the KMT-controlled government, actively claimed sovereignty over all China. The Republic of China in Taiwan retained China's seat in the United Nations until 1971 as well as recognition by the United States until 1979.
Until the 1970s, the KMT successfully pushed ahead with land reforms, developed the economy, implemented a democratic system in a lower level of the government, improved relations between Taiwan and the mainland and created the Taiwan economic miracle. However, the KMT controlled the government under a one-party authoritarian state until reforms in the late 1970s through the 1990s. The ROC in Taiwan was once referred to synonymously with the KMT and known simply as Nationalist China after its ruling party. In the 1970s, the KMT began to allow for "supplemental elections" in Taiwan to fill the seats of the aging representatives in the National Assembly.
Although opposition parties were not permitted, the pro-democracy movement Tangwai ("outside the KMT") created the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on 28 September 1986. Outside observers of Taiwanese politics expected the KMT to clamp down and crush the illegal opposition party, though this did not occur, and instead the party's formation marked the beginning of Taiwan's democratization.
In 1991, martial law ceased when President Lee Teng-hui terminated the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. All parties started to be allowed to compete at all levels of elections, including the presidential election. Lee Teng-hui, the ROC's first democratically elected president and the leader of the KMT during the 1990s, announced his advocacy of "special state-to-state relations" with the PRC. The PRC associated this idea with Taiwan independence.
The KMT faced a split in 1993 that led to the formation of the New Party in August 1993, alleged to be a result of Lee's "corruptive ruling style". The New Party has, since the purging of Lee, largely reintegrated into the KMT. A much more serious split in the party occurred as a result of the 2000 presidential election. Upset at the choice of Lien Chan as the party's presidential nominee, former party Secretary-General James Soong launched an independent bid, which resulted in the expulsion of Soong and his supporters and the formation of the People First Party (PFP) on 31 March 2000. The KMT candidate placed third behind Soong in the elections. After the election, Lee's strong relationship with the opponent became apparent. To prevent defections to the PFP, Lien moved the party away from Lee's pro-independence policies and became more favorable toward Chinese unification. This shift led to Lee's expulsion from the party and the formation of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) by Lee supporters on 24 July 2001.
Prior to this, the party's voters had defected to both the PFP and TSU, and the KMT did poorly in the December 2001 legislative elections and lost its position as the largest party in the Legislative Yuan. However, the party did well in the 2002 local government mayoral and council election with Ma Ying-jeou, its candidate for Taipei mayor, winning reelection by a landslide and its candidate for Kaohsiung mayor narrowly losing but doing surprisingly well. Since 2002, the KMT and PFP have coordinated electoral strategies. In 2004, the KMT and PFP ran a joint presidential ticket, with Lien running for president and Soong running for vice-president.
The loss of the presidential election of 2004 to DPP President Chen Shui-bian by merely over 30,000 votes was a bitter disappointment to party members, leading to large scale rallies for several weeks protesting alleged electoral fraud and the "odd circumstances" of the shooting of President Chen. However, the fortunes of the party were greatly improved when the KMT did well in the legislative elections held in December 2004 by maintaining its support in southern Taiwan achieving a majority for the Pan-Blue Coalition.
Soon after the election, there appeared to be a falling out with the KMT's junior partner, the People First Party and talk of a merger seemed to have ended. This split appeared to widen in early 2005, as the leader of the PFP, James Soong appeared to be reconciling with President Chen Shui-Bian and the Democratic Progressive Party. Many PFP members including legislators and municipal leaders have since defected to the KMT, and the PFP is seen as a fading party.
In 2005, Ma Ying-jeou became KMT chairman defeating speaker Wang Jin-pyng in the first public election for KMT chairmanship. The KMT won a decisive victory in the 3-in-1 local elections of December 2005, replacing the DPP as the largest party at the local level. This was seen as a major victory for the party ahead of legislative elections in 2007. There were elections for the two municipalities of the ROC, Taipei and Kaohsiung in December 2006. The KMT won a clear victory in Taipei, but lost to the DPP in the southern city of Kaohsiung by the slim margin of 1,100 votes.
On 13 February 2007, Ma was indicted by the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office on charges of allegedly embezzling approximately NT$11 million (US$339,000), regarding the issue of "special expenses" while he was mayor of Taipei. Shortly after the indictment, he submitted his resignation as KMT chairman at the same press conference at which he formally announced his candidacy for ROC president. Ma argued that it was customary for officials to use the special expense fund for personal expenses undertaken in the course of their official duties. In December 2007, Ma was acquitted of all charges and immediately filed suit against the prosecutors. In 2008, the KMT won a landslide victory in the Republic of China presidential election on 22 March 2008. The KMT fielded former Taipei mayor and former KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou to run against the DPP's Frank Hsieh. Ma won by a margin of 17% against Hsieh. Ma took office on 20 May 2008, with vice-presidential candidate Vincent Siew, and ended 8 years of the DPP presidency. The KMT also won a landslide victory in the 2008 legislative elections, winning 81 of 113 seats, or 71.7% of seats in the Legislative Yuan. These two elections gave the KMT firm control of both the executive and legislative yuans.
On 25 June 2009, President Ma launched his bid to regain the KMT leadership and registered as the sole candidate for the chairmanship election. On 26 July, Ma won 93.9% of the vote, becoming the new chairman of the KMT, taking office on 17 October 2009. This officially allowed Ma to be able to meet with Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and other PRC delegates, as he was able to represent the KMT as leader of a Chinese political party rather than as head-of-state of a political entity unrecognized by the PRC.
On 29 November 2014, the KMT suffered a heavy loss in the local election to the DPP, winning only 6 municipalities and counties, down from 14 in the previous election in 2009 and 2010. Ma Ying-jeou subsequently resigned from the party chairmanship on 3 December and replaced by acting Chairman Wu Den-yih. Chairmanship election was held on 17 January 2015 and Eric Chu was elected to become the new chairman. He was inaugurated on 19 February. In September 2021, Kuomintang elected its former leader (in office 2015–2016), veteran politician Eric Chu, as its new leader to replace Johnny Chiang (in office 2020–2021).
Upon arriving in Taiwan the KMT occupied assets previously owned by the Japanese and forced local businesses to make contributions directly to the KMT. Some of this real estate and other assets was distributed to party loyalists, but most of it remained with the party, as did the profits generated by the properties.
As the ruling party on Taiwan, the KMT amassed a vast business empire of banks, investment companies, petrochemical firms, and television and radio stations, thought to have made it the world's richest political party, with assets once estimated to be around US$2–10 billion. Although this war chest appeared to help the KMT until the mid-1990s, it later led to accusations of corruption (often referred to as "black gold").
After 2000, the KMT's financial holdings appeared to be more of a liability than a benefit, and the KMT started to divest itself of its assets. However, the transactions were not disclosed and the whereabouts of the money earned from selling assets (if it has gone anywhere) is unknown. There were accusations in the 2004 presidential election that the KMT retained assets that were illegally acquired. During the 2000–2008 DPP presidency, a law was proposed by the DPP in the Legislative Yuan to recover illegally acquired party assets and return them to the government. However, due to the DPP's lack of control of the legislative chamber at the time, it never materialized.
The KMT also acknowledged that part of its assets were acquired through extra-legal means and thus promised to "retro-endow" them to the government. However, the quantity of the assets which should be classified as illegal are still under heated debate. DPP, in its capacity as ruling party from 2000 to 2008, claimed that there is much more that the KMT has yet to acknowledge. Also, the KMT actively sold assets under its title to quench its recent financial difficulties, which the DPP argues is illegal. Former KMT chairman Ma Ying-Jeou's position is that the KMT will sell some of its properties at below market rates rather than return them to the government and that the details of these transactions will not be publicly disclosed.
In 2006, the KMT sold its headquarters at 11 Zhongshan South Road in Taipei to Evergreen Group for NT$2.3 billion (US$96 million). The KMT moved into a smaller building on Bade Road in the eastern part of the city.
In July 2014, the KMT reported total assets of NT$26.8 billion (US$892.4 million) and interest earnings of NT$981.52 million for the year of 2013, making it one of the richest political parties in the world.
In August 2016, the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee was set up by the ruling DPP government to investigate KMT party assets acquired during the martial law period and recover those that were determined to be illegally acquired.
Support for the KMT in Taiwan encompasses a wide range of social groups but is largely determined by age. KMT support tends to be higher in northern Taiwan and in urban areas, where it draws its backing from big businesses due to its policy of maintaining commercial links with mainland China. As of 2020 only 3% of KMT members are under 40 years of age.
The KMT also has some support in the labor sector because of the many labor benefits and insurance implemented while the KMT was in power. The KMT traditionally has strong cooperation with military officers, teachers, and government workers. Among the ethnic groups in Taiwan, the KMT has stronger support among mainlanders and their descendants, for ideological reasons, and among Taiwanese aboriginals. The support for the KMT generally tend to be stronger in majority-Hakka and Mandarin-speaking counties of Taiwan, in contrast to the Hokkien-majority southwestern counties that tend to support the Democratic Progressive Party.
The deep-rooted hostility between Aboriginals and (Taiwanese) Hoklo, and the Aboriginal communities effective KMT networks, contribute to Aboriginal skepticism towards the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Aboriginals' tendency to vote for the KMT. Aboriginals have criticized politicians for abusing the "indigenization" movement for political gains, such as aboriginal opposition to the DPP's "rectification" by recognizing the Taroko for political reasons, with the majority of mountain townships voting for Ma Ying-jeou. In 2005 the Kuomintang displayed a massive photo of the anti-Japanese Aboriginal leader Mona Rudao at its headquarters in honor of the 60th anniversary of Taiwan's retrocession from Japan to the Republic of China.
On social issues, the KMT does not take an official position on same-sex marriage, though most members of legislative committees, mayors of cities, and the most recent presidential candidate (Han Kuo-yu) oppose it. The party does, however, have a small faction that supports same-sex marriage, consisting mainly of young people and people in the Taipei metropolitan area. The opposition to same-sex marriage comes mostly from Christian groups, who wield significant political influence within the KMT.
The Kuomintang's constitution designated Sun Yat-sen as party president. After his death, the Kuomintang opted to keep that language in its constitution to honor his memory forever. The party has since been headed by a director-general (1927–1975) and a chairman (since 1975), positions which officially discharge the functions of the president.
The KMT is being led by a Central Committee with a commitment to a Leninist principle of democratic centralism:
The Kuomintang Party Charter was adopted on January 28, 1924. The current charter has 51 articles and includes contents of General Principles, Party Membership, Organization, The National President, The Director-General, The National Congress, The Central Committee, District and Sub-District Party Headquarters, Cadres and Tenure, Discipline, Awards and Punishment, Funding, and Supplementary Provisions. The most recent version was made at the Twentieth National Congress on July 28, 2019.
The KMT was a nationalist revolutionary party that had been supported by the Soviet Union. It was organized on the Leninist principle of democratic centralism.
The KMT had several influences upon its ideology by revolutionary thinking. The KMT and Chiang Kai-shek used the words feudal and counterrevolutionary as synonyms for evil and backwardness, and they proudly proclaimed themselves to be revolutionaries. Chiang called the warlords feudalists, and he also called for feudalism and counterrevolutionaries to be stamped out by the KMT. Chiang showed extreme rage when he was called a warlord, because of the word's negative and feudal connotations. Ma Bufang was forced to defend himself against the accusations, and stated to the news media that his army was a part of "National army, people's power".
Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the KMT, warned the Soviet Union and other foreign countries about interfering in Chinese affairs. He was personally angry at the way China was treated by foreigners, mainly by the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. He and his New Life Movement called for the crushing of Soviet, Western, American and other foreign influences in China. Chen Lifu, a CC Clique member in the KMT, said "Communism originated from Soviet imperialism, which has encroached on our country." It was also noted that "the white bear of the North Pole is known for its viciousness and cruelty".
KMT leaders across China adopted nationalist rhetoric. The Chinese Muslim general Ma Bufang of Qinghai presented himself as a Chinese nationalist to the people of China who was fighting against Western imperialism to deflect criticism by opponents that his government was feudal and oppressed minorities like Tibetans and Buddhist Mongols. He used his Chinese nationalist credentials to his advantage to keep himself in power.
The Blue Shirts Society, a fascist paramilitary organization within the KMT that modeled itself after Mussolini's blackshirts, was anti-foreign and anti-communist, and it stated that its agenda was to expel foreign (Japanese and Western) imperialists from China, crush Communism, and eliminate feudalism. In addition to being anticommunist, some KMT members, like Chiang Kai-shek's right-hand man Dai Li were anti-American, and wanted to expel American influence. Close Sino-German ties also promoted cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Nazi Party (NSDAP).
The New Life Movement was a government-led civic movement in 1930s China initiated by Chiang Kai-shek to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralised ideology following the emergence of ideological challenges to the status quo. The Movement attempted to counter threats of Western and Japanese imperialism through a resurrection of traditional Chinese morality, which it held to be superior to modern Western values. As such the Movement was based upon Confucianism, mixed with Christianity, nationalism and authoritarianism that have some similarities to fascism. It rejected individualism and liberalism, while also opposing socialism and communism. Some historians regard this movement as imitating Nazism and being a neo-nationalistic movement used to elevate Chiang's control of everyday lives. Frederic Wakeman suggested that the New Life Movement was "Confucian fascism".
The KMT branch in Guangxi province, led by the New Guangxi Clique of Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren, implemented anti-imperialist, anti-religious, and anti-foreign policies. During the Northern Expedition, in 1926 in Guangxi, Muslim General Bai Chongxi led his troops in destroying most of the Buddhist temples and smashing idols, turning the temples into schools and KMT headquarters. Bai led an anti-foreign wave in Guangxi, attacking American, European, and other foreigners and missionaries, and generally making the province unsafe for non-natives. Westerners fled from the province, and some Chinese Christians were also attacked as imperialist agents.
The leaders clashed with Chiang Kai-shek, which led to the Central Plains War where Chiang defeated the clique.
The KMT had a left wing and a right wing, the left being more radical in its pro-Soviet policies, but both wings equally persecuted merchants, accusing them of being counterrevolutionaries and reactionaries. The right wing under Chiang Kai-shek prevailed, and continued radical policies against private merchants and industrialists, even as they denounced communism.
One of the Three Principles of the People of the KMT, Mínshēng, was defined as socialism by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. He defined this principle of saying in his last days "its socialism and its communism". The concept may be understood as social welfare as well. Sun understood it as an industrial economy and equality of land holdings for the Chinese peasant farmers. Here he was influenced by the American thinker Henry George, (see Georgism) the land value tax in Taiwan is a legacy thereof. He divided livelihood into four areas: food, clothing, housing, and transportation; and planned out how an ideal (Chinese) government can take care of these for its people.
The KMT was referred to having a socialist ideology. "Equalization of land rights" was a clause included by Dr. Sun in the original Tongmenhui. The KMT's revolutionary ideology in the 1920s incorporated unique Chinese Socialism as part of its ideology.
The Soviet Union trained KMT revolutionaries in the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. In the West and in the Soviet Union, Chiang was known as the "Red General". Movie theaters in the Soviet Union showed newsreels and clips of Chiang, at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University Portraits of Chiang were hung on the walls, and in the Soviet May Day Parades that year, Chiang's portrait was to be carried along with the portraits of Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and other socialist leaders.
The KMT attempted to levy taxes upon merchants in Canton, and the merchants resisted by raising an army, the Merchant's volunteer corps. Dr. Sun initiated this anti-merchant policy, and Chiang Kai-shek enforced it, Chiang led his army of Whampoa Military Academy graduates to defeat the merchant's army. Chiang was assisted by Soviet advisors, who supplied him with weapons, while the merchants were supplied with weapons from the Western countries.
The KMT was accused of leading a "Red Revolution" in Canton. The merchants were conservative and reactionary, and their Volunteer Corp leader Chen Lianbao was a prominent comprador trader.
The merchants were supported by the Western powers, who led an international flotilla to support them against the KMT. The KMT seized many of Western-supplied weapons from the merchants, using them to equip their troops. A KMT General executed several merchants, and the KMT formed a Soviet-inspired Revolutionary Committee. The British Communist Party sent a letter to Dr. Sun, congratulating him on his military successes.
In 1948, the KMT again attacked the merchants of Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek sent his son Chiang Ching-kuo to restore economic order. Ching-kuo copied Soviet methods, which he learned during his stay there, to start a social revolution by attacking middle-class merchants. He also enforced low prices on all goods to raise support from the proletariat.
As riots broke out and savings were ruined, bankrupting shop owners, Ching-kuo began to attack the wealthy, seizing assets and placing them under arrest. The son of the gangster Du Yuesheng was arrested by him. Ching-kuo ordered KMT agents to raid the Yangtze Development Corporation's warehouses, which was privately owned by H.H. Kung and his family. H.H. Kung's wife was Soong Ai-ling, the sister of Soong Mei-ling who was Ching-kuo's stepmother. H.H. Kung's son David was arrested, the Kung's responded by blackmailing the Chiang's, threatening to release information about them, eventually he was freed after negotiations, and Ching-kuo resigned, ending the terror on the Shanghainese merchants.
The KMT also promotes government-owned corporations. KMT founder Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by the economic ideas of Henry George, who believed that the rents extracted from natural monopolies or the usage of land belonged to the public. Dr. Sun argued for Georgism and emphasized the importance of a mixed economy, which he termed "The Principle of Minsheng" in his Three Principles of the People.
"The railroads, public utilities, canals, and forests should be nationalized, and all income from the land and mines should be in the hands of the State. With this money in hand, the State can therefore finance the social welfare programs."
The KMT Muslim Governor of Ningxia, Ma Hongkui, promoted state-owned monopolies. His government had a company, Fu Ning Company, which had a monopoly over commerce and industry in Ningxia.
Corporations such as CSBC Corporation, Taiwan, CPC Corporation and Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation are owned by the state in the Republic of China.
Marxists also existed in the KMT. They viewed the Chinese revolution in different terms than the CCP, claiming that China already went past its feudal stage and was in a stagnation period rather than in another mode of production. These Marxists in the KMT opposed the CCP ideology. The Left Kuomintang who disagreed with Chiang Kai-shek formed the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang when the KMT was on the edge of defeat in the civil war and later joined the government of the CCP.
The KMT used traditional Chinese religious ceremonies. According to the KMT, the souls of party martyrs were sent to heaven. Chiang Kai-shek believed that these martyrs still witnessed events on Earth.
The KMT backed the New Life Movement, which promoted Confucianism, and it was also against westernization. KMT leaders also opposed the May Fourth Movement. Chiang Kai-shek, as a nationalist, and Confucianist, was against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. He viewed some western ideas as foreign, as a Chinese nationalist, and that the introduction of western ideas and literature that the May Fourth Movement wanted was not welcome. He and Sun Yat-sen criticized these May Fourth intellectuals for corrupting morals of youth.
The KMT also incorporated Confucianism in its jurisprudence. It pardoned Shi Jianqiao for murdering Sun Chuanfang, because she did it in revenge since Sun executed her father Shi Congbin, which was an example of filial piety to one's parents in Confucianism. The KMT encouraged filial revenge killings and extended pardons to those who performed them.
In response to the Cultural Revolution, Chiang Kai-shek promoted a Chinese Cultural Renaissance movement which followed in the steps of the New Life Movement, promoting Confucian values.
The KMT purged China's education system of Western ideas, introducing Confucianism into the curriculum. Education came under the total control of the state, which meant, in effect, the KMT, via the Ministry of Education. Military and political classes on KMT's Three Principles of the People were added. Textbooks, exams, degrees and educational instructors were all controlled by the state, as were all universities.
Chiang Ching-kuo, appointed as KMT director of Secret Police in 1950, was educated in the Soviet Union, and initiated Soviet style military organization in the Republic of China Armed Forces, reorganizing and Sovietizing the political officer corps, surveillance, and KMT activities were propagated throughout the whole of the armed forces. Opposed to this was Sun Li-jen, who was educated at the American Virginia Military Institute. Chiang Ching-kuo then arrested Sun Li-jen, charging him of conspiring with the American CIA of plotting to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, Sun was placed under house arrest in 1955.
Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Kuomintang, also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, was ruling China and strongly opposed the Chinese Communist Party as it was funded and militarily backed by the COMINTERN (Soviet Union) and pursuing a communist revolution to overthrow the Republic of China . On 12 April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in what was known as the Shanghai massacre which led to the Chinese Civil War. The Chinese Nationalist government then led 5 military campaigns in order to wipe out Chinese Soviet Republic, a Soviet-puppet state established by the Chinese Communist Party. Initially, the Kuomintang was successful, eventually forcing the Chinese Communist Party to escape on a long march until a full-scale invasion of China by Japan forced both the Nationalists and the Communists into an alliance. After the war, the two parties were thrown back into a civil war. The Kuomintang were defeated in the mainland and escaped in exile to Taiwan while the rest of mainland China became Communist in 1949.
Former KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek considered all the minority peoples of China as descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the semi-mythical initiator of the Chinese civilization. Chiang considered all ethnic minorities in China to belong to the Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation) and he introduced this into KMT ideology, which was propagated into the educational system of the Republic of China, and the Constitution of the ROC considered Chiang's ideology to be true. In Taiwan, the president performs a ritual honoring the Yellow Emperor, while facing west, in the direction of the Chinese mainland.
The KMT retained the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission for dealing with Mongolian and Tibetan affairs. A Muslim, Ma Fuxiang, was appointed as its chairman.
The KMT was known for sponsoring Muslim students to study abroad at Muslim universities like Al-Azhar University and it established schools especially for Muslims, Muslim KMT warlords like Ma Fuxiang promoted education for Muslims. KMT Muslim Warlord Ma Bufang built a girls' school for Muslim girls in Linxia City which taught modern secular education.
Tibetans and Mongols refused to allow other ethnic groups like Kazakhs to participate in the Kokonur ceremony in Qinghai, but KMT Muslim General Ma Bufang allowed them to participate.
Chinese Muslims were among the most hardline KMT members. Ma Chengxiang was a Muslim KMT member, and he refused to surrender to the Communists.
The KMT incited anti-Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang sentiments among Hui people and Mongols, encouraging for them to topple their rule during the Central Plains War.
Masud Sabri, a Uyghur was appointed as Governor of Xinjiang by the KMT, as was the Tatar Burhan Shahidi and the Uyghur Yulbars Khan.
The Muslim General Ma Bufang also put KMT symbols on his mansion, the Ma Bufang Mansion along with a portrait of party founder Sun Yatsen arranged with the KMT flag and the Republic of China flag.
General Ma Bufang and other high ranking Muslim Generals attended the Kokonuur Lake Ceremony where the God of the Lake was worshipped, and during the ritual, the Chinese national anthem was sung, all participants bowed to a Portrait of KMT founder Sun Yat-sen, and the God of the Lake was also bowed to, and offerings were given to him by the participants, which included the Muslims. This cult of personality around the KMT leader and the KMT was standard in all meetings. Sun Yat-sen's portrait was bowed to three times by KMT party members. Sun's portrait was arranged with two flags crossed under, the KMT flag and the flag of the Republic of China.
The KMT also hosted conferences of important Muslims like Bai Chongxi, Ma Fuxiang, and Ma Liang. Ma Bufang stressed "racial harmony" as a goal when he was Governor of Qinghai.
In 1939, Isa Yusuf Alptekin and Ma Fuliang were sent on a mission by the KMT to the Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Syria to gain support for the Chinese War against Japan, they also visited Afghanistan in 1940 and contacted Muhammad Amin Bughra, they asked him to come to Chongqing, the capital of the Nationalist Government. Bughra was arrested by the British government in 1942 for spying, and the KMT arranged for Bughra's release. He and Isa Yusuf worked as editors of KMT Muslim publications. Ma Tianying (馬天英) (1900–1982) led the 1939 mission which had 5 other people including Isa and Fuliang.
The KMT claims sovereignty over Outer Mongolia and Tuva as well as the territories of the modern People's Republic and Republic of China.
KMT Muslim General Ma Bufang waged war on the invading Tibetans during the Sino-Tibetan War with his Muslim army, and he repeatedly crushed Tibetan revolts during bloody battles in Qinghai provinces. Ma Bufang was fully supported by President Chiang Kai-shek, who ordered him to prepare his Muslim army to invade Tibet several times and threatened aerial bombardment on the Tibetans. With support from the KMT, Ma Bufang repeatedly attacked the Tibetan area of Golog seven times during the KMT Pacification of Qinghai, eliminating thousands of Tibetans.
General Ma Fuxiang, the chairman of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission stated that Mongolia and Tibet were an integral part of the Republic of China, arguing:
Our Party [the Guomindang] takes the development of the weak and small and resistance to the strong and violent as our sole and most urgent task. This is even more true for those groups which are not of our kind [Ch. fei wo zulei zhe]. Now the people of Mongolia and Tibet are closely related to us, and we have great affection for one another: our common existence and common honor already have a history of over a thousand years. [...] Mongolia and Tibet's life and death are China's life and death. China absolutely cannot cause Mongolia and Tibet to break away from China's territory, and Mongolia and Tibet cannot reject China to become independent. At this time, there is not a single nation on earth except China that will sincerely develop Mongolia and Tibet.
Ma Bufang also crushed Mongol separatist movements, abducting the Genghis Khan Shrine and attacking Tibetan Buddhist Temples like Labrang, and keeping a tight control over them through the Kokonur God ceremony.
On 28 February 1947, the Kuomintang cracked down on an anti-government uprising in Taiwan known as the February 28 incident and the government began the White Terror in Taiwan in order to purge communist spies and prevent Chinese communist subversion. While in Taiwan, the Republic of China government under the Kuomintang remained anti-communist and attempted to recover the mainland from the Communist forces. During the Cold War, Taiwan was referred to as Free China while the China on the mainland was known as Red China or Communist China in the West, to mark the ideological difference between the capitalist 'Free World' and the communist nations. The ROC government under the Kuomintang also actively supported anti-communist efforts in Southeast Asia and around the world. This effort did not cease until the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975. The Kuomintang continued to be anti-communist during the period of Chiang Chin-kuo. Contacts between Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party have started since 1990s to re-establish Cross-Strait relations. Even though anti-communism is written under Kuomintang's party charter, the modern Kuomintang is now seen as PRC-friendly.
Sun Yat-sen was not just the founder of the Republic of China, but also the founder of the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-sen's political ideology was based on building a free and democratic China founded on Three Principles of the People, namely Democracy (civil rights of people), people's economic livelihood and nationalism. Although the Kuomintang lost control over mainland China in 1949, the Republic of China under Kuomintang rule was able to achieve the political ideal of a democratic Republic of China on the island of Taiwan based on the Three Principles of the People after its retreat to Taiwan. The Three Principles of the People is not just written in the ROC Constitution, but also in Article 1, 5, 7, 9, 37, 42, 43 of Kuomintang's party charter.
The Kuomintang advocates a free and democratic China under the Republic of China founded on Three Principles of the People. In fact, during the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo advocated Grand Alliance for China's Reunification under the Three Principles of the People. Since then, a democracy promotion banner for Grand Alliance for China's Reunification under the Three Principles of the People continues to exist in Kinmen today as a display to mainland China that the Republic of China's unification principle should be based on Chinese democracy. Today, the Kuomintang continues to view the Republic of China as the free, democratic and legitimate China.
A Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang strongly adheres to the defense of the Republic of China and upholding the Constitution of the Republic of China. It is also strongly opposed to de jure Taiwanese independence (under a theoretical "Republic of Taiwan"), which would mean recognizing the People's Republic of China as the legitimate government representing China. It favors closer relations with the PRC and the CCP, though it also opposes Chinese unification under the "one country, two systems" framework, and any non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.
In modern Taiwanese politics, the Kuomintang is seen as a centre-right to right-wing political party. The Kuomintang believes in the values associated with conservatism. The Kuomintang has a strong tradition of defending the established institutions of the Republic of China, such as defending Constitution of the Republic of China, defending the five branches of government (modeled on Sun Yat-sen's political philosophy of Three Principles of the People), espousing the One-China policy as a vital component for the Republic of China (ROC)'s international security and economic development, as opposed to Taiwanization. The Kuomintang claims to have a strong tradition of fighting to defend, preserve and revive traditional Chinese culture and religious freedom as well as advocating for Confucian values, economic liberalism and anti-communism. The KMT still sees the Republic of China in Taiwan as presenting the true cultural China which has preserved Chinese culture, as compared to the People's Republic of China which had experienced Chinese cultural destruction during the Cultural Revolution.
Some Kuomintang conservatives see traditional social or family values as being threatened by liberal values and oppose same-sex marriage. KMT conservatives are also typically against the abolishment of capital punishment, arguing the need to maintain deterrence against harsh crimes. Conservative KMT policies may also be characterized by a focus on maintaining the traditions and doctrine of Confucian thought, namely reinforcing the morals of paternalism and patriarchy in Taiwan's society. In terms of education policy, KMT policies advocate increasing more Classical Chinese content in Chinese education and Chinese history content in order to reinforce Chinese cultural identity, as opposed to de-sinicization attempts by advocates of Taiwan independence who typically decrease Classical Chinese and Chinese history content in schools in order to achieve Taiwanization.
The Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) was initially pro-ROC and mainly consisted of KMT members who joined as an alternative and were also in opposition to the Malayan Communist Party, supporting the KMT in China by funding them with the intention of reclaiming the Chinese mainland from the communists.
The Tibet Improvement Party was founded by Pandatsang Rapga, a pro-ROC and pro-KMT Khampa revolutionary, who worked against the 14th Dalai Lama's Tibetan Government in Lhasa. Rapga borrowed Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People doctrine and translated his political theories into the Tibetan language, hailing it as the best hope for Asian peoples against imperialism. Rapga stated that "the Sanmin Zhuyi was intended for all peoples under the domination of foreigners, for all those who had been deprived of the rights of man. But it was conceived especially for the Asians. It is for this reason that I translated it. At that time, a lot of new ideas were spreading in Tibet," during an interview in 1975 by Dr. Heather Stoddard. He wanted to destroy the feudal government in Lhasa, in addition to modernizing and secularizing Tibetan society. The ultimate goal of the party was the overthrow of the Dalai Lama's regime, and the creation of a Tibetan Republic which would be an autonomous Republic within the ROC. Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT funded the party and their efforts to build an army to battle the Dalai Lama's government. The KMT was extensively involved in the Kham region, recruiting the Khampa people to both oppose the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government, fight the Communist Red Army, and crush the influence of local Chinese warlords who did not obey the central government.
The KMT assisted the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng party which translates literally into Chinese (越南國民黨; Yuènán Guómíndǎng) as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. When it was established, it was based on the Chinese KMT and was pro Chinese. The Chinese KMT helped the party, known as the VNQDD, set up headquarters in Canton and Yunnan, to aid their anti-imperialist struggle against the French occupiers of Indochina and against the Vietnamese Communist Party. It was the first revolutionary nationalist party to be established in Vietnam, before the communist party. The KMT assisted VNQDD with funds and military training.
The VNQDD was founded with KMT aid in 1925, they were against Ho Chi Minh's Viet Nam Revolutionary Youth League. When the VNQDD fled to China after the failed uprising against the French, they settled in Yunnan and Canton, in two different branches. The VNQDD existed as a party in exile in China for 15 years, receiving help, militarily and financially, and organizationally from the Chinese KMT. The two VNQDD parties merged into a single organization, the Canton branch removed the word "revolutionary" from the party name. Lu Han, a KMT official in Nanjing, who was originally from Yunnan, was contacted by the VNQDD, and the KMT Central Executive Committee and Military made direct contact with VNQDD for the first time, the party was reestablished in Nanjing with KMT help.
The Chinese KMT used the VNQDD for its own interests in south China and Indo China. General Zhang Fakui (Chang Fa-kuei), who based himself in Guangxi, established the Việt Nam Cách mệnh Đồng minh Hội meaning "Viet Nam Revolutionary League" in 1942, which was assisted by the VNQDD to serve the KMT's aims. The Chinese Yunnan provincial army, under the KMT, occupied northern Vietnam after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the VNQDD tagging alone, opposing Ho Chi Minh's communist party. The Viet Nam Revolutionary League was a union of various Vietnamese nationalist groups, run by the pro Chinese VNQDD. Its stated goal was for unity with China under the Three Principles of the People, created by KMT founder Dr. Sun and opposition to Japanese and French Imperialists. The Revolutionary League was controlled by Nguyễn Hải Thần. General Zhang shrewdly blocked the Communists of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh from entering the league, as his main goal was Chinese influence in Indo China. The KMT utilized these Vietnamese nationalists during World War II against Japanese forces.
A KMT left-winger, General Chang Fa-kuei, worked with Nguyễn Hải Thần, a VNQDD member, against French Imperialists and Communists in Indo China. General Chang Fa-kuei planned to lead a Chinese army invasion of Tonkin in Indochina to free Vietnam from French control, and to get Chiang Kai-shek's support. The VNQDD opposed the government of Ngo Dinh Diem during the Vietnam War.
The party dissolved after the Fall of Saigon in 1977 and was later re-founded in 1991 as the People's Action Party of Vietnam (Đảng Nhân dân Hành động Việt Nam).
On 30 November 1958, the establishment of the Ryukyu Guomindang took place. Tsugumasa Kiyuna headed its predecessor party, the Ryukyuan separatist Ryukyu Revolutionary Party which was backed by the Kuomintang in Taiwan.
The pro-ROC camp is a political alignment in Hong Kong. It pledges allegiance to the Republic of China. One of these members, the 123 Democratic Alliance, dissolved in 2000 due to the lack of financial support from the Taiwanese government after the 2000 presidential election.
Ma Fuxiang founded Islamic organizations sponsored by the KMT, including the China Islamic Association (中國回教公會).
KMT Muslim General Bai Chongxi was Chairman of the Chinese Islamic National Salvation Federation. The Muslim Chengda school and Yuehua publication were supported by the Nationalist Government, and they supported the KMT.
The Chinese Muslim Association was also sponsored by the KMT, and it evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan with the party. The Chinese Muslim Association owns the Taipei Grand Mosque which was built with funds from the KMT.
The Yihewani (Ikhwan al Muslimun a.k.a. Muslim brotherhood) was the predominant Muslim sect backed by the KMT. Other Muslim sects, like the Xidaotang were also supported by the KMT. The Chinese Muslim brotherhood became a Chinese nationalist organization and supported KMT rule. Brotherhood Imams like Hu Songshan ordered Muslims to pray for the Nationalist Government, salute KMT flags during prayer, and listen to nationalist sermons.
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{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially based on the Chinese mainland and then in Taiwan since 1949. It was the sole ruling party in China during the Republican Era from 1928 to 1949, when most of the Chinese mainland was under its control. The party retreated from the mainland to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-shek declared martial law and retained his authoritarian rule over Taiwan under the Dang Guo system until democratic reforms were enacted in the 1980s and full democratization in the 1990s. In Taiwanese politics today, the KMT is a centre-right to right-wing party and is the largest party in the Pan-Blue Coalition. The KMT's primary rival in elections is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its allies in the Pan-Green Coalition. As of 2023, the KMT is the largest opposition party in the Legislative Yuan. The current chairman is Eric Chu.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The party originated as the Revive China Society, founded by Sun Yat-sen on 24 November 1894 in Honolulu. From there, the party underwent major reorganization changes that occurred before and after the Xinhai Revolution, which resulted in the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Provisional Republic Government, with Sun as the first president of the Republic. In 1919, Sun re-established the party under the name \"Kuomintang\" in the Shanghai French Concession. From 1926 to 1928, the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek successfully led the Northern Expedition against regional warlords and unified the fragmented nation. From 1937 to 1945, the KMT-ruled Nationalist government led China through the Second Sino-Japanese War against Japan. By 1949, the KMT was decisively defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War (in which the People's Republic of China was established by the CCP on 1 October 1949) and withdrew the ROC government to Taiwan, a former Qing territory annexed by the Empire of Japan from 1895 to 1945.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled Taiwan as an authoritarian one-party state after the February 28 incident. During this period, martial law was in effect and civil liberties were curtailed under the guise of anti-communism, with the period being known as the White Terror. The party oversaw Taiwan's economic development, but also experienced diplomatic setbacks, including the ROC losing its United Nations seat and most of the world including its ally the United States switching diplomatic recognition to the CCP-led People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son and the next KMT leader in turn, lifted martial law and the ban of opposition parties. His successor Lee Teng-hui continued pursuing democratic reforms and constitutional amendments and was re-elected in 1996 through a direct presidential election, the first time in the ROC history. The 2000 presidential election put an end to 72 years of the KMT's political dominance in the ROC. The KMT reclaimed power from 2008 to 2016, with the landslide victory of Ma Ying-jeou in the 2008 presidential election, whose presidency significantly loosened restrictions placed on cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges. The KMT again lost the presidency and its legislative majority in the 2016 election, returning to the opposition.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The KMT is a member of the International Democracy Union. The party's guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, advocated by Sun Yat-sen and historically organized on a basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that entailed open discussion of policy on the condition of unity among party members in upholding the agreed-upon decisions. The KMT opposes de jure Taiwan independence, Chinese unification under the \"one country, two systems\" framework, and any non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes. Originally placing high priority on reclaiming the Chinese mainland through Project National Glory, the KMT now favors a closer relation with the PRC and seeks to maintain Taiwan's status quo under the Constitution of the Republic of China. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as \"one China\" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The KMT traces its ideological and organizational roots to the work of Sun Yat-sen, a proponent of Chinese nationalism and democracy who founded the Revive China Society at the capital of the Republic of Hawaii, Honolulu, on 24 November 1894. On 20 August 1905, Sun joined forces with other anti-monarchist societies in Tokyo, Empire of Japan, to form the Tongmenghui, a group committed to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and to establish a republic in China.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The group supported the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the founding of the Republic of China on 1 January 1912. Although Sun and the Tongmenghui are often depicted as the principal organizers of the Xinhai Revolution, this view is disputed by scholars who argue that the Revolution broke out in a leaderless and decentralized way and that Sun was only later elected provisional president of the new Chinese republic. However, Sun did not have military power and ceded the provisional presidency of the republic to Yuan Shikai, who arranged for the abdication of Puyi, the last Emperor, on 12 February.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "On 25 August 1912, the Nationalist Party was established at the Huguang Guild Hall in Beijing, where the Tongmenghui and five smaller pro-revolution parties merged to contest the first national elections. Sun was chosen as the party chairman with Huang Xing as his deputy.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The most influential member of the party was the third ranking Song Jiaoren, who mobilized mass support from gentry and merchants for the Nationalists to advocate a constitutional parliamentary democracy. The party opposed constitutional monarchists and sought to check the power of Yuan. The Nationalists won an overwhelming majority in the first National Assembly election in December 1912.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "However, Yuan soon began to ignore the parliament in making presidential decisions. Song Jiaoren was assassinated in Shanghai in 1913. Members of the Nationalists, led by Sun Yat-sen, suspected that Yuan was behind the plot and thus staged the Second Revolution in July 1913, a poorly planned and ill-supported armed rising to overthrow Yuan, and failed. Yuan, claiming subversiveness and betrayal, expelled adherents of the KMT from the parliament. Yuan dissolved the Nationalists, whose members had largely fled into exile in Japan, in November and dismissed the parliament early in 1914.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Yuan Shikai proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915. While exiled in Japan in 1914, Sun established the Chinese Revolutionary Party on 8 July 1914, but many of his old revolutionary comrades, including Huang Xing, Wang Jingwei, Hu Hanmin and Chen Jiongming, refused to join him or support his efforts in inciting armed uprising against Yuan. To join the Revolutionary Party, members had to take an oath of personal loyalty to Sun, which many old revolutionaries regarded as undemocratic and contrary to the spirit of the revolution. As a result, he became largely sidelined within the Republican movement during this period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Sun returned to China in 1917 to establish a military junta at Canton to oppose the Beiyang government but was soon forced out of office and exiled to Shanghai. There, with renewed support, he resurrected the KMT on 10 October 1919, under the name Kuomintang of China (中國國民黨) and established its headquarters in Canton in 1920.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1923, the KMT and its Canton government accepted aid from the Soviet Union after being denied recognition by the western powers. Soviet advisers—the most prominent of whom was Mikhail Borodin, an agent of the Comintern—arrived in China in 1923 to aid in the reorganization and consolidation of the KMT along the lines of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), establishing a Leninist party structure that lasted into the 1990s. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was under Comintern instructions to cooperate with the KMT, and its members were encouraged to join while maintaining their separate party identities, forming the First United Front between the two parties. Mao Zedong and early members of the CCP also joined the KMT in 1923.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Soviet advisers also helped the KMT to set up a political institute to train propagandists in mass mobilization techniques, and in 1923 Chiang Kai-shek, one of Sun's lieutenants from the Tongmenghui days, was sent to Moscow for several months' military and political study. At the first party congress in 1924 in Guangzhou, Guangdong, which included non-KMT delegates such as members of the CCP, they adopted Sun's political theory, which included the Three Principles of the People: nationalism, democracy and people's livelihood.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "When Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, the political leadership of the KMT fell to Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, respectively the left-wing and right-wing leaders of the party. However, the real power was in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was in near complete control of the military as the superintendent of the Whampoa Military Academy. With their military superiority, the KMT confirmed their rule on Canton, the provincial capital of Guangdong. The Guangxi warlords pledged loyalty to the KMT. The KMT now became a rival government in opposition to the warlord Beiyang government based in Beijing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Chiang assumed leadership of the KMT on 6 July 1926. Unlike Sun Yat-sen, whom he admired greatly and who forged all his political, economic, and revolutionary ideas primarily from what he had learned in Hawaii and indirectly through Hong Kong and Japan under the Meiji Restoration, Chiang knew relatively little about the West. He also studied in Japan, but he was firmly rooted in his ancient Han Chinese identity and was steeped in Chinese culture. As his life progressed, he became increasingly attached to ancient Chinese culture and traditions. His few trips to the West confirmed his pro-ancient Chinese outlook and he studied the ancient Chinese classics and ancient Chinese history assiduously. In 1923, after the formation of the First United Front, Sun Yat-sen sent Chiang to spend three months in Moscow studying the political and military system of the Soviet Union. Although Chiang did not follow the Soviet Communist doctrine, he, like the Communist Party, sought to destroy warlordism and foreign imperialism in China, and upon his return established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, following the Soviet Model.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Chiang was also particularly committed to Sun's idea of \"political tutelage\". Sun believed that the only hope for a unified and better China lay in a military conquest, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. Using this ideology, Chiang built himself into the dictator of the Republic of China, both in the Chinese mainland and after the national government relocated to Taiwan.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Following the death of Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek emerged as the KMT leader and launched the Northern Expedition to defeat the northern warlords and unite China under the party. With its power confirmed in the southeast, the Nationalist Government appointed Chiang Kai-shek commander-in-chief of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), and the Northern Expedition to suppress the warlords began. Chiang had to defeat three separate warlords and two independent armies. Chiang, with Soviet supplies, conquered the southern half of China in nine months.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "A split erupted between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT, which threatened the Northern Expedition. Wang Jing Wei, who led the KMT leftist allies, took the city of Wuhan in January 1927. With the support of the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin, Wang declared the National Government as having moved to Wuhan. Having taken Nanjing in March, Chiang halted his campaign and prepared a violent break with Wang and his communist allies. Chiang's expulsion of the CCP and their Soviet advisers, marked by the Shanghai massacre on 12 April, led to the beginning of the Chinese Civil War. Wang finally surrendered his power to Chiang. Once this split had been healed, Chiang resumed his Northern Expedition and managed to take Shanghai.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "During the Nanjing incident in March 1927, the NRA stormed the consulates of the United States, the United Kingdom and Imperial Japan, looted foreign properties and almost assassinated the Japanese consul. An American, two British, one French, an Italian and a Japanese were killed. These looters also stormed and seized millions of dollars' worth of British concessions in Hankou, refusing to hand them back to the UK government. Both Nationalists and Communist soldiers within the army participated in the rioting and looting of foreign residents in Nanjing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "NRA took Beijing in 1928. The city was the internationally recognized capital, even when it was previously controlled by warlords. This event allowed the KMT to receive widespread diplomatic recognition in the same year. The capital was moved from Beijing to Nanjing, the original capital of the Ming dynasty, and thus a symbolic purge of the final Qing elements. This period of KMT rule in China between 1927 and 1937 was relatively stable and prosperous and is still known as the Nanjing decade.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "After the Northern Expedition in 1928, the Nationalist government under the KMT declared that China had been exploited for decades under the unequal treaties signed between the foreign powers and the Qing dynasty. The KMT government demanded that the foreign powers renegotiate the treaties on equal terms.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Before the Northern Expedition, the KMT began as a heterogeneous group advocating American-inspired federalism and provincial autonomy. However, the KMT under Chiang's leadership aimed at establishing a centralized one-party state with one ideology. This was even more evident following Sun's elevation into a cult figure after his death. The control by one single party began the period of \"political tutelage\", whereby the party was to lead the government while instructing the people on how to participate in a democratic system. The topic of reorganizing the army, brought up at a military conference in 1929, sparked the Central Plains War. The cliques, some of them former warlords, demanded to retain their army and political power within their own territories. Although Chiang finally won the war, the conflicts among the cliques would have a devastating effect on the survival of the KMT. Muslim Generals in Gansu waged war against the Guominjun in favor of the KMT during the conflict in Gansu in 1927–1930.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 1931, Japanese aggression resumed with the Mukden Incident and occupation of Manchuria, and the CCP founded the Chinese Soviet Republic (CSR) in Jiangxi while secretly recruiting within the KMT government and military. Chiang was alarmed by the expansion of communist influence; he wanted to suppress internal conflicts before confronting foreign aggression. The KMT were aided by German military advisors. The CSR was destroyed in 1934 after a series of KMT offensives. The communists abandoned bases in southeast China for Shaanxi in a military retreat called the Long March; less than 10% of the communist army survived. A new base, the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region, was created with Soviet aid.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "KMT secret police persecuted suspected communists and political opponents with terror. In The Birth of Communist China, C.P. Fitzgerald describes China under the rule of the KMT thus: \"the Chinese people groaned under a regime Fascist in every quality except efficiency.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1936, Chiang was kidnapped by Zhang Xueliang in the Xi'an Incident and forced into the Second United Front, an anti-Japanese alliance with the CCP; the Second Sino-Japanese War started the following year. The alliance brought little coordination and was treated as a temporary cease fire in the civil war. The New Fourth Army Incident in 1941 ended the alliance.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Japan surrendered in 1945, and Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China on 25 October of that year. The brief period of celebration was soon shadowed by the possibility of a civil war between the KMT and CCP. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan just before it surrendered and occupied Manchuria, the north eastern part of China. The Soviet Union denied the KMT army the right to enter the region but allowed the CCP to take control of the Japanese factories and their supplies.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Full-scale civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists erupted in 1946. The Communist Chinese armies, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), previously a minor faction, grew rapidly in influence and power due to several errors on the KMT's part. First, the KMT reduced troop levels precipitously after the Japanese surrender, leaving large numbers of able-bodied, trained fighting men who became unemployed and disgruntled with the KMT as prime recruits for the PLA. Second, the KMT government proved thoroughly unable to manage the economy, allowing hyperinflation to result. Among the most despised and ineffective efforts it undertook to contain inflation was the conversion to the gold standard for the national treasury and the Chinese gold yuan in August 1948, outlawing private ownership of gold, silver and foreign exchange, collecting all such precious metals and foreign exchange from the people and issuing the Gold Standard Scrip in exchange. As most farmland in the north were under CCP's control, the cities governed by the KMT lacked food supply and this added to the hyperinflation. The new scrip became worthless in only ten months and greatly reinforced the nationwide perception of the KMT as a corrupt or at best inept entity. Third, Chiang Kai-shek ordered his forces to defend the urbanized cities. This decision gave CCP a chance to move freely through the countryside. At first, the KMT had the edge with the aid of weapons and ammunition from the United States (US). However, with the country suffering from hyperinflation, widespread corruption and other economic ills, the KMT continued to lose popular support. Some leading officials and military leaders of the KMT hoarded material, armament and military-aid funding provided by the US. This became an issue which proved to be a hindrance of its relationship with US government. US President Harry S. Truman wrote that \"the Chiangs, the Kungs and the Soongs (were) all thieves\", having taken $750 million in US aid.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "At the same time, the suspension of American aid and tens of thousands of deserted or decommissioned soldiers being recruited to the PLA cause tipped the balance of power quickly to the CCP side, and the overwhelming popular support for the CCP in most of the country made it all but impossible for the KMT forces to carry out successful assaults against the Communists.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "By the end of 1949, the CCP controlled almost all of mainland China, as the KMT retreated to Taiwan with a significant amount of China's national treasures and 2 million people, including military forces and refugees. Some party members stayed in the mainland and broke away from the main KMT to found the Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang (also known as the Left Kuomintang), which still currently exists as one of the eight minor registered parties of the People's Republic of China.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1895, Formosa (now called Taiwan), including the Penghu islands, became a Japanese colony via the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the First Sino-Japanese War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "After Japan's defeat at the end of World War II in 1945, General Order No. 1 instructed Japan to surrender its troops in Taiwan to Chiang Kai-shek. On 25 October 1945, KMT general Chen Yi acted on behalf of the Allied Powers to accept Japan's surrender and proclaimed that day as Taiwan Retrocession Day.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Tensions between the local Taiwanese and mainlanders from mainland China increased in the intervening years, culminating in a flashpoint on 27 February 1947 in Taipei when a dispute between a female cigarette vendor and an anti-smuggling officer in front of Tianma Tea House triggered civil disorder and protests that would last for days. The uprising turned bloody and was shortly put down by the ROC Army in the February 28 Incident. As a result of the 28 February Incident in 1947, Taiwanese people endured what is called the \"White Terror\", a KMT-led political repression that resulted in the death or disappearance of over 30,000 Taiwanese intellectuals, activists, and people suspected of opposition to the KMT.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Following the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949, the commanders of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) believed that Kinmen and Matsu had to be taken before a final assault on Taiwan. The KMT fought the Battle of Guningtou on 25–27 October 1949 and stopped the PLA invasion. The KMT headquarters was set up on 10 December 1949 at No. 11 Zhongshan South Road. In 1950, Chiang took office in Taipei under the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. The provision declared martial law in Taiwan and halted some democratic processes, including presidential and parliamentary elections, until the mainland could be recovered from the CCP. The KMT estimated it would take 3 years to defeat the Communists. The slogan was \"prepare in the first year, start fighting in the second, and conquer in the third year.\" Chiang also initiated the Project National Glory to retake back the mainland in 1965, but was eventually dropped in July 1972 after many unsuccessful attempts.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "However, various factors, including international pressure, are believed to have prevented the KMT from militarily engaging the CCP full-scale. The KMT backed Muslim insurgents formerly belonging to the National Revolutionary Army during the KMT Islamic insurgency in 1950–1958 in mainland China. A cold war with a couple of minor military conflicts was resulted in the early years. The various government bodies previously in Nanjing, that were re-established in Taipei as the KMT-controlled government, actively claimed sovereignty over all China. The Republic of China in Taiwan retained China's seat in the United Nations until 1971 as well as recognition by the United States until 1979.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Until the 1970s, the KMT successfully pushed ahead with land reforms, developed the economy, implemented a democratic system in a lower level of the government, improved relations between Taiwan and the mainland and created the Taiwan economic miracle. However, the KMT controlled the government under a one-party authoritarian state until reforms in the late 1970s through the 1990s. The ROC in Taiwan was once referred to synonymously with the KMT and known simply as Nationalist China after its ruling party. In the 1970s, the KMT began to allow for \"supplemental elections\" in Taiwan to fill the seats of the aging representatives in the National Assembly.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Although opposition parties were not permitted, the pro-democracy movement Tangwai (\"outside the KMT\") created the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on 28 September 1986. Outside observers of Taiwanese politics expected the KMT to clamp down and crush the illegal opposition party, though this did not occur, and instead the party's formation marked the beginning of Taiwan's democratization.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 1991, martial law ceased when President Lee Teng-hui terminated the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion. All parties started to be allowed to compete at all levels of elections, including the presidential election. Lee Teng-hui, the ROC's first democratically elected president and the leader of the KMT during the 1990s, announced his advocacy of \"special state-to-state relations\" with the PRC. The PRC associated this idea with Taiwan independence.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The KMT faced a split in 1993 that led to the formation of the New Party in August 1993, alleged to be a result of Lee's \"corruptive ruling style\". The New Party has, since the purging of Lee, largely reintegrated into the KMT. A much more serious split in the party occurred as a result of the 2000 presidential election. Upset at the choice of Lien Chan as the party's presidential nominee, former party Secretary-General James Soong launched an independent bid, which resulted in the expulsion of Soong and his supporters and the formation of the People First Party (PFP) on 31 March 2000. The KMT candidate placed third behind Soong in the elections. After the election, Lee's strong relationship with the opponent became apparent. To prevent defections to the PFP, Lien moved the party away from Lee's pro-independence policies and became more favorable toward Chinese unification. This shift led to Lee's expulsion from the party and the formation of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) by Lee supporters on 24 July 2001.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Prior to this, the party's voters had defected to both the PFP and TSU, and the KMT did poorly in the December 2001 legislative elections and lost its position as the largest party in the Legislative Yuan. However, the party did well in the 2002 local government mayoral and council election with Ma Ying-jeou, its candidate for Taipei mayor, winning reelection by a landslide and its candidate for Kaohsiung mayor narrowly losing but doing surprisingly well. Since 2002, the KMT and PFP have coordinated electoral strategies. In 2004, the KMT and PFP ran a joint presidential ticket, with Lien running for president and Soong running for vice-president.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The loss of the presidential election of 2004 to DPP President Chen Shui-bian by merely over 30,000 votes was a bitter disappointment to party members, leading to large scale rallies for several weeks protesting alleged electoral fraud and the \"odd circumstances\" of the shooting of President Chen. However, the fortunes of the party were greatly improved when the KMT did well in the legislative elections held in December 2004 by maintaining its support in southern Taiwan achieving a majority for the Pan-Blue Coalition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Soon after the election, there appeared to be a falling out with the KMT's junior partner, the People First Party and talk of a merger seemed to have ended. This split appeared to widen in early 2005, as the leader of the PFP, James Soong appeared to be reconciling with President Chen Shui-Bian and the Democratic Progressive Party. Many PFP members including legislators and municipal leaders have since defected to the KMT, and the PFP is seen as a fading party.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 2005, Ma Ying-jeou became KMT chairman defeating speaker Wang Jin-pyng in the first public election for KMT chairmanship. The KMT won a decisive victory in the 3-in-1 local elections of December 2005, replacing the DPP as the largest party at the local level. This was seen as a major victory for the party ahead of legislative elections in 2007. There were elections for the two municipalities of the ROC, Taipei and Kaohsiung in December 2006. The KMT won a clear victory in Taipei, but lost to the DPP in the southern city of Kaohsiung by the slim margin of 1,100 votes.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On 13 February 2007, Ma was indicted by the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office on charges of allegedly embezzling approximately NT$11 million (US$339,000), regarding the issue of \"special expenses\" while he was mayor of Taipei. Shortly after the indictment, he submitted his resignation as KMT chairman at the same press conference at which he formally announced his candidacy for ROC president. Ma argued that it was customary for officials to use the special expense fund for personal expenses undertaken in the course of their official duties. In December 2007, Ma was acquitted of all charges and immediately filed suit against the prosecutors. In 2008, the KMT won a landslide victory in the Republic of China presidential election on 22 March 2008. The KMT fielded former Taipei mayor and former KMT chairman Ma Ying-jeou to run against the DPP's Frank Hsieh. Ma won by a margin of 17% against Hsieh. Ma took office on 20 May 2008, with vice-presidential candidate Vincent Siew, and ended 8 years of the DPP presidency. The KMT also won a landslide victory in the 2008 legislative elections, winning 81 of 113 seats, or 71.7% of seats in the Legislative Yuan. These two elections gave the KMT firm control of both the executive and legislative yuans.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 25 June 2009, President Ma launched his bid to regain the KMT leadership and registered as the sole candidate for the chairmanship election. On 26 July, Ma won 93.9% of the vote, becoming the new chairman of the KMT, taking office on 17 October 2009. This officially allowed Ma to be able to meet with Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and other PRC delegates, as he was able to represent the KMT as leader of a Chinese political party rather than as head-of-state of a political entity unrecognized by the PRC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "On 29 November 2014, the KMT suffered a heavy loss in the local election to the DPP, winning only 6 municipalities and counties, down from 14 in the previous election in 2009 and 2010. Ma Ying-jeou subsequently resigned from the party chairmanship on 3 December and replaced by acting Chairman Wu Den-yih. Chairmanship election was held on 17 January 2015 and Eric Chu was elected to become the new chairman. He was inaugurated on 19 February. In September 2021, Kuomintang elected its former leader (in office 2015–2016), veteran politician Eric Chu, as its new leader to replace Johnny Chiang (in office 2020–2021).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Upon arriving in Taiwan the KMT occupied assets previously owned by the Japanese and forced local businesses to make contributions directly to the KMT. Some of this real estate and other assets was distributed to party loyalists, but most of it remained with the party, as did the profits generated by the properties.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "As the ruling party on Taiwan, the KMT amassed a vast business empire of banks, investment companies, petrochemical firms, and television and radio stations, thought to have made it the world's richest political party, with assets once estimated to be around US$2–10 billion. Although this war chest appeared to help the KMT until the mid-1990s, it later led to accusations of corruption (often referred to as \"black gold\").",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "After 2000, the KMT's financial holdings appeared to be more of a liability than a benefit, and the KMT started to divest itself of its assets. However, the transactions were not disclosed and the whereabouts of the money earned from selling assets (if it has gone anywhere) is unknown. There were accusations in the 2004 presidential election that the KMT retained assets that were illegally acquired. During the 2000–2008 DPP presidency, a law was proposed by the DPP in the Legislative Yuan to recover illegally acquired party assets and return them to the government. However, due to the DPP's lack of control of the legislative chamber at the time, it never materialized.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The KMT also acknowledged that part of its assets were acquired through extra-legal means and thus promised to \"retro-endow\" them to the government. However, the quantity of the assets which should be classified as illegal are still under heated debate. DPP, in its capacity as ruling party from 2000 to 2008, claimed that there is much more that the KMT has yet to acknowledge. Also, the KMT actively sold assets under its title to quench its recent financial difficulties, which the DPP argues is illegal. Former KMT chairman Ma Ying-Jeou's position is that the KMT will sell some of its properties at below market rates rather than return them to the government and that the details of these transactions will not be publicly disclosed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In 2006, the KMT sold its headquarters at 11 Zhongshan South Road in Taipei to Evergreen Group for NT$2.3 billion (US$96 million). The KMT moved into a smaller building on Bade Road in the eastern part of the city.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In July 2014, the KMT reported total assets of NT$26.8 billion (US$892.4 million) and interest earnings of NT$981.52 million for the year of 2013, making it one of the richest political parties in the world.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In August 2016, the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee was set up by the ruling DPP government to investigate KMT party assets acquired during the martial law period and recover those that were determined to be illegally acquired.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Support for the KMT in Taiwan encompasses a wide range of social groups but is largely determined by age. KMT support tends to be higher in northern Taiwan and in urban areas, where it draws its backing from big businesses due to its policy of maintaining commercial links with mainland China. As of 2020 only 3% of KMT members are under 40 years of age.",
"title": "Supporter base"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The KMT also has some support in the labor sector because of the many labor benefits and insurance implemented while the KMT was in power. The KMT traditionally has strong cooperation with military officers, teachers, and government workers. Among the ethnic groups in Taiwan, the KMT has stronger support among mainlanders and their descendants, for ideological reasons, and among Taiwanese aboriginals. The support for the KMT generally tend to be stronger in majority-Hakka and Mandarin-speaking counties of Taiwan, in contrast to the Hokkien-majority southwestern counties that tend to support the Democratic Progressive Party.",
"title": "Supporter base"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The deep-rooted hostility between Aboriginals and (Taiwanese) Hoklo, and the Aboriginal communities effective KMT networks, contribute to Aboriginal skepticism towards the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Aboriginals' tendency to vote for the KMT. Aboriginals have criticized politicians for abusing the \"indigenization\" movement for political gains, such as aboriginal opposition to the DPP's \"rectification\" by recognizing the Taroko for political reasons, with the majority of mountain townships voting for Ma Ying-jeou. In 2005 the Kuomintang displayed a massive photo of the anti-Japanese Aboriginal leader Mona Rudao at its headquarters in honor of the 60th anniversary of Taiwan's retrocession from Japan to the Republic of China.",
"title": "Supporter base"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "On social issues, the KMT does not take an official position on same-sex marriage, though most members of legislative committees, mayors of cities, and the most recent presidential candidate (Han Kuo-yu) oppose it. The party does, however, have a small faction that supports same-sex marriage, consisting mainly of young people and people in the Taipei metropolitan area. The opposition to same-sex marriage comes mostly from Christian groups, who wield significant political influence within the KMT.",
"title": "Supporter base"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Kuomintang's constitution designated Sun Yat-sen as party president. After his death, the Kuomintang opted to keep that language in its constitution to honor his memory forever. The party has since been headed by a director-general (1927–1975) and a chairman (since 1975), positions which officially discharge the functions of the president.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The KMT is being led by a Central Committee with a commitment to a Leninist principle of democratic centralism:",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "The Kuomintang Party Charter was adopted on January 28, 1924. The current charter has 51 articles and includes contents of General Principles, Party Membership, Organization, The National President, The Director-General, The National Congress, The Central Committee, District and Sub-District Party Headquarters, Cadres and Tenure, Discipline, Awards and Punishment, Funding, and Supplementary Provisions. The most recent version was made at the Twentieth National Congress on July 28, 2019.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The KMT was a nationalist revolutionary party that had been supported by the Soviet Union. It was organized on the Leninist principle of democratic centralism.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The KMT had several influences upon its ideology by revolutionary thinking. The KMT and Chiang Kai-shek used the words feudal and counterrevolutionary as synonyms for evil and backwardness, and they proudly proclaimed themselves to be revolutionaries. Chiang called the warlords feudalists, and he also called for feudalism and counterrevolutionaries to be stamped out by the KMT. Chiang showed extreme rage when he was called a warlord, because of the word's negative and feudal connotations. Ma Bufang was forced to defend himself against the accusations, and stated to the news media that his army was a part of \"National army, people's power\".",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the KMT, warned the Soviet Union and other foreign countries about interfering in Chinese affairs. He was personally angry at the way China was treated by foreigners, mainly by the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States. He and his New Life Movement called for the crushing of Soviet, Western, American and other foreign influences in China. Chen Lifu, a CC Clique member in the KMT, said \"Communism originated from Soviet imperialism, which has encroached on our country.\" It was also noted that \"the white bear of the North Pole is known for its viciousness and cruelty\".",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "KMT leaders across China adopted nationalist rhetoric. The Chinese Muslim general Ma Bufang of Qinghai presented himself as a Chinese nationalist to the people of China who was fighting against Western imperialism to deflect criticism by opponents that his government was feudal and oppressed minorities like Tibetans and Buddhist Mongols. He used his Chinese nationalist credentials to his advantage to keep himself in power.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "The Blue Shirts Society, a fascist paramilitary organization within the KMT that modeled itself after Mussolini's blackshirts, was anti-foreign and anti-communist, and it stated that its agenda was to expel foreign (Japanese and Western) imperialists from China, crush Communism, and eliminate feudalism. In addition to being anticommunist, some KMT members, like Chiang Kai-shek's right-hand man Dai Li were anti-American, and wanted to expel American influence. Close Sino-German ties also promoted cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Nazi Party (NSDAP).",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "The New Life Movement was a government-led civic movement in 1930s China initiated by Chiang Kai-shek to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralised ideology following the emergence of ideological challenges to the status quo. The Movement attempted to counter threats of Western and Japanese imperialism through a resurrection of traditional Chinese morality, which it held to be superior to modern Western values. As such the Movement was based upon Confucianism, mixed with Christianity, nationalism and authoritarianism that have some similarities to fascism. It rejected individualism and liberalism, while also opposing socialism and communism. Some historians regard this movement as imitating Nazism and being a neo-nationalistic movement used to elevate Chiang's control of everyday lives. Frederic Wakeman suggested that the New Life Movement was \"Confucian fascism\".",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "The KMT branch in Guangxi province, led by the New Guangxi Clique of Bai Chongxi and Li Zongren, implemented anti-imperialist, anti-religious, and anti-foreign policies. During the Northern Expedition, in 1926 in Guangxi, Muslim General Bai Chongxi led his troops in destroying most of the Buddhist temples and smashing idols, turning the temples into schools and KMT headquarters. Bai led an anti-foreign wave in Guangxi, attacking American, European, and other foreigners and missionaries, and generally making the province unsafe for non-natives. Westerners fled from the province, and some Chinese Christians were also attacked as imperialist agents.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "The leaders clashed with Chiang Kai-shek, which led to the Central Plains War where Chiang defeated the clique.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The KMT had a left wing and a right wing, the left being more radical in its pro-Soviet policies, but both wings equally persecuted merchants, accusing them of being counterrevolutionaries and reactionaries. The right wing under Chiang Kai-shek prevailed, and continued radical policies against private merchants and industrialists, even as they denounced communism.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "One of the Three Principles of the People of the KMT, Mínshēng, was defined as socialism by Dr. Sun Yat-sen. He defined this principle of saying in his last days \"its socialism and its communism\". The concept may be understood as social welfare as well. Sun understood it as an industrial economy and equality of land holdings for the Chinese peasant farmers. Here he was influenced by the American thinker Henry George, (see Georgism) the land value tax in Taiwan is a legacy thereof. He divided livelihood into four areas: food, clothing, housing, and transportation; and planned out how an ideal (Chinese) government can take care of these for its people.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "The KMT was referred to having a socialist ideology. \"Equalization of land rights\" was a clause included by Dr. Sun in the original Tongmenhui. The KMT's revolutionary ideology in the 1920s incorporated unique Chinese Socialism as part of its ideology.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "The Soviet Union trained KMT revolutionaries in the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University. In the West and in the Soviet Union, Chiang was known as the \"Red General\". Movie theaters in the Soviet Union showed newsreels and clips of Chiang, at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University Portraits of Chiang were hung on the walls, and in the Soviet May Day Parades that year, Chiang's portrait was to be carried along with the portraits of Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and other socialist leaders.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The KMT attempted to levy taxes upon merchants in Canton, and the merchants resisted by raising an army, the Merchant's volunteer corps. Dr. Sun initiated this anti-merchant policy, and Chiang Kai-shek enforced it, Chiang led his army of Whampoa Military Academy graduates to defeat the merchant's army. Chiang was assisted by Soviet advisors, who supplied him with weapons, while the merchants were supplied with weapons from the Western countries.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "The KMT was accused of leading a \"Red Revolution\" in Canton. The merchants were conservative and reactionary, and their Volunteer Corp leader Chen Lianbao was a prominent comprador trader.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "The merchants were supported by the Western powers, who led an international flotilla to support them against the KMT. The KMT seized many of Western-supplied weapons from the merchants, using them to equip their troops. A KMT General executed several merchants, and the KMT formed a Soviet-inspired Revolutionary Committee. The British Communist Party sent a letter to Dr. Sun, congratulating him on his military successes.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "In 1948, the KMT again attacked the merchants of Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek sent his son Chiang Ching-kuo to restore economic order. Ching-kuo copied Soviet methods, which he learned during his stay there, to start a social revolution by attacking middle-class merchants. He also enforced low prices on all goods to raise support from the proletariat.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "As riots broke out and savings were ruined, bankrupting shop owners, Ching-kuo began to attack the wealthy, seizing assets and placing them under arrest. The son of the gangster Du Yuesheng was arrested by him. Ching-kuo ordered KMT agents to raid the Yangtze Development Corporation's warehouses, which was privately owned by H.H. Kung and his family. H.H. Kung's wife was Soong Ai-ling, the sister of Soong Mei-ling who was Ching-kuo's stepmother. H.H. Kung's son David was arrested, the Kung's responded by blackmailing the Chiang's, threatening to release information about them, eventually he was freed after negotiations, and Ching-kuo resigned, ending the terror on the Shanghainese merchants.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "The KMT also promotes government-owned corporations. KMT founder Sun Yat-sen, was heavily influenced by the economic ideas of Henry George, who believed that the rents extracted from natural monopolies or the usage of land belonged to the public. Dr. Sun argued for Georgism and emphasized the importance of a mixed economy, which he termed \"The Principle of Minsheng\" in his Three Principles of the People.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "\"The railroads, public utilities, canals, and forests should be nationalized, and all income from the land and mines should be in the hands of the State. With this money in hand, the State can therefore finance the social welfare programs.\"",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "The KMT Muslim Governor of Ningxia, Ma Hongkui, promoted state-owned monopolies. His government had a company, Fu Ning Company, which had a monopoly over commerce and industry in Ningxia.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Corporations such as CSBC Corporation, Taiwan, CPC Corporation and Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation are owned by the state in the Republic of China.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "Marxists also existed in the KMT. They viewed the Chinese revolution in different terms than the CCP, claiming that China already went past its feudal stage and was in a stagnation period rather than in another mode of production. These Marxists in the KMT opposed the CCP ideology. The Left Kuomintang who disagreed with Chiang Kai-shek formed the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang when the KMT was on the edge of defeat in the civil war and later joined the government of the CCP.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "The KMT used traditional Chinese religious ceremonies. According to the KMT, the souls of party martyrs were sent to heaven. Chiang Kai-shek believed that these martyrs still witnessed events on Earth.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The KMT backed the New Life Movement, which promoted Confucianism, and it was also against westernization. KMT leaders also opposed the May Fourth Movement. Chiang Kai-shek, as a nationalist, and Confucianist, was against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. He viewed some western ideas as foreign, as a Chinese nationalist, and that the introduction of western ideas and literature that the May Fourth Movement wanted was not welcome. He and Sun Yat-sen criticized these May Fourth intellectuals for corrupting morals of youth.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "The KMT also incorporated Confucianism in its jurisprudence. It pardoned Shi Jianqiao for murdering Sun Chuanfang, because she did it in revenge since Sun executed her father Shi Congbin, which was an example of filial piety to one's parents in Confucianism. The KMT encouraged filial revenge killings and extended pardons to those who performed them.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "In response to the Cultural Revolution, Chiang Kai-shek promoted a Chinese Cultural Renaissance movement which followed in the steps of the New Life Movement, promoting Confucian values.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "The KMT purged China's education system of Western ideas, introducing Confucianism into the curriculum. Education came under the total control of the state, which meant, in effect, the KMT, via the Ministry of Education. Military and political classes on KMT's Three Principles of the People were added. Textbooks, exams, degrees and educational instructors were all controlled by the state, as were all universities.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Chiang Ching-kuo, appointed as KMT director of Secret Police in 1950, was educated in the Soviet Union, and initiated Soviet style military organization in the Republic of China Armed Forces, reorganizing and Sovietizing the political officer corps, surveillance, and KMT activities were propagated throughout the whole of the armed forces. Opposed to this was Sun Li-jen, who was educated at the American Virginia Military Institute. Chiang Ching-kuo then arrested Sun Li-jen, charging him of conspiring with the American CIA of plotting to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT, Sun was placed under house arrest in 1955.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Kuomintang, also known as the Chinese Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek, was ruling China and strongly opposed the Chinese Communist Party as it was funded and militarily backed by the COMINTERN (Soviet Union) and pursuing a communist revolution to overthrow the Republic of China . On 12 April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek purged the communists in what was known as the Shanghai massacre which led to the Chinese Civil War. The Chinese Nationalist government then led 5 military campaigns in order to wipe out Chinese Soviet Republic, a Soviet-puppet state established by the Chinese Communist Party. Initially, the Kuomintang was successful, eventually forcing the Chinese Communist Party to escape on a long march until a full-scale invasion of China by Japan forced both the Nationalists and the Communists into an alliance. After the war, the two parties were thrown back into a civil war. The Kuomintang were defeated in the mainland and escaped in exile to Taiwan while the rest of mainland China became Communist in 1949.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "Former KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek considered all the minority peoples of China as descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the semi-mythical initiator of the Chinese civilization. Chiang considered all ethnic minorities in China to belong to the Zhonghua minzu (Chinese nation) and he introduced this into KMT ideology, which was propagated into the educational system of the Republic of China, and the Constitution of the ROC considered Chiang's ideology to be true. In Taiwan, the president performs a ritual honoring the Yellow Emperor, while facing west, in the direction of the Chinese mainland.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The KMT retained the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission for dealing with Mongolian and Tibetan affairs. A Muslim, Ma Fuxiang, was appointed as its chairman.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "The KMT was known for sponsoring Muslim students to study abroad at Muslim universities like Al-Azhar University and it established schools especially for Muslims, Muslim KMT warlords like Ma Fuxiang promoted education for Muslims. KMT Muslim Warlord Ma Bufang built a girls' school for Muslim girls in Linxia City which taught modern secular education.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Tibetans and Mongols refused to allow other ethnic groups like Kazakhs to participate in the Kokonur ceremony in Qinghai, but KMT Muslim General Ma Bufang allowed them to participate.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "Chinese Muslims were among the most hardline KMT members. Ma Chengxiang was a Muslim KMT member, and he refused to surrender to the Communists.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "The KMT incited anti-Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang sentiments among Hui people and Mongols, encouraging for them to topple their rule during the Central Plains War.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Masud Sabri, a Uyghur was appointed as Governor of Xinjiang by the KMT, as was the Tatar Burhan Shahidi and the Uyghur Yulbars Khan.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "The Muslim General Ma Bufang also put KMT symbols on his mansion, the Ma Bufang Mansion along with a portrait of party founder Sun Yatsen arranged with the KMT flag and the Republic of China flag.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "General Ma Bufang and other high ranking Muslim Generals attended the Kokonuur Lake Ceremony where the God of the Lake was worshipped, and during the ritual, the Chinese national anthem was sung, all participants bowed to a Portrait of KMT founder Sun Yat-sen, and the God of the Lake was also bowed to, and offerings were given to him by the participants, which included the Muslims. This cult of personality around the KMT leader and the KMT was standard in all meetings. Sun Yat-sen's portrait was bowed to three times by KMT party members. Sun's portrait was arranged with two flags crossed under, the KMT flag and the flag of the Republic of China.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The KMT also hosted conferences of important Muslims like Bai Chongxi, Ma Fuxiang, and Ma Liang. Ma Bufang stressed \"racial harmony\" as a goal when he was Governor of Qinghai.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "In 1939, Isa Yusuf Alptekin and Ma Fuliang were sent on a mission by the KMT to the Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Turkey and Syria to gain support for the Chinese War against Japan, they also visited Afghanistan in 1940 and contacted Muhammad Amin Bughra, they asked him to come to Chongqing, the capital of the Nationalist Government. Bughra was arrested by the British government in 1942 for spying, and the KMT arranged for Bughra's release. He and Isa Yusuf worked as editors of KMT Muslim publications. Ma Tianying (馬天英) (1900–1982) led the 1939 mission which had 5 other people including Isa and Fuliang.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "The KMT claims sovereignty over Outer Mongolia and Tuva as well as the territories of the modern People's Republic and Republic of China.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "KMT Muslim General Ma Bufang waged war on the invading Tibetans during the Sino-Tibetan War with his Muslim army, and he repeatedly crushed Tibetan revolts during bloody battles in Qinghai provinces. Ma Bufang was fully supported by President Chiang Kai-shek, who ordered him to prepare his Muslim army to invade Tibet several times and threatened aerial bombardment on the Tibetans. With support from the KMT, Ma Bufang repeatedly attacked the Tibetan area of Golog seven times during the KMT Pacification of Qinghai, eliminating thousands of Tibetans.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "General Ma Fuxiang, the chairman of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission stated that Mongolia and Tibet were an integral part of the Republic of China, arguing:",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Our Party [the Guomindang] takes the development of the weak and small and resistance to the strong and violent as our sole and most urgent task. This is even more true for those groups which are not of our kind [Ch. fei wo zulei zhe]. Now the people of Mongolia and Tibet are closely related to us, and we have great affection for one another: our common existence and common honor already have a history of over a thousand years. [...] Mongolia and Tibet's life and death are China's life and death. China absolutely cannot cause Mongolia and Tibet to break away from China's territory, and Mongolia and Tibet cannot reject China to become independent. At this time, there is not a single nation on earth except China that will sincerely develop Mongolia and Tibet.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "Ma Bufang also crushed Mongol separatist movements, abducting the Genghis Khan Shrine and attacking Tibetan Buddhist Temples like Labrang, and keeping a tight control over them through the Kokonur God ceremony.",
"title": "Ideology in mainland China"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "On 28 February 1947, the Kuomintang cracked down on an anti-government uprising in Taiwan known as the February 28 incident and the government began the White Terror in Taiwan in order to purge communist spies and prevent Chinese communist subversion. While in Taiwan, the Republic of China government under the Kuomintang remained anti-communist and attempted to recover the mainland from the Communist forces. During the Cold War, Taiwan was referred to as Free China while the China on the mainland was known as Red China or Communist China in the West, to mark the ideological difference between the capitalist 'Free World' and the communist nations. The ROC government under the Kuomintang also actively supported anti-communist efforts in Southeast Asia and around the world. This effort did not cease until the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975. The Kuomintang continued to be anti-communist during the period of Chiang Chin-kuo. Contacts between Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party have started since 1990s to re-establish Cross-Strait relations. Even though anti-communism is written under Kuomintang's party charter, the modern Kuomintang is now seen as PRC-friendly.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Sun Yat-sen was not just the founder of the Republic of China, but also the founder of the Kuomintang. Sun Yat-sen's political ideology was based on building a free and democratic China founded on Three Principles of the People, namely Democracy (civil rights of people), people's economic livelihood and nationalism. Although the Kuomintang lost control over mainland China in 1949, the Republic of China under Kuomintang rule was able to achieve the political ideal of a democratic Republic of China on the island of Taiwan based on the Three Principles of the People after its retreat to Taiwan. The Three Principles of the People is not just written in the ROC Constitution, but also in Article 1, 5, 7, 9, 37, 42, 43 of Kuomintang's party charter.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "The Kuomintang advocates a free and democratic China under the Republic of China founded on Three Principles of the People. In fact, during the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo advocated Grand Alliance for China's Reunification under the Three Principles of the People. Since then, a democracy promotion banner for Grand Alliance for China's Reunification under the Three Principles of the People continues to exist in Kinmen today as a display to mainland China that the Republic of China's unification principle should be based on Chinese democracy. Today, the Kuomintang continues to view the Republic of China as the free, democratic and legitimate China.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "A Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang strongly adheres to the defense of the Republic of China and upholding the Constitution of the Republic of China. It is also strongly opposed to de jure Taiwanese independence (under a theoretical \"Republic of Taiwan\"), which would mean recognizing the People's Republic of China as the legitimate government representing China. It favors closer relations with the PRC and the CCP, though it also opposes Chinese unification under the \"one country, two systems\" framework, and any non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as \"one China\" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "In modern Taiwanese politics, the Kuomintang is seen as a centre-right to right-wing political party. The Kuomintang believes in the values associated with conservatism. The Kuomintang has a strong tradition of defending the established institutions of the Republic of China, such as defending Constitution of the Republic of China, defending the five branches of government (modeled on Sun Yat-sen's political philosophy of Three Principles of the People), espousing the One-China policy as a vital component for the Republic of China (ROC)'s international security and economic development, as opposed to Taiwanization. The Kuomintang claims to have a strong tradition of fighting to defend, preserve and revive traditional Chinese culture and religious freedom as well as advocating for Confucian values, economic liberalism and anti-communism. The KMT still sees the Republic of China in Taiwan as presenting the true cultural China which has preserved Chinese culture, as compared to the People's Republic of China which had experienced Chinese cultural destruction during the Cultural Revolution.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Some Kuomintang conservatives see traditional social or family values as being threatened by liberal values and oppose same-sex marriage. KMT conservatives are also typically against the abolishment of capital punishment, arguing the need to maintain deterrence against harsh crimes. Conservative KMT policies may also be characterized by a focus on maintaining the traditions and doctrine of Confucian thought, namely reinforcing the morals of paternalism and patriarchy in Taiwan's society. In terms of education policy, KMT policies advocate increasing more Classical Chinese content in Chinese education and Chinese history content in order to reinforce Chinese cultural identity, as opposed to de-sinicization attempts by advocates of Taiwan independence who typically decrease Classical Chinese and Chinese history content in schools in order to achieve Taiwanization.",
"title": "Ideology in Taiwan"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "The Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) was initially pro-ROC and mainly consisted of KMT members who joined as an alternative and were also in opposition to the Malayan Communist Party, supporting the KMT in China by funding them with the intention of reclaiming the Chinese mainland from the communists.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "The Tibet Improvement Party was founded by Pandatsang Rapga, a pro-ROC and pro-KMT Khampa revolutionary, who worked against the 14th Dalai Lama's Tibetan Government in Lhasa. Rapga borrowed Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People doctrine and translated his political theories into the Tibetan language, hailing it as the best hope for Asian peoples against imperialism. Rapga stated that \"the Sanmin Zhuyi was intended for all peoples under the domination of foreigners, for all those who had been deprived of the rights of man. But it was conceived especially for the Asians. It is for this reason that I translated it. At that time, a lot of new ideas were spreading in Tibet,\" during an interview in 1975 by Dr. Heather Stoddard. He wanted to destroy the feudal government in Lhasa, in addition to modernizing and secularizing Tibetan society. The ultimate goal of the party was the overthrow of the Dalai Lama's regime, and the creation of a Tibetan Republic which would be an autonomous Republic within the ROC. Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT funded the party and their efforts to build an army to battle the Dalai Lama's government. The KMT was extensively involved in the Kham region, recruiting the Khampa people to both oppose the Dalai Lama's Tibetan government, fight the Communist Red Army, and crush the influence of local Chinese warlords who did not obey the central government.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "The KMT assisted the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng party which translates literally into Chinese (越南國民黨; Yuènán Guómíndǎng) as the Vietnamese Nationalist Party. When it was established, it was based on the Chinese KMT and was pro Chinese. The Chinese KMT helped the party, known as the VNQDD, set up headquarters in Canton and Yunnan, to aid their anti-imperialist struggle against the French occupiers of Indochina and against the Vietnamese Communist Party. It was the first revolutionary nationalist party to be established in Vietnam, before the communist party. The KMT assisted VNQDD with funds and military training.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "The VNQDD was founded with KMT aid in 1925, they were against Ho Chi Minh's Viet Nam Revolutionary Youth League. When the VNQDD fled to China after the failed uprising against the French, they settled in Yunnan and Canton, in two different branches. The VNQDD existed as a party in exile in China for 15 years, receiving help, militarily and financially, and organizationally from the Chinese KMT. The two VNQDD parties merged into a single organization, the Canton branch removed the word \"revolutionary\" from the party name. Lu Han, a KMT official in Nanjing, who was originally from Yunnan, was contacted by the VNQDD, and the KMT Central Executive Committee and Military made direct contact with VNQDD for the first time, the party was reestablished in Nanjing with KMT help.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "The Chinese KMT used the VNQDD for its own interests in south China and Indo China. General Zhang Fakui (Chang Fa-kuei), who based himself in Guangxi, established the Việt Nam Cách mệnh Đồng minh Hội meaning \"Viet Nam Revolutionary League\" in 1942, which was assisted by the VNQDD to serve the KMT's aims. The Chinese Yunnan provincial army, under the KMT, occupied northern Vietnam after the Japanese surrender in 1945, the VNQDD tagging alone, opposing Ho Chi Minh's communist party. The Viet Nam Revolutionary League was a union of various Vietnamese nationalist groups, run by the pro Chinese VNQDD. Its stated goal was for unity with China under the Three Principles of the People, created by KMT founder Dr. Sun and opposition to Japanese and French Imperialists. The Revolutionary League was controlled by Nguyễn Hải Thần. General Zhang shrewdly blocked the Communists of Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh from entering the league, as his main goal was Chinese influence in Indo China. The KMT utilized these Vietnamese nationalists during World War II against Japanese forces.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "A KMT left-winger, General Chang Fa-kuei, worked with Nguyễn Hải Thần, a VNQDD member, against French Imperialists and Communists in Indo China. General Chang Fa-kuei planned to lead a Chinese army invasion of Tonkin in Indochina to free Vietnam from French control, and to get Chiang Kai-shek's support. The VNQDD opposed the government of Ngo Dinh Diem during the Vietnam War.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "The party dissolved after the Fall of Saigon in 1977 and was later re-founded in 1991 as the People's Action Party of Vietnam (Đảng Nhân dân Hành động Việt Nam).",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "On 30 November 1958, the establishment of the Ryukyu Guomindang took place. Tsugumasa Kiyuna headed its predecessor party, the Ryukyuan separatist Ryukyu Revolutionary Party which was backed by the Kuomintang in Taiwan.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "The pro-ROC camp is a political alignment in Hong Kong. It pledges allegiance to the Republic of China. One of these members, the 123 Democratic Alliance, dissolved in 2000 due to the lack of financial support from the Taiwanese government after the 2000 presidential election.",
"title": "Parties affiliated with the Kuomintang"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "Ma Fuxiang founded Islamic organizations sponsored by the KMT, including the China Islamic Association (中國回教公會).",
"title": "Sponsored organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "KMT Muslim General Bai Chongxi was Chairman of the Chinese Islamic National Salvation Federation. The Muslim Chengda school and Yuehua publication were supported by the Nationalist Government, and they supported the KMT.",
"title": "Sponsored organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "The Chinese Muslim Association was also sponsored by the KMT, and it evacuated from the mainland to Taiwan with the party. The Chinese Muslim Association owns the Taipei Grand Mosque which was built with funds from the KMT.",
"title": "Sponsored organizations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "The Yihewani (Ikhwan al Muslimun a.k.a. Muslim brotherhood) was the predominant Muslim sect backed by the KMT. Other Muslim sects, like the Xidaotang were also supported by the KMT. The Chinese Muslim brotherhood became a Chinese nationalist organization and supported KMT rule. Brotherhood Imams like Hu Songshan ordered Muslims to pray for the Nationalist Government, salute KMT flags during prayer, and listen to nationalist sermons.",
"title": "Sponsored organizations"
}
] |
The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially based on the Chinese mainland and then in Taiwan since 1949. It was the sole ruling party in China during the Republican Era from 1928 to 1949, when most of the Chinese mainland was under its control. The party retreated from the mainland to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Chiang Kai-shek declared martial law and retained his authoritarian rule over Taiwan under the Dang Guo system until democratic reforms were enacted in the 1980s and full democratization in the 1990s. In Taiwanese politics today, the KMT is a centre-right to right-wing party and is the largest party in the Pan-Blue Coalition. The KMT's primary rival in elections is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its allies in the Pan-Green Coalition. As of 2023, the KMT is the largest opposition party in the Legislative Yuan. The current chairman is Eric Chu. The party originated as the Revive China Society, founded by Sun Yat-sen on 24 November 1894 in Honolulu. From there, the party underwent major reorganization changes that occurred before and after the Xinhai Revolution, which resulted in the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Provisional Republic Government, with Sun as the first president of the Republic. In 1919, Sun re-established the party under the name "Kuomintang" in the Shanghai French Concession. From 1926 to 1928, the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek successfully led the Northern Expedition against regional warlords and unified the fragmented nation. From 1937 to 1945, the KMT-ruled Nationalist government led China through the Second Sino-Japanese War against Japan. By 1949, the KMT was decisively defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Chinese Civil War and withdrew the ROC government to Taiwan, a former Qing territory annexed by the Empire of Japan from 1895 to 1945. From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled Taiwan as an authoritarian one-party state after the February 28 incident. During this period, martial law was in effect and civil liberties were curtailed under the guise of anti-communism, with the period being known as the White Terror. The party oversaw Taiwan's economic development, but also experienced diplomatic setbacks, including the ROC losing its United Nations seat and most of the world including its ally the United States switching diplomatic recognition to the CCP-led People's Republic of China (PRC) in the 1970s. In the late 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son and the next KMT leader in turn, lifted martial law and the ban of opposition parties. His successor Lee Teng-hui continued pursuing democratic reforms and constitutional amendments and was re-elected in 1996 through a direct presidential election, the first time in the ROC history. The 2000 presidential election put an end to 72 years of the KMT's political dominance in the ROC. The KMT reclaimed power from 2008 to 2016, with the landslide victory of Ma Ying-jeou in the 2008 presidential election, whose presidency significantly loosened restrictions placed on cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges. The KMT again lost the presidency and its legislative majority in the 2016 election, returning to the opposition. The KMT is a member of the International Democracy Union. The party's guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, advocated by Sun Yat-sen and historically organized on a basis of democratic centralism, a principle conceived by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin that entailed open discussion of policy on the condition of unity among party members in upholding the agreed-upon decisions. The KMT opposes de jure Taiwan independence, Chinese unification under the "one country, two systems" framework, and any non-peaceful means to resolve the cross-strait disputes. Originally placing high priority on reclaiming the Chinese mainland through Project National Glory, the KMT now favors a closer relation with the PRC and seeks to maintain Taiwan's status quo under the Constitution of the Republic of China. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.
|
2001-10-23T09:30:32Z
|
2023-12-31T15:39:21Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuomintang
|
16,904 |
KMT (disambiguation)
|
KMT often refers to Kuomintang, a political party in Republic of China (Taiwan).
KMT or kmt may also refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "KMT often refers to Kuomintang, a political party in Republic of China (Taiwan).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "KMT or kmt may also refer to:",
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}
] |
KMT often refers to Kuomintang, a political party in Republic of China (Taiwan). KMT or kmt may also refer to: "KMT" (song), a 2017 song by Drake
Kmt (magazine), a magazine on ancient Egypt
kilometre-tonne or kmt, a unit of payload-distance
King in Council (Sweden) or K.M:t, a term of constitutional importance that was used in Sweden before 1975 when the 1974 Instrument of Government came into force
km.t, a name for ancient Egypt using the hieroglyph Km
Kartu multi-trip (KMT). Card for KRL Commuterline
Kinetic Molecular Theory, or the kinetic theory of gases
|
2023-04-11T07:45:50Z
|
[
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"Template:Disambiguation"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KMT_(disambiguation)
|
|
16,905 |
Kabbalah
|
Kabbalah or Qabalah (/kəˈbɑːlə, ˈkæbələ/ kə-BAH-lə, KAB-ə-lə; Hebrew: קַבָּלָה, romanized: Qabbālā, lit. 'reception, tradition') is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal (מְקוּבָּל, Məqūbbāl, 'receiver'). The definition of Kabbalah varies according to the tradition and aims of those following it, from its origin in medieval Judaism to its later adaptations in Western esotericism (Christian Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah). Jewish Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between the unchanging, eternal God—the mysterious Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף, "The Infinite")—and the mortal, finite universe (God's creation). It forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism.
Jewish Kabbalists originally developed their own transmission of sacred texts within the realm of Jewish tradition and often use classical Jewish scriptures to explain and demonstrate its mystical teachings. These teachings are held by Kabbalists to define the inner meaning of both the Hebrew Bible and traditional rabbinic literature and their formerly concealed transmitted dimension, as well as to explain the significance of Jewish religious observances.
Traditional practitioners believe its earliest origins pre-date world religions, forming the primordial blueprint for Creation's philosophies, religions, sciences, arts, and political systems. Historically, Kabbalah emerged from earlier forms of Jewish mysticism, in 12th- to 13th-century Spain and Southern France, and was reinterpreted during the Jewish mystical renaissance in 16th-century Ottoman Palestine. The Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah, was composed in the late 13th century. Isaac Luria (16th century) is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah; Lurianic Kabbalah was popularised in the form of Hasidic Judaism from the 18th century onwards. During the 20th century, academic interest in Kabbalistic texts led primarily by the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem has inspired the development of historical research on Kabbalah in the field of Judaic studies.
Though innumerable glosses, marginalia, commentaries, precedent works, satellite texts and other minor works contribute to an understanding of the Kabbalah as an evolving tradition, the major texts in the main line of Jewish mysticism that inarguably fall under the heading 'Kabbalah' are the Bahir, Zohar, Pardes Rimonim, and Etz Chayim ('Ein Sof'). The early Hekhalot writings are acknowledged as ancestral to the sensibilities of Kabbalah and the Sefer Yetzirah--a brief document of only few pages written centuries before the high and late medieval works, detailing an alphanumeric vision of cosmology--may be understood as a kind of prelude to the canon of Kabbalah.
According to the Zohar, a foundational text for kabbalistic thought, Torah study can proceed along four levels of interpretation (exegesis). These four levels are called pardes from their initial letters (PRDS Hebrew: פַּרדֵס, orchard).
Kabbalah is considered by its followers as a necessary part of the study of Torah – the study of Torah (the Tanakh and rabbinic literature) being an inherent duty of observant Jews.
Modern academic-historical study of Jewish mysticism reserves the term "kabbalah" to designate the particular, distinctive doctrines that textually emerged fully expressed in the Middle Ages, as distinct from the earlier Merkabah mystical concepts and methods. According to this descriptive categorization, both versions of Kabbalistic theory, the medieval-Zoharic and the early-modern Lurianic Kabbalah together comprise the Theosophical tradition in Kabbalah, while the Meditative-Ecstatic Kabbalah incorporates a parallel inter-related Medieval tradition. A third tradition, related but more shunned, involves the magical aims of Practical Kabbalah. Moshe Idel, for example, writes that these 3 basic models can be discerned operating and competing throughout the whole history of Jewish mysticism, beyond the particular Kabbalistic background of the Middle Ages. They can be readily distinguished by their basic intent with respect to God:
According to Kabbalistic belief, early kabbalistic knowledge was transmitted orally by the Patriarchs, prophets, and sages, eventually to be "interwoven" into Jewish religious writings and culture. According to this view, early kabbalah was, in around the 10th century BCE, an open knowledge practiced by over a million people in ancient Israel. Foreign conquests drove the Jewish spiritual leadership of the time (the Sanhedrin) to hide the knowledge and make it secret, fearing that it might be misused if it fell into the wrong hands.
It is hard to clarify with any degree of certainty the exact concepts within kabbalah. There are several different schools of thought with very different outlooks; however, all are accepted as correct. Modern halakhic authorities have tried to narrow the scope and diversity within kabbalah, by restricting study to certain texts, notably Zohar and the teachings of Isaac Luria as passed down through Hayyim ben Joseph Vital. However, even this qualification does little to limit the scope of understanding and expression, as included in those works are commentaries on Abulafian writings, Sefer Yetzirah, Albotonian writings, and the Berit Menuhah, which is known to the kabbalistic elect and which, as described more recently by Gershom Scholem, combined ecstatic with theosophical mysticism. It is therefore important to bear in mind when discussing things such as the sephirot and their interactions that one is dealing with highly abstract concepts that at best can only be understood intuitively.
From the Renaissance onwards Jewish Kabbalah texts entered non-Jewish culture, where they were studied and translated by Christian Hebraists and Hermetic occultists. The syncretic traditions of Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah developed independently of Judaic Kabbalah, reading the Jewish texts as universalist ancient wisdom preserved from the Gnostic traditions of antiquity. Both adapted the Jewish concepts freely from their Jewish understanding, to merge with multiple other theologies, religious traditions and magical associations. With the decline of Christian Cabala in the Age of Reason, Hermetic Qabalah continued as a central underground tradition in Western esotericism. Through these non-Jewish associations with magic, alchemy and divination, Kabbalah acquired some popular occult connotations forbidden within Judaism, where Jewish theurgic Practical Kabbalah was a minor, permitted tradition restricted for a few elite. Today, many publications on Kabbalah belong to the non-Jewish New Age and occult traditions of Cabala, rather than giving an accurate picture of Judaic Kabbalah. Instead, academic and traditional Jewish publications now translate and study Judaic Kabbalah for wide readership.
According to the traditional Kabbalistic understanding, Kabbalah dates from Eden. It came down from a remote past as a revelation to elect tzadikim (righteous people), and, for the most part, was preserved only by a privileged few. Talmudic Judaism records its view of the proper protocol for teaching secrets in the Talmud, Tractate Hagigah, 11b-13a, "One should not teach . . . the work of Creation in pairs, nor the work of the Chariot to an individual, unless he is wise and can understand the implications himself etc."
Contemporary scholarship suggests that various schools of Jewish esotericism arose at different periods of Jewish history, each reflecting not only prior forms of mysticism, but also the intellectual and cultural milieu of that historical period. Answers to questions of transmission, lineage, influence, and innovation vary greatly and cannot be easily summarised.
Originally, Kabbalistic knowledge was believed to be an integral part of the Oral Torah, given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai around the 13th century BCE according to its followers; although some believe that Kabbalah began with Adam.
For a few centuries the esoteric knowledge was referred to by its aspect practice—meditation Hitbonenut (Hebrew: הִתְבּוֹנְנוּת), Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's Hitbodedut (Hebrew: הִתְבּוֹדְדוּת), translated as "being alone" or "isolating oneself", or by a different term describing the actual, desired goal of the practice—prophecy ("NeVu'a" Hebrew: נְבוּאָה). Kabbalistic scholar Aryeh Kaplan traces the origins of medieval Kabbalistic meditative methods to their inheritance from orally transmitted remnants of the Biblical Prophetic tradition, and reconstructs their terminology and speculated techniques.
From the 5th century BCE, when the works of the Tanakh were edited and canonised and the secret knowledge encrypted within the various writings and scrolls ("Megilot"), esoteric knowledge became referred to as Ma'aseh Merkavah (Hebrew: מַעֲשֶׂה מֶרְכָּבָה) and Ma'aseh B'reshit (Hebrew: מַעֲשֶׂה בְּרֵאשִׁית), respectively "the act of the Chariot" and "the act of Creation". Merkabah mysticism alluded to the encrypted knowledge, and meditation methods within the book of the prophet Ezekiel describing his vision of the "Divine Chariot". B'reshit mysticism referred to the first chapter of Genesis (Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית) in the Torah that is believed to contain secrets of the creation of the universe and forces of nature. These terms received their later historical documentation and description in the second chapter of the Talmudic tractate Hagigah from the early centuries CE.
Confidence in new Prophetic revelation closed after the Biblical return from Babylon in Second Temple Judaism, shifting to canonisation and exegesis of Scripture after Ezra the Scribe. Lesser level prophecy of Ruach Hakodesh remained, with angelic revelations, esoteric heavenly secrets, and eschatological deliverance from Greek and Roman oppression of Apocalyptic literature among early Jewish proto-mystical circles, such as the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls community of Qumran. Early Jewish mystical literature inherited the developing concerns and remnants of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Judaisms.
When read by later generations of Kabbalists, the Torah's description of the creation in the Book of Genesis reveals mysteries about God himself, the true nature of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden (Hebrew: גַּן עֵדֶן), the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Hebrew: עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וְרַע), and the Tree of Life (Hebrew: עֵץ החַיִּים), as well as the interaction of these supernatural entities with the Serpent (Hebrew: נָחָשׁ), which leads to disaster when they eat the forbidden fruit (Hebrew: פְּרִי עֵץ הַדַּעַת), as recorded in Genesis 3.
The Bible provides ample additional material for mythic and mystical speculation. The prophet Ezekiel's visions in particular attracted much mystical speculation, as did Isaiah's Temple vision. Other mystical events include Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven, and Moses' encounters with the Burning bush and God on Mount Sinai.
The 72 letter name of God which is used in Jewish mysticism for meditation purposes is derived from the Hebrew verbal utterance Moses spoke in the presence of an angel, while the Sea of Reeds parted, allowing the Hebrews to escape their approaching attackers. The miracle of the Exodus, which led to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and the Jewish Orthodox view of the acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai, preceded the creation of the first Jewish nation approximately three hundred years before King Saul.
In early Rabbinic Judaism (the early centuries of the 1st millennium CE), the terms Ma'aseh Bereshit ("Works of Creation") and Ma'aseh Merkabah ("Works of the Divine Throne/Chariot") clearly indicate the Midrashic nature of these speculations; they are really based upon Genesis 1 and Ezekiel 1:4–28, while the names Sitrei Torah (Hidden aspects of the Torah) (Talmud Hag. 13a) and Razei Torah (Torah secrets) (Ab. vi. 1) indicate their character as secret lore.
Talmudic doctrine forbade the public teaching of esoteric doctrines and warned of their dangers. In the Mishnah (Hagigah 2:1), rabbis were warned to teach the mystical creation doctrines only to one student at a time. To highlight the danger, in one Jewish aggadic ("legendary") anecdote, four prominent rabbis of the Mishnaic period (1st century CE) are said to have visited the Orchard (that is, Paradise, pardes, Hebrew: פרדס lit., orchard):
Four men entered pardes—Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher (Elisha ben Abuyah), and Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma looked and went mad; Acher destroyed the plants; Akiba entered in peace and departed in peace.
In notable readings of this legend, only Rabbi Akiba was fit to handle the study of mystical doctrines. The Tosafot, medieval commentaries on the Talmud, say that the four sages "did not go up literally, but it appeared to them as if they went up". On the other hand, Louis Ginzberg, writes in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) that the journey to paradise "is to be taken literally and not allegorically".
In contrast to the Kabbalists, Maimonides interprets pardes as philosophy and not mysticism.
The mystical methods and doctrines of Hekhalot (Heavenly "Chambers") and Merkabah (Divine "Chariot") texts, named by modern scholars from these repeated motifs, lasted from the 1st century BCE through to the 10th century CE, before giving way to the documented manuscript emergence of Kabbalah. Initiates were said to "descend the chariot", possibly a reference to internal introspection on the Heavenly journey through the spiritual realms. The ultimate aim was to arrive before the transcendent awe, rather than nearness, of the Divine. The mystical protagonists of the texts are famous Talmudic Sages of Rabbinic Judaism, either pseudepigraphic or documenting remnants of a developed tradition. From the 8th to 11th centuries, the Hekhalot texts, and the proto-Kabbalistic early cosmogonic Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Creation") made their way into European Jewish circles. A controversial esoteric work from associated literature describing a cosmic Anthropos, Shi'ur Qomah, was interpreted allegorically by subsequent Kabbalists in their meditation on the Sephirot Divine Persona.
Another, separate influential mystical, theosophical, and pious movement, shortly before the arrival there of Kabbalistic theory, was the "Hasidei Ashkenaz" (חסידי אשכנז) or Medieval German Pietists from 1150 to 1250. This ethical-ascetic movement with elite theoretical and Practical Kabbalah speculations arose mostly among a single scholarly family, the Kalonymus family of the French and German Rhineland. Its Jewish ethics of saintly self-sacrifice influenced Ashkenazi Jewry, Musar literature and later emphases of piety in Judaism.
Modern scholars have identified several mystical brotherhoods that functioned in Europe starting in the 12th century. Some, such as the "Iyyun Circle" and the "Unique Cherub Circle", were truly esoteric, remaining largely anonymous. The first documented historical emergence of Theosophical Kabbalistic doctrine occurred among Jewish Sages of Provence and Languedoc in southern France in the latter 1100s, with the appearance or consolidation of the mysterious work the Bahir (Book of "Brightness"), a midrash describing God's sephirot attributes as a dynamic interacting hypostatic drama in the Divine realm, and the school of Isaac the Blind (1160–1235) among critics of the rationalist influence of Maimonides. From there Kabbalah spread to Catalonia in north-east Spain around the central Rabbinic figure of Nahmanides (the Ramban) (1194–1270) in the early 1200s, with a Neoplatonic orientation focused on the upper sephirot. Subsequently, Kabbalistic doctrine reached its fullest classic expression among Castilian Kabbalists from the latter 1200s, with the Zohar (Book of "Splendor") literature, concerned with cosmic healing of gnostic dualities between the lower, revealed male and female attributes of God.
Rishonim ("Elder Sages") of exoteric Judaism who were deeply involved in Kabbalistic activity, gave the Kabbalah wide scholarly acceptance, including Nahmanides and Bahya ben Asher (Rabbeinu Behaye) (died 1340), whose classic commentaries on the Torah reference Kabbalistic esotericism.
Many Orthodox Jews reject the idea that Kabbalah underwent significant historical development or change such as has been proposed above. After the composition known as the Zohar was presented to the public in the 13th century, the term "Kabbalah" began to refer more specifically to teachings derived from, or related to, the Zohar. At an even later time, the term began to generally be applied to Zoharic teachings as elaborated upon by Isaac Luria (the Arizal). Historians generally date the start of Kabbalah as a major influence in Jewish thought and practice with the publication of the Zohar and climaxing with the spread of the Lurianic teachings. The majority of Haredi Jews accept the Zohar as the representative of the Ma'aseh Merkavah and Ma'aseh B'reshit that are referred to in Talmudic texts.
Contemporary with the Zoharic efflorescence of Spanish Theosophical-Theurgic Kabbalah, Spanish exilarch Abraham Abulafia developed his own alternative, Maimonidean system of Ecstatic-Prophetic Kabbalah meditation, each consolidating aspects of a claimed inherited mystical tradition from Biblical times. This was the classic time when various different interpretations of an esoteric meaning to Torah were articulated among Jewish thinkers. Abulafia interpreted Theosophical Kabbalah's Sephirot Divine attributes, not as supernal hypostases which he opposed, but in psychological terms. Instead of influencing harmony in the divine real by theurgy, his meditative scheme aimed for mystical union with God, drawing down prophetic influx on the individual. He saw this meditation using Divine Names as a superior form of Kabbalistic ancient tradition. His version of Kabbalah, followed in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, remained a marginal stream to mainstream Theosophical Kabbalah development. Abulafian elements were later incorporated into the 16th century theosophical Kabbalistic systemisations of Moses Cordovero and Hayim Vital. Through them, later Hasidic Judaism incorporated elements of unio mystica and psychological focus from Abulafia.
Following the upheavals and dislocations in the Jewish world as a result of anti-Judaism during the Middle Ages, and the national trauma of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, closing the Spanish Jewish flowering, Jews began to search for signs of when the long-awaited Jewish Messiah would come to comfort them in their painful exiles. In the 16th century, the community of Safed in the Galilee became the centre of Jewish mystical, exegetical, legal and liturgical developments. The Safed mystics responded to the Spanish expulsion by turning Kabbalistic doctrine and practice towards a messianic focus. Moses Cordovero (The RAMAK 1522–1570) and his school popularized the teachings of the Zohar which had until then been only a restricted work. Cordovero's comprehensive works achieved the first (quasi-rationalistic) of Theosophical Kabbalah's two systemisations, harmonising preceding interpretations of the Zohar on its own apparent terms. The author of the Shulkhan Arukh (the normative Jewish "Code of Law"), Yosef Karo (1488–1575), was also a scholar of Kabbalah who kept a personal mystical diary. Moshe Alshich wrote a mystical commentary on the Torah, and Shlomo Alkabetz wrote Kabbalistic commentaries and poems.
The messianism of the Safed mystics culminated in Kabbalah receiving its biggest transformation in the Jewish world with the explication of its new interpretation from Isaac Luria (The ARI 1534–1572), by his disciples Hayim Vital and Israel Sarug. Both transcribed Luria's teachings (in variant forms) gaining them widespread popularity, Sarug taking Lurianic Kabbalah to Europe, Vital authoring the latterly canonical version. Luria's teachings came to rival the influence of the Zohar and Luria stands, alongside Moses de Leon, as the most influential mystic in Jewish history. Lurianic Kabbalah gave Theosophical Kabbalah its second, complete (supra-rational) of two systemisations, reading the Zohar in light of its most esoteric sections (the Idrot), replacing the broken Sephirot attributes of God with rectified Partzufim (Divine Personas), embracing reincarnation, repair, and the urgency of cosmic Jewish messianism dependent on each person's soul tasks.
From the European Renaissance on, Judaic Kabbalah became a significant influence in non-Jewish culture, fully divorced from the separately evolving Judaic tradition. Kabbalah received the interest of Christian Hebraist scholars and occultists, who freely syncretised and adapted it to diverse non-Jewish spiritual traditions and belief systems of Western esotericism. Christian Cabalists from the 15th-18th centuries adapted what they saw as ancient Biblical wisdom to Christian theology, while Hermeticism lead to Kabbalah's incorporation into Western magic through Hermetic Qabalah. Presentations of Kabbalah in occult and New Age books on Kabbalah bear little resemblance to Judaic Kabbalah.
The Rabbinic ban on studying Kabbalah in Jewish society was lifted by the efforts of the 16th-century kabbalist Avraham Azulai (1570–1643).
I have found it written that all that has been decreed Above forbidding open involvement in the Wisdom of Truth [Kabbalah] was [only meant for] the limited time period until the year 5,250 (1490 C.E.). From then on after is called the "Last Generation", and what was forbidden is [now] allowed. And permission is granted to occupy ourselves in the [study of] Zohar. And from the year 5,300 (1540 C.E.) it is most desirable that the masses both those great and small [in Torah], should occupy themselves [in the study of Kabbalah], as it says in the Raya M'hemna [a section of the Zohar]. And because in this merit King Mashiach will come in the future—and not in any other merit—it is not proper to be discouraged [from the study of Kabbalah].
The question, however, is whether the ban ever existed in the first place. Concerning the above quote by Avraham Azulai, it has found many versions in English, another is this
From the year 1540 and onward, the basic levels of Kabbalah must be taught publicly to everyone, young and old. Only through Kabbalah will we forever eliminate war, destruction, and man's inhumanity to his fellow man.
The lines concerning the year 1490 are also missing from the Hebrew edition of Hesed L'Avraham, the source work that both of these quote from. Furthermore, by Azulai's view the ban was lifted thirty years before his birth, a time that would have corresponded with Haim Vital's publication of the teaching of Isaac Luria. Moshe Isserles understood there to be only a minor restriction, in his words, "One's belly must be full of meat and wine, discerning between the prohibited and the permitted." He is supported by the Bier Hetiv, the Pithei Teshuva as well as the Vilna Gaon. The Vilna Gaon says, "There was never any ban or enactment restricting the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah. Any who says there is has never studied Kabbalah, has never seen PaRDeS, and speaks as an ignoramus."
The Kabbalah of the Sefardi (Iberian Peninsula) and Mizrahi (Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus) Torah scholars has a long history. Kabbalah in various forms was widely studied, commented upon, and expanded by North African, Turkish, Yemenite, and Asian scholars from the 16th century onward. It flourished among Sefardic Jews in Tzfat (Safed), even before the arrival of Isaac Luria. Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Arukh was part of the Tzfat school of Kabbalah. Shlomo Alkabetz, author of the hymn Lekhah Dodi, taught there.
His disciple Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (or Cordoeiro) authored Pardes Rimonim, an organised, exhaustive compilation of kabbalistic teachings on a variety of subjects up to that point. Cordovero headed the academy of Tzfat until his death, when Isaac Luria rose to prominence. Rabbi Moshe's disciple Eliyahu De Vidas authored the classic work, Reishit Chochma, combining kabbalistic and mussar (moral) teachings. Chaim Vital also studied under Cordovero, but with the arrival of Luria became his main disciple. Vital claimed to be the only one authorised to transmit the Ari's teachings, though other disciples also published books presenting Luria's teachings.
The Oriental Kabbalist tradition continues until today among Sephardi and Mizrachi Hakham sages and study circles. Among leading figures were the Yemenite Shalom Sharabi (1720–1777) of the Beit El Synagogue, the Jerusalemite Hida (1724–1806), the Baghdad leader Ben Ish Chai (1832–1909), and the Abuhatzeira dynasty.
One of the most innovative theologians in early-modern Judaism was Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1525–1609) known as the "Maharal of Prague". Many of his written works survive and are studied for their unusual combination of the mystical and philosophical approaches in Judaism. While conversant in Kabbalistic learning, he expresses Jewish mystical thought in his own individual approach without reference to Kabbalistic terms. The Maharal is most well known in popular culture for the legend of the golem of Prague, associated with him in folklore. However, his thought influenced Hasidism, for example being studied in the introspective Przysucha school. During the 20th century, Isaac Hutner (1906–1980) continued to spread the Maharal's works indirectly through his own teachings and publications within the non-Hasidic yeshiva world.
The spiritual and mystical yearnings of many Jews remained frustrated after the death of Isaac Luria and his disciples and colleagues. No hope was in sight for many following the devastation and mass killings of the pogroms that followed in the wake of the Chmielnicki Uprising (1648–1654), the largest single massacre of Jews until the Holocaust, and it was at this time that a controversial scholar by the name of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) captured the hearts and minds of the Jewish masses of that time with the promise of a newly minted messianic Millennialism in the form of his own personage.
His charisma, mystical teachings that included repeated pronunciations of the holy Tetragrammaton in public, tied to an unstable personality, and with the help of his greatest enthusiast, Nathan of Gaza, convinced the Jewish masses that the Jewish Messiah had finally come. It seemed that the esoteric teachings of Kabbalah had found their "champion" and had triumphed, but this era of Jewish history unravelled when Zevi became an apostate to Judaism by converting to Islam after he was arrested by the Ottoman Sultan and threatened with execution for attempting a plan to conquer the world and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Unwilling to give up their messianic expectations, a minority of Zevi's Jewish followers converted to Islam along with him.
Many of his followers, known as Sabbatians, continued to worship him in secret, explaining his conversion not as an effort to save his life but to recover the sparks of the holy in each religion, and most leading rabbis were always on guard to root them out. The Dönmeh movement in modern Turkey is a surviving remnant of the Sabbatian schism. Theologies developed by leaders of Sabbatian movements dealt with antinomian redemption of the realm of impurity through sin, based on Lurianic theory. Moderate views reserved this dangerous task for the divine messiah Sabbatai Zevi alone, while his followers remained observant Jews. Radical forms spoke of the messianic transcendence of Torah, and required Sabbatean followers to emulate him, either in private or publicly.
Due to the chaos caused in the Jewish world, the rabbinic prohibition against studying Kabbalah established itself firmly within the Jewish religion. One of the conditions allowing a man to study and engage himself in the Kabbalah was to be at least forty years old. This age requirement came about during this period and is not Talmudic in origin but rabbinic. Many Jews are familiar with this ruling, but are not aware of its origins. Moreover, the prohibition is not halakhic in nature. According to Moses Cordovero, halakhically, one must be of age twenty to engage in the Kabbalah. Many famous kabbalists, including the ARI, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Yehuda Ashlag, were younger than twenty when they began.
The Sabbatian movement was followed by that of the Frankists, disciples of Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who eventually became an apostate to Judaism by apparently converting to Catholicism. Frank took the Sabbatean impulse to its nihilistic end, declaring himself part of a messianic trinity along with his daughter, and that breaking all of Torah was its fulfilment. This era of disappointment did not stem the Jewish masses' yearnings for "mystical" leadership.
Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–1746), based in Italy, was a precocious Talmudic scholar who deduced a need for the public teaching and study of Kabbalah. He established a yeshiva for Kabbalah study and actively recruited students. He wrote copious manuscripts in an appealing clear Hebrew style, all of which gained the attention of both admirers and rabbinical critics, who feared another "Sabbatai Zevi" (false messiah) in the making. His rabbinical opponents forced him to close his school, hand over and destroy many of his most precious unpublished kabbalistic writings, and go into exile in the Netherlands. He eventually moved to the Land of Israel. Some of his most important works, such as Derekh Hashem, survive and serve as a gateway to the world of Jewish mysticism.
Elijah of Vilna (Vilna Gaon) (1720–1797), based in Lithuania, had his teachings encoded and publicised by his disciples, such as Chaim Volozhin's posthumously published the mystical-ethical work Nefesh HaChaim. He staunchly opposed the new Hasidic movement and warned against their public displays of religious fervour inspired by the mystical teachings of their rabbis. Although the Vilna Gaon did not look with favor on the Hasidic movement, he did not prohibit the study and engagement in the Kabbalah. This is evident from his writings in the Even Shlema. "He that is able to understand secrets of the Torah and does not try to understand them will be judged harshly, may God have mercy". (The Vilna Gaon, Even Shlema, 8:24). "The Redemption will only come about through learning Torah, and the essence of the Redemption depends upon learning Kabbalah" (The Vilna Gaon, Even Shlema, 11:3).
In the Oriental tradition of Kabbalah, Shalom Sharabi (1720–1777) from Yemen was a major esoteric clarifier of the works of the Ari. The Beit El Synagogue, "yeshivah of the kabbalists", which he came to head, was one of the few communities to bring Lurianic meditation into communal prayer.
In the 20th century, Yehuda Ashlag (1885—1954) in Mandate Palestine became a leading esoteric kabbalist in the traditional mode, who translated the Zohar into Hebrew with a new approach in Lurianic Kabbalah.
Yisrael ben Eliezer Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760), founder of Hasidism in the area of Ukraine, spread teachings based on Lurianic Kabbalah, but adapted to a different aim of immediate psychological perception of Divine Omnipresence amidst the mundane. The emotional, ecstatic fervour of early Hasidism developed from previous Nistarim circles of mystical activity, but instead sought communal revival of the common folk by reframing Judaism around the central principle of devekut (mystical cleaving to God) for all. This new approach turned formerly esoteric elite kabbalistic theory into a popular social mysticism movement for the first time, with its own doctrines, classic texts, teachings and customs. From the Baal Shem Tov sprang the wide ongoing schools of Hasidic Judaism, each with different approaches and thought. Hasidism instituted a new concept of Tzadik leadership in Jewish mysticism, where the elite scholars of mystical texts now took on a social role as embodiments and intercessors of Divinity for the masses. With the 19th-century consolidation of the movement, leadership became dynastic.
Among later Hasidic schools Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, revitalised and further expanded the latter's teachings, amassing a following of thousands in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Poland. In a unique amalgam of Hasidic and Mitnaged approaches, Rebbe Nachman emphasised study of both Kabbalah and serious Torah scholarship to his disciples. His teachings also differed from the way other Hasidic groups were developing, as he rejected the idea of hereditary Hasidic dynasties and taught that each Hasid must "search for the tzaddik ('saintly/righteous person')" for himself and within himself.
The Habad-Lubavitch intellectual school of Hasidism broke away from General-Hasidism's emotional faith orientation, by making the mind central as the route to the internal heart. Its texts combine what they view as rational investigation with explanation of Kabbalah through articulating unity in a common Divine essence. In recent times, the messianic element latent in Hasidism has come to the fore in Habad.
The Jewish Haskalah (Hebrew: הַשְׂכָּלָה) enlightenment movement from the late 1700s renewed an ideology of rationalism in Judaism, giving birth to critical Judaic scholarship. It presented Judaism in apologetic terms, stripped of mysticism and myth, in line with Jewish emancipation. Many foundational historians of Judaism such as Heinrich Graetz, criticised Kabbalah as a foreign import that compromised historical Judaism. In the 20th century Gershom Scholem overturned Jewish historiography, presenting the centrality of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah to historical Judaism, and their subterranean life as the true creative renewing spirit of Jewish thought and culture. His influence contributed to the flourishing of Jewish mysticism academia today, its impact on wider intellectual currents, and the contribution of mystical spirituality in modernist Jewish denominations today. Traditionalist Kabbalah and Hasidism, meanwhile, continued outside the academic interest in it.
Jewish mysticism has influenced the thought of some major Jewish theologians, philosophers, writers and thinkers in the 20th century, outside of Kabbalistic or Hasidic traditions. The first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook was a mystical thinker who drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative. Students of Joseph B. Soloveitchik, figurehead of American Modern Orthodox Judaism have read the influence of Kabbalistic symbols in his philosophical works. Neo-Hasidism, rather than Kabbalah, shaped Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Abraham Joshua Heschel's Conservative Judaism. Lurianic symbols of Tzimtzum and Shevirah have informed Holocaust theologians. Gershom Scholem's central academic influence on reshaping Jewish historiography in favour of myth and imagination, made historical arcane Kabbalah of relevance to wide intellectual discourse in the 20th century. Moshe Idel traces the influences of Kabbalistic and Hasidic concepts on diverse thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano, Paul Celan and George Steiner. Harold Bloom has seen Kabbalistic hermeneutics as the paradigm for western literary criticism. Sanford Drob discusses the direct and indirect influence of Kabbalah on the depth psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as modern and postmodern philosophers, in his project to develop new intellectual relevance and open dialogue for kabbalah. The interaction of Kabbalah with modern physics, as with other mystical traditions, has generated its own literature. Traditional Kabbalist Yitzchak Ginsburgh brings esoteric dimensions of advanced kabbalistic symmetry into relationship with mathematics and the sciences, including renaming the elementary particles of Quantum theory with Kabbalistic Hebrew names, and developing kabbalistic approaches to debates in Evolutionary theory.
The nature of the divine prompted kabbalists to envision two aspects to God: (a) God in essence, absolutely transcendent, unknowable, limitless divine simplicity beyond revelation, and (b) God in manifestation, the revealed persona of God through which he creates and sustains and relates to humankind. Kabbalists speak of the first as Ein/Ayn Sof (אין סוף "the infinite/endless", literally "there is no end"). Of the impersonal Ein Sof nothing can be grasped. However, the second aspect of divine emanations, are accessible to human perception, dynamically interacting throughout spiritual and physical existence, reveal the divine immanently, and are bound up in the life of man. Kabbalists believe that these two aspects are not contradictory but complement one another, emanations mystically revealing the concealed mystery from within the Godhead.
As a term describing the Infinite Godhead beyond Creation, Kabbalists viewed the Ein Sof itself as too sublime to be referred to directly in the Torah. It is not a Holy Name in Judaism, as no name could contain a revelation of the Ein Sof. Even terming it "No End" is an inadequate representation of its true nature, the description only bearing its designation in relation to Creation. However, the Torah does narrate God speaking in the first person, most memorably the first word of the Ten Commandments, a reference without any description or name to the simple Divine essence (termed also Atzmus Ein Sof – Essence of the Infinite) beyond even the duality of Infinitude/Finitude. In contrast, the term Ein Sof describes the Godhead as Infinite lifeforce first cause, continuously keeping all Creation in existence. The Zohar reads the first words of Genesis, BeReishit Bara Elohim – In the beginning God created, as "With (the level of) Reishit (Beginning) (the Ein Sof) created Elohim (God's manifestation in creation)":
At the very beginning the King made engravings in the supernal purity. A spark of blackness emerged in the sealed within the sealed, from the mystery of the Ayn Sof, a mist within matter, implanted in a ring, no white, no black, no red, no yellow, no colour at all. When He measured with the standard of measure, He made colours to provide light. Within the spark, in the innermost part, emerged a source, from which the colours are painted below; it is sealed among the sealed things of the mystery of Ayn Sof. It penetrated, yet did not penetrate its air. It was not known at all until, from the pressure of its penetration, a single point shone, sealed, supernal. Beyond this point nothing is known, so it is called reishit (beginning): the first word of all ... "
The structure of emanations has been described in various ways: Sephirot (divine attributes) and Partzufim (divine "faces"), Ohr (spiritual light and flow), Names of God and the supernal Torah, Olamot (Spiritual Worlds), a Divine Tree and Archetypal Man, Angelic Chariot and Palaces, male and female, enclothed layers of reality, inwardly holy vitality and external Kelipot shells, 613 channels ("limbs" of the King) and the divine Souls of Man. These symbols are used to describe various levels and aspects of Divine manifestation, from the Pnimi (inner) dimensions to the Hitzoni (outer). It is solely in relation to the emanations, certainly not the Ein Sof Ground of all Being, that Kabbalah uses anthropomorphic symbolism to relate psychologically to divinity. Kabbalists debated the validity of anthropomorphic symbolism, between its disclosure as mystical allusion, versus its instrumental use as allegorical metaphor; in the language of the Zohar, symbolism "touches yet does not touch" its point.
The Sephirot (also spelled "sefirot"; singular sefirah) are the ten emanations and attributes of God with which he continually sustains the existence of the universe. The Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts elaborate on the emergence of the sephirot from a state of concealed potential in the Ein Sof until their manifestation in the mundane world. In particular, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (known as "the Ramak"), describes how God emanated the myriad details of finite reality out of the absolute unity of Divine light via the ten sephirot, or vessels.
According to Lurianic cosmology, the sephirot correspond to various levels of creation (ten sephirot in each of the Four Worlds, and four worlds within each of the larger four worlds, each containing ten sephirot, which themselves contain ten sephirot, to an infinite number of possibilities), and are emanated from the Creator for the purpose of creating the universe. The sephirot are considered revelations of the Creator's will (ratzon), and they should not be understood as ten different "gods" but as ten different ways the one God reveals his will through the Emanations. It is not God who changes but the ability to perceive God that changes.
Divine creation by means of the Ten Sephirot is an ethical process. They represent the different aspects of Morality. Loving-Kindness is a possible moral justification found in Chessed, and Gevurah is the Moral Justification of Justice and both are mediated by Mercy which is Rachamim. However, these pillars of morality become immoral once they become extremes. When Loving-Kindness becomes extreme it can lead to sexual depravity and lack of Justice to the wicked. When Justice becomes extreme, it can lead to torture and the Murder of innocents and unfair punishment.
"Righteous" humans (tzadikim plural of Tzadik) ascend these ethical qualities of the ten sephirot by doing righteous actions. If there were no righteous humans, the blessings of God would become completely hidden, and creation would cease to exist. While real human actions are the "Foundation" (Yesod) of this universe (Malchut), these actions must accompany the conscious intention of compassion. Compassionate actions are often impossible without faith (Emunah), meaning to trust that God always supports compassionate actions even when God seems hidden. Ultimately, it is necessary to show compassion toward oneself too in order to share compassion toward others. This "selfish" enjoyment of God's blessings but only in order to empower oneself to assist others is an important aspect of "Restriction", and is considered a kind of golden mean in kabbalah, corresponding to the sefirah of Adornment (Tiferet) being part of the "Middle Column".
Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, wrote Tomer Devorah (Palm Tree of Deborah), in which he presents an ethical teaching of Judaism in the kabbalistic context of the ten sephirot. Tomer Devorah has become also a foundational Musar text.
The most esoteric Idrot sections of the classic Zohar make reference to hypostatic male and female Partzufim (Divine Personas) displacing the Sephirot, manifestations of God in particular Anthropomorphic symbolic personalities based on Biblical esoteric exegesis and midrashic narratives. Lurianic Kabbalah places these at the centre of our existence, rather than earlier Kabbalah's Sephirot, which Luria saw as broken in Divine crisis. Contemporary cognitive understanding of the Partzuf symbols relates them to Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious, reflecting a psychologised progression from youth to sage in therapeutic healing back to the infinite Ein Sof/Unconscious, as Kabbalah is simultaneously both theology and psychology.
Medieval Kabbalists believed that all things are linked to God through these emanations, making all levels in creation part of one great, gradually descending chain of being. Through this any lower creation reflects its particular roots in supernal divinity. Kabbalists agreed with the divine transcendence described by Jewish philosophy, but as only referring to the Ein Sof unknowable Godhead. They reinterpreted the theistic philosophical concept of creation from nothing, replacing God's creative act with panentheistic continual self-emanation by the mystical Ayin Nothingness/No-thing sustaining all spiritual and physical realms as successively more corporeal garments, veils and condensations of divine immanence. The innumerable levels of descent divide into Four comprehensive spiritual worlds, Atziluth ("Closeness" – Divine Wisdom), Beriah ("Creation" – Divine Understanding), Yetzirah ("Formation" – Divine Emotions), Assiah ("Action" – Divine Activity), with a preceding Fifth World Adam Kadmon ("Primordial Man" – Divine Will) sometimes excluded due to its sublimity. Together the whole spiritual heavens form the Divine Persona/Anthropos.
Hasidic thought extends the divine immanence of Kabbalah by holding that God is all that really exists, all else being completely undifferentiated from God's perspective. This view can be defined as acosmic monistic panentheism. According to this philosophy, God's existence is higher than anything that this world can express, yet he includes all things of this world within his divine reality in perfect unity, so that the creation effected no change in him at all. This paradox as seen from dual human and divine perspectives is dealt with at length in Chabad texts.
Among problems considered in the Hebrew Kabbalah is the theological issue of the nature and origin of evil. In the views of some Kabbalists this conceives "evil" as a "quality of God", asserting that negativity enters into the essence of the Absolute. In this view it is conceived that the Absolute needs evil to "be what it is", i.e., to exist. Foundational texts of Medieval Kabbalism conceived evil as a demonic parallel to the holy, called the Sitra Achra (the "Other Side"), and the qlippoth (the "shells/husks") that cover and conceal the holy, are nurtured from it, and yet also protect it by limiting its revelation. Scholem termed this element of the Spanish Kabbalah a "Jewish gnostic" motif, in the sense of dual powers in the divine realm of manifestation. In a radical notion, the root of evil is found within the 10 holy Sephirot, through an imbalance of Gevurah, the power of "Strength/Judgement/Severity".
Gevurah is necessary for Creation to exist as it counterposes Chesed ("loving-kindness"), restricting the unlimited divine bounty within suitable vessels, so forming the Worlds. However, if man sins (actualising impure judgement within his soul), the supernal Judgement is reciprocally empowered over the Kindness, introducing disharmony among the Sephirot in the divine realm and exile from God throughout Creation. The demonic realm, though illusory in its holy origin, becomes the real apparent realm of impurity in lower Creation. In the Zohar, the sin of Adam and Eve (who embodied Adam Kadmon below) took place in the spiritual realms. Their sin was that they separated the Tree of knowledge (10 sefirot within Malkuth, representing Divine immanence), from the Tree of life within it (10 sefirot within Tiferet, representing Divine transcendence). This introduced the false perception of duality into lower creation, an external Tree of Death nurtured from holiness, and an Adam Belial of impurity. In Lurianic Kabbalah, evil originates from a primordial shattering of the sephirot of God's Persona before creation of the stable spiritual worlds, mystically represented by the 8 Kings of Edom (the derivative of Gevurah) "who died" before any king reigned in Israel from Genesis 36. In the divine view from above within Kabbalah, emphasised in Hasidic Panentheism, the appearance of duality and pluralism below dissolves into the absolute Monism of God, psychologising evil. Though impure below, what appears as evil derives from a divine blessing too high to be contained openly. The mystical task of the righteous in the Zohar is to reveal this concealed Divine Oneness and absolute good, to "convert bitterness into sweetness, darkness into light".
Kabbalistic doctrine gives man the central role in Creation, as his soul and body correspond to the supernal divine manifestations. In the Christian Kabbalah this scheme was universalised to describe harmonia mundi, the harmony of Creation within man. In Judaism, it gave a profound spiritualisation of Jewish practice. While the kabbalistic scheme gave a radically innovative, though conceptually continuous, development of mainstream Midrashic and Talmudic rabbinic notions, kabbalistic thought underscored and invigorated conservative Jewish observance. The esoteric teachings of kabbalah gave the traditional mitzvot observances the central role in spiritual creation, whether the practitioner was learned in this knowledge or not. Accompanying normative Jewish observance and worship with elite mystical kavanot intentions gave them theurgic power, but sincere observance by common folk, especially in the Hasidic popularisation of kabbalah, could replace esoteric abilities. Many kabbalists were also leading legal figures in Judaism, such as Nachmanides and Joseph Karo.
Medieval kabbalah elaborates particular reasons for each Biblical mitzvah, and their role in harmonising the supernal divine flow, uniting masculine and feminine forces on High. With this, the feminine Divine presence in this world is drawn from exile to the Holy One Above. The 613 mitzvot are embodied in the organs and soul of man. Lurianic Kabbalah incorporates this in the more inclusive scheme of Jewish messianic rectification of exiled divinity. Jewish mysticism, in contrast to Divine transcendence rationalist human-centred reasons for Jewish observance, gave Divine-immanent providential cosmic significance to the daily events in the worldly life of man in general, and the spiritual role of Jewish observance in particular.
The Kabbalah posits that the human soul has three elements, the nefesh, ru'ach, and neshamah. The nefesh is found in all humans, and enters the physical body at birth. It is the source of one's physical and psychological nature. The next two parts of the soul are not implanted at birth, but can be developed over time; their development depends on the actions and beliefs of the individual. They are said to only fully exist in people awakened spiritually. A common way of explaining the three parts of the soul is as follows:
Reincarnation, the transmigration of the soul after death, was introduced into Judaism as a central esoteric tenet of Kabbalah from the Medieval period onwards, called Gilgul neshamot ("cycles of the soul"). The concept does not appear overtly in the Hebrew Bible or classic rabbinic literature, and was rejected by various Medieval Jewish philosophers. However, the Kabbalists explained a number of scriptural passages in reference to Gilgulim. The concept became central to the later Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, who systemised it as the personal parallel to the cosmic process of rectification. Through Lurianic Kabbalah and Hasidic Judaism, reincarnation entered popular Jewish culture as a literary motif.
Tzimtzum (Constriction/Concentration) is the primordial cosmic act whereby God "contracted" His infinite light, leaving a "void" into which the light of existence was poured. This allowed the emergence of independent existence that would not become nullified by the pristine Infinite Light, reconciling the unity of the Ein Sof with the plurality of creation. This changed the first creative act into one of withdrawal/exile, the antithesis of the ultimate Divine Will. In contrast, a new emanation after the Tzimtzum shone into the vacuum to begin creation, but led to an initial instability called Tohu (Chaos), leading to a new crisis of Shevirah (Shattering) of the sephirot vessels. The shards of the broken vessels fell down into the lower realms, animated by remnants of their divine light, causing primordial exile within the Divine Persona before the creation of man. Exile and enclothement of higher divinity within lower realms throughout existence requires man to complete the Tikkun olam (Rectification) process. Rectification Above corresponds to the reorganization of the independent sephirot into relating Partzufim (Divine Personas), previously referred to obliquely in the Zohar. From the catastrophe stems the possibility of self-aware Creation, and also the Kelipot (Impure Shells) of previous Medieval kabbalah. The metaphorical anthropomorphism of the partzufim accentuates the sexual unifications of the redemption process, while Gilgul reincarnation emerges from the scheme. Uniquely, Lurianism gave formerly private mysticism the urgency of Messianic social involvement.
According to interpretations of Luria, the catastrophe stemmed from the "unwillingness" of the residue imprint after the Tzimtzum to relate to the new vitality that began creation. The process was arranged to shed and harmonise the Divine Infinity with the latent potential of evil. The creation of Adam would have redeemed existence, but his sin caused new shevirah of Divine vitality, requiring the Giving of the Torah to begin Messianic rectification. Historical and individual history becomes the narrative of reclaiming exiled Divine sparks.
Kabbalistic thought extended Biblical and Midrashic notions that God enacted Creation through the Hebrew language and through the Torah into a full linguistic mysticism. In this, every Hebrew letter, word, number, even accent on words of the Hebrew Bible contain Jewish mystical meanings, describing the spiritual dimensions within exoteric ideas, and it teaches the hermeneutic methods of interpretation for ascertaining these meanings. Names of God in Judaism have further prominence, though infinite meaning turns the whole Torah into a Divine name. As the Hebrew name of things is the channel of their lifeforce, parallel to the sephirot, so concepts such as "holiness" and "mitzvot" embody ontological Divine immanence, as God can be known in manifestation as well as transcendence. The infinite potential of meaning in the Torah, as in the Ein Sof, is reflected in the symbol of the two trees of the Garden of Eden; the Torah of the Tree of Knowledge is the external, finite Halachic Torah, enclothed within which the mystics perceive the unlimited infinite plurality of meanings of the Torah of the Tree of Life. In Lurianic terms, each of the 600,000 root souls of Israel find their own interpretation in Torah, as "God, the Torah and Israel are all One".
The reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her.
As early as the 1st century BCE Jews believed that the Torah and other canonical texts contained encoded messages and hidden meanings. Gematria is one method for discovering its hidden meanings. In this system, each Hebrew letter also represents a number. By converting letters to numbers, Kabbalists were able to find a hidden meaning in each word. This method of interpretation was used extensively by various schools.
In contemporary interpretation of kabbalah, Sanford Drob makes cognitive sense of this linguistic mythos by relating it to postmodern philosophical concepts described by Jacques Derrida and others, where all reality embodies narrative texts with infinite plurality of meanings brought by the reader. In this dialogue, kabbalah survives the nihilism of Deconstruction by incorporating its own Lurianic Shevirah, and by the dialectical paradox where man and God imply each other.
The founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, privileged an intellectual view of the nature of Kabbalistic symbols as dialectic Theosophical speculation. In contrast, contemporary scholarship of Moshe Idel and Elliot R. Wolfson has opened a phenomenological understanding of the mystical nature of Kabbalistic experience, based on a close reading of the historical texts. Wolfson has shown that among the closed elite circles of mystical activity, medieval Theosophical Kabbalists held that an intellectual view of their symbols was secondary to the experiential. In the context of medieval Jewish philosophical debates on the role of imagination in Biblical prophecy, and essentialist versus instrumental kabbalistic debates about the relation of sephirot to God, they saw contemplation on the sephirot as a vehicle for prophecy. Judaism's ban on physical iconography, along with anthropomorphic metaphors for Divinity in the Hebrew Bible and midrash, enabled their internal visualisation of the Divine sephirot Anthropos in imagination. Disclosure of the aniconic in iconic internal psychology, involved sublimatory revelation of Kabbalah's sexual unifications. Previous academic distinction between Theosophical versus Abulafian Ecstatic-Prophetic Kabbalah overstated their division of aims, which revolved around visual versus verbal/auditory views of prophecy. In addition, throughout the history of Judaic Kabbalah, the greatest mystics claimed to receive new teachings from Elijah the Prophet, the souls of earlier sages (a purpose of Lurianic meditation prostrated on the graves of Talmudic Tannaim, Amoraim and Kabbalists), the soul of the mishnah, ascents during sleep, heavenly messengers, etc. A tradition of parapsychology abilities, psychic knowledge, and theurgic intercessions in heaven for the community is recounted in the hagiographic works Praises of the Ari, Praises of the Besht, and in many other Kabbalistic and Hasidic tales. Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts are concerned to apply themselves from exegesis and theory to spiritual practice, including prophetic drawing of new mystical revelations in Torah. The mythological symbols Kabbalah uses to answer philosophical questions, themselves invite mystical contemplation, intuitive apprehension and psychological engagement.
In bringing Theosophical Kabbalah into contemporary intellectual understanding, using the tools of modern and postmodern philosophy and psychology, Sanford Drob shows philosophically how every symbol of the Kabbalah embodies the simultaneous dialectical paradox of mystical Coincidentia oppositorum, the conjoining of two opposite dualities. Thus the Infinite Ein Sof is above the duality of Yesh/Ayin Being/Non-Being transcending Existence/Nothingness (Becoming into Existence through the souls of Man who are the inner dimension of all spiritual and physical worlds, yet simultaneously the Infinite Divine generative lifesource beyond Creation that continuously keeps everything spiritual and physical in existence); Sephirot bridge the philosophical problem of the One and the Many; Man is both Divine (Adam Kadmon) and human (invited to project human psychology onto Divinity to understand it); Tzimtzum is both illusion and real from Divine and human perspectives; evil and good imply each other (Kelipah draws from Divinity, good arises only from overcoming evil); Existence is simultaneously partial (Tzimtzum), broken (Shevirah), and whole (Tikun) from different perspectives; God experiences Himself as Other through Man, Man embodies and completes (Tikun) the Divine Persona Above. In Kabbalah's reciprocal Panentheism, Theism and Atheism/Humanism represent two incomplete poles of a mutual dialectic that imply and include each other's partial validity. This was expressed by the Chabad Hasidic thinker Aaron of Staroselye, that the truth of any concept is revealed only in its opposite.
By expressing itself using symbols and myth that transcend single interpretations, Theosophical Kabbalah incorporates aspects of philosophy, Jewish theology, psychology and unconscious depth psychology, mysticism and meditation, Jewish exegesis, theurgy, and ethics, as well as overlapping with theory from magical elements. Its symbols can be read as questions which are their own existentialist answers (the Hebrew sephirah Chokhmah-Wisdom, the beginning of Existence, is read etymologically by Kabbalists as the question "Koach Mah?" the "Power of What?"). Alternative listings of the Sephirot start with either Keter (Unconscious Will/Volition), or Chokhmah (Wisdom), a philosophical duality between a Rational or Supra-Rational Creation, between whether the Mitzvot Judaic observances have reasons or transcend reasons in Divine Will, between whether study or good deeds is superior, and whether the symbols of Kabbalah should be read as primarily metaphysical intellectual cognition or Axiology values. Messianic redemption requires both ethical Tikkun olam and contemplative Kavanah. Sanford Drob sees every attempt to limit Kabbalah to one fixed dogmatic interpretation as necessarily bringing its own Deconstruction (Lurianic Kabbalah incorporates its own Shevirah self shattering; the Ein Sof transcends all of its infinite expressions; the infinite mystical Torah of the Tree of Life has no/infinite interpretations). The infinite axiology of the Ein Sof One, expressed through the Plural Many, overcomes the dangers of nihilism, or the antinomian mystical breaking of Jewish observance alluded to throughout Kabbalistic and Hasidic mysticisms.
Like the rest of the rabbinic literature, the texts of kabbalah were once part of an ongoing oral tradition, though, over the centuries, much of the oral tradition has been written down.
Jewish forms of esotericism existed over 2,000 years ago. Ben Sira (born c. 170 BCE) warns against it, saying: "You shall have no business with secret things". Nonetheless, mystical studies were undertaken and resulted in mystical literature, the first being the Apocalyptic literature of the second and first pre-Christian centuries and which contained elements that carried over to later kabbalah.
Throughout the centuries since, many texts have been produced, among them the ancient descriptions of Sefer Yetzirah, the Heichalot mystical ascent literature, the Bahir, Sefer Raziel HaMalakh and the Zohar, the main text of Kabbalistic exegesis. Classic mystical Bible commentaries are included in fuller versions of the Mikraot Gedolot (Main Commentators). Cordoveran systemisation is presented in Pardes Rimonim, philosophical articulation in the works of the Maharal, and Lurianic rectification in Etz Chayim. Subsequent interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah was made in the writings of Shalom Sharabi, in Nefesh HaChaim and the 20th-century Sulam. Hasidism interpreted kabbalistic structures to their correspondence in inward perception. The Hasidic development of kabbalah incorporates a successive stage of Jewish mysticism from historical kabbalistic metaphysics.
The first modern-academic historians of Judaism, the "Wissenschaft des Judentums" school of the 19th century, framed Judaism in solely rational terms in the emancipatory Haskalah spirit of their age. They opposed kabbalah and restricted its significance from Jewish historiography. In the mid-20th century, it was left to Gershom Scholem to overturn their stance, establishing the flourishing present-day academic investigation of Jewish mysticism, and making Heichalot, Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts the objects of scholarly critical-historical study. In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components of Judaism were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the exoteric Halakha or intellectualist Jewish philosophy, were the living subterranean stream in historical Jewish development that periodically broke out to renew the Jewish spirit and social life of the community. Scholem's magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) among his seminal works, though representing scholarship and interpretations that have subsequently been challenged and revised within the field, remains the only academic survey studying all main historical periods of Jewish mysticism
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been a centre of this research, including Scholem and Isaiah Tishby, and more recently Joseph Dan, Yehuda Liebes, Rachel Elior, and Moshe Idel. Scholars across the eras of Jewish mysticism in America and Britain have included Alexander Altmann, Arthur Green, Lawrence Fine, Elliot Wolfson, Daniel Matt, Louis Jacobs and Ada Rapoport-Albert.
Moshe Idel has opened up research on the Ecstatic Kabbalah alongside the theosophical, and has called for new multi-disciplinary approaches, beyond the philological and historical that have dominated until now, to include phenomenology, psychology, anthropology and comparative studies.
Historians have noted that most claims for the authority of kabbalah involve an argument of the antiquity of authority. As a result, virtually all early foundational works pseudepigraphically claim, or are ascribed, ancient authorship. For example, Sefer Raziel HaMalach, an astro-magical text partly based on a magical manual of late antiquity, Sefer ha-Razim, was, according to the kabbalists, transmitted by the angel Raziel to Adam after he was evicted from Eden. Another famous work, the early Sefer Yetzirah, is dated back to the patriarch Abraham. This tendency toward pseudepigraphy has its roots in apocalyptic literature, which claims that esoteric knowledge such as magic, divination and astrology was transmitted to humans in the mythic past by the two angels, Aza and Azaz'el (in other places, Azaz'el and Uzaz'el) who fell from heaven (see Genesis 6:4).
As well as ascribing ancient origins to texts, and reception of Oral Torah transmission, the greatest and most innovative Kabbalists claimed mystical reception of direct personal divine revelations, by heavenly mentors such as Elijah the Prophet, the souls of Talmudic sages, prophetic revelation, soul ascents on high, etc. On this basis Arthur Green speculates, that while the Zohar was written by a circle of Kabbalists in medieval Spain, they may have believed they were channeling the souls and direct revelations from the earlier mystic circle of Shimon bar Yochai in 2nd century Galilee depicted in the Zohar's narrative. Academics have compared the Zohar mystic circle of Spain with the romanticised wandering mystic circle of Galilee described in the text. Similarly, Isaac Luria gathered his disciples at the traditional Idra assembly location, placing each in the seat of their former reincarnations as students of Shimon bar Yochai.
One point of view is represented by the Hasidic work Tanya (1797), in order to argue that Jews have a different character of soul: while a non-Jew, according to the author Shneur Zalman of Liadi (born 1745), can achieve a high level of spirituality, similar to an angel, his soul is still fundamentally different in character, from a Jewish one. A similar view is found in Kuzari, an early medieval philosophical book by Yehuda Halevi (1075–1141 CE).
Another prominent Habad rabbi, Abraham Yehudah Khein (born 1878), believed that spiritually elevated Gentiles have essentially Jewish souls, "who just lack the formal conversion to Judaism", and that unspiritual Jews are "Jewish merely by their birth documents". The great 20th-century Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag viewed the terms "Jews" and "Gentile" as different levels of perception, available to every human soul.
David Halperin argues that the collapse of Kabbalah's influence among Western European Jews over the course of the 17th and 18th century was a result of the cognitive dissonance they experienced between the negative perception of Gentiles found in some exponents of Kabbalah, and their own positive dealings with non-Jews, which were rapidly expanding and improving during this period due to the influence of the Enlightenment.
However, a number of renowned Kabbalists claimed the exact opposite, stressing universality of all human souls and providing universal interpretations of the Kabbalistic tradition, including its Lurianic version. In their view, Kabbalah transcends the borders of Judaism and can serve as a basis of inter-religious theosophy and a universal religion. Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz, a prominent Lithuanian-Galician Kabbalist of the 18th century and a moderate proponent of the Haskalah, called for brotherly love and solidarity between all nations, and believed that Kabbalah can empower everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, with prophetic abilities.
The works of Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1570–1635) are full of references to Gentile mystical philosophers. Such approach was particularly common among the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian Jews. Late medieval and Renaissance Italian Kabbalists, such as Yohanan Alemanno, David Messer Leon and Abraham Yagel, adhered to humanistic ideals and incorporated teachings of various Christian and pagan mystics.
A prime representative of this humanist stream in Kabbalah was Elijah Benamozegh, who explicitly praised Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, as well as a whole range of ancient pagan mystical systems. He believed that Kabbalah can reconcile the differences between the world religions, which represent different facets and stages of the universal human spirituality. In his writings, Benamozegh interprets the New Testament, Hadith, Vedas, Avesta and pagan mysteries according to the Kabbalistic theosophy.
E. R. Wolfson provides numerous examples from the 17th to the 20th centuries, which would challenge the view of Halperin as well as the notion that "modern Judaism" has rejected or dismissed this "outdated aspect" of the religion and, he argues, there are still Kabbalists today who harbor this view. He argues that, while it is accurate to say that many Jews do and would find this distinction offensive, it is inaccurate to say that the idea has been totally rejected in all circles. As Wolfson has argued, it is an ethical demand on the part of scholars to continue to be vigilant with regard to this matter and in this way the tradition can be refined from within.
The idea that there are ten divine sephirot could evolve over time into the idea that "God is One being, yet in that One being there are Ten" which opens up a debate about what the "correct beliefs" in God should be, according to Judaism. The early Kabbalists debated the relationship of the Sephirot to God, adopting a range of essentialist versus instrumental views. Modern Kabbalah, based on the 16th century systemisations of Cordovero and Isaac Luria, takes an intermediate position: the instrumental vessels of the sephirot are created, but their inner light is from the undifferentiated Ohr Ein Sof essence.
The pre-Kabbalistic Saadia Gaon wrote that Jews who believe in reincarnation have adopted a non-Jewish belief.
Maimonides (12th century), celebrated by followers for his Jewish rationalism, rejected many of the pre-Kabbalistic Hekalot texts, particularly Shi'ur Qomah whose starkly anthropomorphic vision of God he considered heretical. Maimonides, a centrally important medieval sage of Judaism, lived at the time of the first emergence of Kabbalah. Modern scholarship views the systemisation and publication of their historic oral doctrine by Kabbalists, as a move to rebut the threat on Judaic observance by the populance misreading Maimonides' ideal of philosophical contemplation over ritual performance in his philosophical Guide of the Perplexed. They objected to Maimonides equating the Talmudic Maaseh Breishit and Maaseh Merkavah secrets of the Torah with Aristotelean physics and metaphysics in that work and in his legal Mishneh Torah, teaching that their own Theosophy, centred on an esoteric metaphysics of traditional Jewish practice, is the Torah's true inner meaning.
The Kabbalist medieval rabbinic sage Nachmanides (13th century), classic debater against Maimonidean rationalism, provides background to many kabbalistic ideas. An entire book entitled Gevuras Aryeh was authored by Yaakov Yehuda Aryeh Leib Frenkel and originally published in 1915, specifically to explain and elaborate on the kabbalistic concepts addressed by Nachmanides in his classic commentary to the Five books of Moses.
Abraham Maimonides (in the spirit of his father Maimonides, Saadiah Gaon, and other predecessors) explains at length in his Milḥamot HaShem that God is in no way literally within time or space nor physically outside time or space, since time and space simply do not apply to his being whatsoever, emphasizing the Monotheist Oneness of Divine transcendence unlike any worldly conception. Kabbalah's Panentheism expressed by Moses Cordovero and Hasidic thought, agrees that God's essence transcends all expression, but holds in contrast that existence is a manifestation of God's Being, descending immanently through spiritual and physical condensations of the divine light. By incorporating the pluralist many within God, God's Oneness is deepened to exclude the true existence of anything but God. In Hasidic Panentheism, the world is acosmic from the Divine view, yet real from its own perspective.
Around the 1230s, Rabbi Meir ben Simon of Narbonne wrote an epistle (included in his Milḥemet Mitzvah) against his contemporaries, the early Kabbalists, characterizing them as blasphemers who even approach heresy. He particularly singled out the Sefer Bahir, rejecting the attribution of its authorship to the tanna R. Neḥunya ben ha-Kanah and describing some of its content as truly heretical.
Leon of Modena, a 17th-century Venetian critic of Kabbalah, wrote that if we were to accept the Kabbalah, then the Christian trinity would be compatible with Judaism, as the Trinity seems to resemble the kabbalistic doctrine of the sephirot. This was in response to the belief that some European Jews of the period addressed individual sephirot in their prayers, although the practice was apparently uncommon. Apologists explained that Jews may have been praying for and not necessarily to the aspects of Godliness represented by the sephirot. In contrast to Christianity, Kabbalists declare that one prays only "to Him (God's Essence, male solely by metaphor in Hebrew's gendered grammar), not to his attributes (sephirot or any other Divine manifestations or forms of incarnation)". Kabbalists directed their prayers to God's essence through the channels of particular sephirot using kavanot Divine names intentions. To pray to a manifestation of God introduces false division among the sephirot, disrupting their absolute unity, dependence and dissolving into the transcendent Ein Sof; the sephirot descend throughout Creation, only appearing from man's perception of God, where God manifests by any variety of numbers.
Yaakov Emden (1697–1776), himself an Orthodox Kabbalist who venerated the Zohar, concerned to battle Sabbatean misuse of Kabbalah, wrote the Mitpaḥath Sfarim (Veil of the Books), an astute critique of the Zohar in which he concludes that certain parts of the Zohar contain heretical teaching and therefore could not have been written by Shimon bar Yochai.
Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) held the Zohar and Luria in deep reverence, critically emending classic Judaic texts from historically accumulated errors by his acute acumen and scholarly belief in the perfect unity of Kabbalah revelation and Rabbinic Judaism. Though a Lurianic Kabbalist, his commentaries sometimes chose Zoharic interpretation over Luria when he felt the matter lent itself to a more exoteric view. Although proficient in mathematics and sciences and recommending their necessity for understanding Talmud, he had no use for canonical medieval Jewish philosophy, declaring that Maimonides had been "misled by the accursed philosophy" in denying belief in the external occult matters of demons, incantations and amulets.
Views of Kabbalists regarding Jewish philosophy varied from those who appreciated Maimonidean and other classic medieval philosophical works, integrating them with Kabbalah and seeing profound human philosophical and Divine kabbalistic wisdoms as compatible, to those who polemicised against religious philosophy during times when it became overly rationalist and dogmatic. A dictum commonly cited by Kabbalists, "Kabbalah begins where Philosophy ends", can be read as either appreciation or polemic. Moses of Burgos (late 13th century) declared, "these philosophers whose wisdom you are praising end where we begin". Moses Cordovero appreciated the influence of Maimonides in his quasi-rational systemisation. From its inception, the Theosophical Kabbalah became permeated by terminology adapted from philosophy and given new mystical meanings, such as its early integration with the Neoplatonism of Ibn Gabirol and use of Aristotelian terms of Form over Matter.
Pinchas Giller and Adin Steinsaltz write that Kabbalah is best described as the inner part of traditional Jewish religion, the official metaphysics of Judaism, that was essential to normative Judaism until fairly recently. With the decline of Jewish life in medieval Spain, it displaced rationalist Jewish philosophy until the modern rise of Haskalah enlightenment, receiving a revival in our postmodern age. While Judaism always maintained a minority tradition of religious rationalist criticism of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem writes that Lurianic Kabbalah was the last theology that was near predominant in Jewish life. While Lurianism represented the elite of esoteric Kabbalism, its mythic-messianic divine drama and personalisation of reincarnation captured the popular imagination in Jewish folklore and in the Sabbatean and Hasidic social movements. Giller notes that the former Zoharic-Cordoverian classic Kabbalah represented a common exoteric popular view of Kabbalah, as depicted in early modern Musar literature.
In contemporary Orthodox Judaism there is dispute as to the status of the Zohar's and Isaac Luria's (the Arizal) Kabbalistic teachings. While a portion of Modern Orthodox, followers of the Dor De'ah movement, and many students of the Rambam reject Arizal's Kabbalistic teachings, as well as deny that the Zohar is authoritative or from Shimon bar Yohai, all three of these groups accept the existence and validity of the Talmudic Maaseh Breishit and Maaseh Merkavah mysticism. Their disagreement concerns whether the Kabbalistic teachings promulgated today are accurate representations of those esoteric teachings to which the Talmud refers. The mainstream Haredi (Hasidic, Lithuanian, Oriental) and Religious Zionist Jewish movements revere Luria and the Kabbalah, but one can find both rabbis who sympathize with such a view, while disagreeing with it, as well as rabbis who consider such a view heresy. The Haredi Eliyahu Dessler and Gedaliah Nadel maintained that it is acceptable to believe that the Zohar was not written by Shimon bar Yochai and that it had a late authorship. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg mentioned the possibility of Christian influence in the Kabbalah with the "Kabbalistic vision of the Messiah as the redeemer of all mankind" being "the Jewish counterpart to Christ."
Modern Orthodox Judaism, representing an inclination to rationalism, embrace of academic scholarship, and the individual's autonomy to define Judaism, embodies a diversity of views regarding Kabbalah from a Neo-Hasidic spirituality to Maimonist anti-Kabbalism. In a book to help define central theological issues in Modern Orthodoxy, Michael J. Harris writes that the relationship between Modern Orthodoxy and mysticism has been under-discussed. He sees a deficiency of spirituality in Modern Orthodoxy, as well as the dangers in a fundamentalist adoption of Kabbalah. He suggests the development of neo-Kabbalistic adaptions of Jewish mysticism compatible with rationalism, offering a variety of precedent models from past thinkers ranging from the mystical inclusivism of Abraham Isaac Kook to a compartmentalisation between Halakha and mysticism.
Yiḥyeh Qafeḥ, a 20th-century Yemenite Jewish leader and Chief Rabbi of Yemen, spearheaded the Dor De'ah ("generation of knowledge") movement to counteract the influence of the Zohar and modern Kabbalah. He authored critiques of mysticism in general and Lurianic Kabbalah in particular; his magnum opus was Milḥamoth ha-Shem (Wars of Hashem) against what he perceived as neo-platonic and gnostic influences on Judaism with the publication and distribution of the Zohar since the 13th Century. Rabbi Yiḥyah founded yeshivot, rabbinical schools, and synagogues that featured a rationalist approach to Judaism based on the Talmud and works of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides (Rambam). In recent years, rationalists holding similar views as those of the Dor De'ah movement have described themselves as "talmide ha-Rambam" (disciples of Maimonides) rather than as being aligned with Dor De'ah, and are more theologically aligned with the rationalism of Modern Orthodox Judaism than with Orthodox Ḥasidic or Ḥaredi communities.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994), an ultra-rationalist Modern Orthodox philosopher, referred to Kabbalah "a collection of "pagan superstitions" and "idol worship" in remarks given in 1990.
Kabbalah tended to be rejected by most Jews in the Conservative and Reform movements, though its influences were not completely eliminated. While it was generally not studied as a discipline, the Kabbalistic Kabbalat Shabbat service remained part of liberal liturgy, as did the Yedid Nefesh prayer. Nevertheless, in the 1960s, Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America is reputed to have introduced a lecture by Scholem on Kabbalah with a statement that Kabbalah itself was "nonsense", but the academic study of Kabbalah was "scholarship". This view became popular among many Jews, who viewed the subject as worthy of study, but who did not accept Kabbalah as teaching literal truths.
According to Bradley Shavit Artson (Dean of the Conservative Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies)
Many western Jews insisted that their future and their freedom required shedding what they perceived as parochial orientalism. They fashioned a Judaism that was decorous and strictly rational (according to 19th-century European standards), denigrating Kabbalah as backward, superstitious, and marginal.
However, in the late 20th century and early 21st century there has been a revival in interest in Kabbalah in all branches of liberal Judaism. The Kabbalistic 12th-century prayer Anim Zemirot was restored to the new Conservative Sim Shalom siddur, as was the B'rikh Shmeh passage from the Zohar, and the mystical Ushpizin service welcoming to the Sukkah the spirits of Jewish forebears. Anim Zemirot and the 16th-century mystical poem Lekhah Dodi reappeared in the Reform Siddur Gates of Prayer in 1975. All rabbinical seminaries now teach several courses in Kabbalah—in Conservative Judaism, both the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles have full-time instructors in Kabbalah and Hasidut, Eitan Fishbane and Pinchas Giller, respectively. In Reform Judaism, Sharon Koren teaches at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Reform rabbis like Herbert Weiner and Lawrence Kushner have renewed interest in Kabbalah among Reform Jews. At the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the only accredited seminary that has curricular requirements in Kabbalah, Joel Hecker is the full-time instructor teaching courses in Kabbalah and Hasidut.
According to Artson:
Ours is an age hungry for meaning, for a sense of belonging, for holiness. In that search, we have returned to the very Kabbalah our predecessors scorned. The stone that the builders rejected has become the head cornerstone (Psalm 118:22)... Kabbalah was the last universal theology adopted by the entire Jewish people, hence faithfulness to our commitment to positive-historical Judaism mandates a reverent receptivity to Kabbalah.
The Reconstructionist movement, under the leadership of Arthur Green in the 1980s and 1990s, and with the influence of Zalman Schachter Shalomi, brought a strong openness to Kabbalah and hasidic elements that then came to play prominent roles in the Kol ha-Neshamah siddur series.
Teaching of classic esoteric kabbalah texts and practice remained traditional until recent times, passed on in Judaism from master to disciple, or studied by leading rabbinic scholars. This changed in the 20th century, through conscious reform and the secular openness of knowledge. In contemporary times kabbalah is studied in four very different, though sometimes overlapping, ways.
The traditional method, employed among Jews since the 16th century, continues in learned study circles. Its prerequisite is to either be born Jewish or be a convert and to join a group of kabbalists under the tutelage of a rabbi, since the 18th century more likely a Hasidic one, though others exist among Sephardi-Mizrachi, and Lithuanian rabbinic scholars. Beyond elite, historical esoteric kabbalah, the public-communally studied texts of Hasidic thought explain kabbalistic concepts for wide spiritual application, through their own concern with popular psychological perception of Divine Panentheism.
A second, new universalist form, is the method of modern-style Jewish organisations and writers, who seek to disseminate kabbalah to every man, woman and child regardless of race or class, especially since the Western interest in mysticism from the 1960s. These derive from various cross-denominational Jewish interests in kabbalah, and range from considered theology to popularised forms that often adopt New Age terminology and beliefs for wider communication. These groups highlight or interpret kabbalah through non-particularist, universalist aspects.
A third way are non-Jewish organisations, mystery schools, initiation bodies, fraternities and secret societies, the most popular of which are Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and the Golden Dawn, although hundreds of similar societies claim a kabbalistic lineage. These derive from syncretic combinations of Jewish kabbalah with Christian, occultist or contemporary New Age spirituality. As a separate spiritual tradition in Western esotericism since the Renaissance, with different aims from its Jewish origin, the non-Jewish traditions differ significantly and do not give an accurate representation of the Jewish spiritual understanding (or vice versa).
Fourthly, since the mid-20th century, historical-critical scholarly investigation of all eras of Jewish mysticism has flourished into an established department of university Jewish studies. Where the first academic historians of Judaism in the 19th century opposed and marginalised kabbalah, Gershom Scholem and his successors repositioned the historiography of Jewish mysticism as a central, vital component of Judaic renewal through history. Cross-disciplinary academic revisions of Scholem's and others' theories are regularly published for wide readership.
In recent decades, Kabbalah has seen a resurgence of interest, with several modern groups and individuals exploring its profound teachings. These contemporary interpretations of Kabbalah offer a fresh perspective on this ancient mystical tradition, often bridging the gap between traditional wisdom and modern thought. Some of these interpretations emphasize universalist and philosophical approaches, seeking to enrich secular disciplines through the lens of Kabbalistic insights. Others have gained attention for their unique blends of spirituality and popular culture, attracting followers from diverse backgrounds. These modern expressions of Kabbalah showcase its enduring appeal and relevance in today's world.
Bnei Baruch is a group of Kabbalah students, based in Israel. Study materials are available in over 25 languages for free online or at printing cost. Michael Laitman established Bnei Baruch in 1991, following the passing of his teacher, Ashlag's son Rav Baruch Ashlag. Laitman named his group Bnei Baruch (sons of Baruch) to commemorate the memory of his mentor. The teaching strongly suggests restricting one's studies to 'authentic sources', kabbalists of the direct lineage of master to disciple.
The Kabbalah Centre was founded in the United States in 1965 as The National Research Institute of Kabbalah by Philip Berg and Rav Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein, disciple of Yehuda Ashlag's. Later Philip Berg and his wife re-established the organisation as the worldwide Kabbalah Centre. In recent times its outreach teaching in New Age style has been "derided by critics as Hollywood's new "non-religion" and even "the McDonald's of spirituality"" after having attracted a cross-religious celebrity following (see Madonna) and media profile, though the organisation is led by Orthodox Jewish teachers.
The Kabbalah Society, run by Warren Kenton, an organisation based instead on pre-Lurianic Medieval Kabbalah presented in universalist style. In contrast, traditional kabbalists read earlier kabbalah through later Lurianism and the systemisations of 16th-century Safed.
The New Kabbalah, website and books by Sanford L. Drob, is a scholarly intellectual investigation of the Lurianic symbolism in the perspective of modern and postmodern intellectual thought. It seeks a "new kabbalah" rooted in the historical tradition through its academic study, but universalised through dialogue with modern philosophy and psychology. This approach seeks to enrich the secular disciplines, while uncovering intellectual insights formerly implicit in kabbalah's essential myth:
By being equipped with the nonlinear concepts of dialectical, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive thought we can begin to make sense of the kabbalistic symbols in our own time. So equipped, we are today probably in a better position to understand the philosophical aspects of the kabbalah than were the kabbalists themselves.
The Kabbalah of Information is described in the 2018 book From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics written by Ukrainian-born professor and businessman Eduard Shyfrin. The main tenet of the teaching is "In the beginning He created information", rephrasing the famous saying of Nahmanides, "In the beginning He created primordial matter and He didn't create anything else, just shaped it and formed it."
Since the 18th century, Jewish mystical development has continued in Hasidic Judaism, turning kabbalah into a social revival with texts that internalise mystical thought. Among different schools, Chabad-Lubavitch and Breslav with related organisations, give outward looking spiritual resources and textual learning for secular Jews. The Intellectual Hasidism of Chabad most emphasises the spread and understanding of kabbalah through its explanation in Hasidic thought, articulating the Divine meaning within kabbalah through human rational analogies, uniting the spiritual and material, esoteric and exoteric in their Divine source:
Hasidic thought instructs in the predominance of spiritual form over physical matter, the advantage of matter when it is purified, and the advantage of form when integrated with matter. The two are to be unified so one cannot detect where either begins or ends, for "the Divine beginning is implanted in the end and the end in the beginning" (Sefer Yetzira 1:7). The One God created both for one purpose – to reveal the holy light of His hidden power. Only both united complete the perfection desired by the Creator.
From the early 20th century, Neo-Hasidism expressed a modernist or non-Orthodox Jewish interest in Jewish mysticism, becoming influential among Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionalist Jewish denominations from the 1960s, and organised through the Jewish Renewal and Chavurah movements. The writings and teachings of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Lawrence Kushner, Herbert Weiner and others, has sought a critically selective, non-fundamentalist neo- Kabbalistic and Hasidic study and mystical spirituality among modernist Jews. The contemporary proliferation of scholarship by Jewish mysticism academia has contributed to critical adaptions of Jewish mysticism. Arthur Green's translations from the religious writings of Hillel Zeitlin conceive the latter to be a precursor of contemporary Neo-Hasidism. Reform rabbi Herbert Weiner's Nine and a Half Mystics: The Kabbala Today (1969), a travelogue among Kabbalists and Hasidim, brought perceptive insights into Jewish mysticism to many Reform Jews. Leading Reform philosopher Eugene Borowitz described the Orthodox Hasidic Adin Steinsaltz (The Thirteen Petalled Rose) and Aryeh Kaplan as major presenters of Kabbalistic spirituality for modernists today.
The writings of Abraham Isaac Kook (1864–1935), first chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine and visionary, incorporate kabbalistic themes through his own poetic language and concern with human and divine unity. His influence is in the Religious Zionist community, who follow his aim that the legal and imaginative aspects of Judaism should interfuse:
Due to the alienation from the "secret of God" [i.e. Kabbalah], the higher qualities of the depths of Godly life are reduced to trivia that do not penetrate the depth of the soul. When this happens, the most mighty force is missing from the soul of nation and individual, and Exile finds favor essentially... We should not negate any conception based on rectitude and awe of Heaven of any form—only the aspect of such an approach that desires to negate the mysteries and their great influence on the spirit of the nation. This is a tragedy that we must combat with counsel and understanding, with holiness and courage.
Nathaniel Deutsch writes:
Initially, these interactions [between Mandaeans and Jewish mystics in Babylonia from Late Antiquity to the medieval period] resulted in shared magical and angelological traditions. During this phase the parallels which exist between Mandaeism and Hekhalot mysticism would have developed. At some point, both Mandaeans and Jews living in Babylonia began to develop similar cosmogonic and theosophic traditions involving an analogous set of terms, concepts, and images. At present it is impossible to say whether these parallels resulted primarily from Jewish influence on Mandaeans, Mandaean influence on Jews, or from cross fertilization. Whatever their original source, these traditions eventually made their way into the priestly – that is, esoteric – Mandaean texts ... and into the Kabbalah.
R.J. Zwi Werblowsky suggests Mandaeism has more commonality with Kabbalah than with Merkabah mysticism such as cosmogony and sexual imagery. The Thousand and Twelve Questions, Scroll of Exalted Kingship, and Alma Rišaia Rba link the alphabet with the creation of the world, a concept found in Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir. Mandaean names for uthras (angels or guardians) have been found in Jewish magical texts. Abatur appears to be inscribed inside a Jewish magic bowl in a corrupted form as "Abiṭur". Ptahil is found in Sefer HaRazim listed among other angels who stand on the ninth step of the second firmament.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kabbalah or Qabalah (/kəˈbɑːlə, ˈkæbələ/ kə-BAH-lə, KAB-ə-lə; Hebrew: קַבָּלָה, romanized: Qabbālā, lit. 'reception, tradition') is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal (מְקוּבָּל, Məqūbbāl, 'receiver'). The definition of Kabbalah varies according to the tradition and aims of those following it, from its origin in medieval Judaism to its later adaptations in Western esotericism (Christian Kabbalah and Hermetic Qabalah). Jewish Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between the unchanging, eternal God—the mysterious Ein Sof (אֵין סוֹף, \"The Infinite\")—and the mortal, finite universe (God's creation). It forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Jewish Kabbalists originally developed their own transmission of sacred texts within the realm of Jewish tradition and often use classical Jewish scriptures to explain and demonstrate its mystical teachings. These teachings are held by Kabbalists to define the inner meaning of both the Hebrew Bible and traditional rabbinic literature and their formerly concealed transmitted dimension, as well as to explain the significance of Jewish religious observances.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Traditional practitioners believe its earliest origins pre-date world religions, forming the primordial blueprint for Creation's philosophies, religions, sciences, arts, and political systems. Historically, Kabbalah emerged from earlier forms of Jewish mysticism, in 12th- to 13th-century Spain and Southern France, and was reinterpreted during the Jewish mystical renaissance in 16th-century Ottoman Palestine. The Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah, was composed in the late 13th century. Isaac Luria (16th century) is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah; Lurianic Kabbalah was popularised in the form of Hasidic Judaism from the 18th century onwards. During the 20th century, academic interest in Kabbalistic texts led primarily by the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem has inspired the development of historical research on Kabbalah in the field of Judaic studies.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Though innumerable glosses, marginalia, commentaries, precedent works, satellite texts and other minor works contribute to an understanding of the Kabbalah as an evolving tradition, the major texts in the main line of Jewish mysticism that inarguably fall under the heading 'Kabbalah' are the Bahir, Zohar, Pardes Rimonim, and Etz Chayim ('Ein Sof'). The early Hekhalot writings are acknowledged as ancestral to the sensibilities of Kabbalah and the Sefer Yetzirah--a brief document of only few pages written centuries before the high and late medieval works, detailing an alphanumeric vision of cosmology--may be understood as a kind of prelude to the canon of Kabbalah.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "According to the Zohar, a foundational text for kabbalistic thought, Torah study can proceed along four levels of interpretation (exegesis). These four levels are called pardes from their initial letters (PRDS Hebrew: פַּרדֵס, orchard).",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kabbalah is considered by its followers as a necessary part of the study of Torah – the study of Torah (the Tanakh and rabbinic literature) being an inherent duty of observant Jews.",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Modern academic-historical study of Jewish mysticism reserves the term \"kabbalah\" to designate the particular, distinctive doctrines that textually emerged fully expressed in the Middle Ages, as distinct from the earlier Merkabah mystical concepts and methods. According to this descriptive categorization, both versions of Kabbalistic theory, the medieval-Zoharic and the early-modern Lurianic Kabbalah together comprise the Theosophical tradition in Kabbalah, while the Meditative-Ecstatic Kabbalah incorporates a parallel inter-related Medieval tradition. A third tradition, related but more shunned, involves the magical aims of Practical Kabbalah. Moshe Idel, for example, writes that these 3 basic models can be discerned operating and competing throughout the whole history of Jewish mysticism, beyond the particular Kabbalistic background of the Middle Ages. They can be readily distinguished by their basic intent with respect to God:",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "According to Kabbalistic belief, early kabbalistic knowledge was transmitted orally by the Patriarchs, prophets, and sages, eventually to be \"interwoven\" into Jewish religious writings and culture. According to this view, early kabbalah was, in around the 10th century BCE, an open knowledge practiced by over a million people in ancient Israel. Foreign conquests drove the Jewish spiritual leadership of the time (the Sanhedrin) to hide the knowledge and make it secret, fearing that it might be misused if it fell into the wrong hands.",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "It is hard to clarify with any degree of certainty the exact concepts within kabbalah. There are several different schools of thought with very different outlooks; however, all are accepted as correct. Modern halakhic authorities have tried to narrow the scope and diversity within kabbalah, by restricting study to certain texts, notably Zohar and the teachings of Isaac Luria as passed down through Hayyim ben Joseph Vital. However, even this qualification does little to limit the scope of understanding and expression, as included in those works are commentaries on Abulafian writings, Sefer Yetzirah, Albotonian writings, and the Berit Menuhah, which is known to the kabbalistic elect and which, as described more recently by Gershom Scholem, combined ecstatic with theosophical mysticism. It is therefore important to bear in mind when discussing things such as the sephirot and their interactions that one is dealing with highly abstract concepts that at best can only be understood intuitively.",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "From the Renaissance onwards Jewish Kabbalah texts entered non-Jewish culture, where they were studied and translated by Christian Hebraists and Hermetic occultists. The syncretic traditions of Christian Cabala and Hermetic Qabalah developed independently of Judaic Kabbalah, reading the Jewish texts as universalist ancient wisdom preserved from the Gnostic traditions of antiquity. Both adapted the Jewish concepts freely from their Jewish understanding, to merge with multiple other theologies, religious traditions and magical associations. With the decline of Christian Cabala in the Age of Reason, Hermetic Qabalah continued as a central underground tradition in Western esotericism. Through these non-Jewish associations with magic, alchemy and divination, Kabbalah acquired some popular occult connotations forbidden within Judaism, where Jewish theurgic Practical Kabbalah was a minor, permitted tradition restricted for a few elite. Today, many publications on Kabbalah belong to the non-Jewish New Age and occult traditions of Cabala, rather than giving an accurate picture of Judaic Kabbalah. Instead, academic and traditional Jewish publications now translate and study Judaic Kabbalah for wide readership.",
"title": "Traditions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "According to the traditional Kabbalistic understanding, Kabbalah dates from Eden. It came down from a remote past as a revelation to elect tzadikim (righteous people), and, for the most part, was preserved only by a privileged few. Talmudic Judaism records its view of the proper protocol for teaching secrets in the Talmud, Tractate Hagigah, 11b-13a, \"One should not teach . . . the work of Creation in pairs, nor the work of the Chariot to an individual, unless he is wise and can understand the implications himself etc.\"",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Contemporary scholarship suggests that various schools of Jewish esotericism arose at different periods of Jewish history, each reflecting not only prior forms of mysticism, but also the intellectual and cultural milieu of that historical period. Answers to questions of transmission, lineage, influence, and innovation vary greatly and cannot be easily summarised.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Originally, Kabbalistic knowledge was believed to be an integral part of the Oral Torah, given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai around the 13th century BCE according to its followers; although some believe that Kabbalah began with Adam.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "For a few centuries the esoteric knowledge was referred to by its aspect practice—meditation Hitbonenut (Hebrew: הִתְבּוֹנְנוּת), Rebbe Nachman of Breslov's Hitbodedut (Hebrew: הִתְבּוֹדְדוּת), translated as \"being alone\" or \"isolating oneself\", or by a different term describing the actual, desired goal of the practice—prophecy (\"NeVu'a\" Hebrew: נְבוּאָה). Kabbalistic scholar Aryeh Kaplan traces the origins of medieval Kabbalistic meditative methods to their inheritance from orally transmitted remnants of the Biblical Prophetic tradition, and reconstructs their terminology and speculated techniques.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "From the 5th century BCE, when the works of the Tanakh were edited and canonised and the secret knowledge encrypted within the various writings and scrolls (\"Megilot\"), esoteric knowledge became referred to as Ma'aseh Merkavah (Hebrew: מַעֲשֶׂה מֶרְכָּבָה) and Ma'aseh B'reshit (Hebrew: מַעֲשֶׂה בְּרֵאשִׁית), respectively \"the act of the Chariot\" and \"the act of Creation\". Merkabah mysticism alluded to the encrypted knowledge, and meditation methods within the book of the prophet Ezekiel describing his vision of the \"Divine Chariot\". B'reshit mysticism referred to the first chapter of Genesis (Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית) in the Torah that is believed to contain secrets of the creation of the universe and forces of nature. These terms received their later historical documentation and description in the second chapter of the Talmudic tractate Hagigah from the early centuries CE.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Confidence in new Prophetic revelation closed after the Biblical return from Babylon in Second Temple Judaism, shifting to canonisation and exegesis of Scripture after Ezra the Scribe. Lesser level prophecy of Ruach Hakodesh remained, with angelic revelations, esoteric heavenly secrets, and eschatological deliverance from Greek and Roman oppression of Apocalyptic literature among early Jewish proto-mystical circles, such as the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls community of Qumran. Early Jewish mystical literature inherited the developing concerns and remnants of Prophetic and Apocalyptic Judaisms.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "When read by later generations of Kabbalists, the Torah's description of the creation in the Book of Genesis reveals mysteries about God himself, the true nature of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden (Hebrew: גַּן עֵדֶן), the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (Hebrew: עֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וְרַע), and the Tree of Life (Hebrew: עֵץ החַיִּים), as well as the interaction of these supernatural entities with the Serpent (Hebrew: נָחָשׁ), which leads to disaster when they eat the forbidden fruit (Hebrew: פְּרִי עֵץ הַדַּעַת), as recorded in Genesis 3.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Bible provides ample additional material for mythic and mystical speculation. The prophet Ezekiel's visions in particular attracted much mystical speculation, as did Isaiah's Temple vision. Other mystical events include Jacob's vision of the ladder to heaven, and Moses' encounters with the Burning bush and God on Mount Sinai.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The 72 letter name of God which is used in Jewish mysticism for meditation purposes is derived from the Hebrew verbal utterance Moses spoke in the presence of an angel, while the Sea of Reeds parted, allowing the Hebrews to escape their approaching attackers. The miracle of the Exodus, which led to Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and the Jewish Orthodox view of the acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai, preceded the creation of the first Jewish nation approximately three hundred years before King Saul.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In early Rabbinic Judaism (the early centuries of the 1st millennium CE), the terms Ma'aseh Bereshit (\"Works of Creation\") and Ma'aseh Merkabah (\"Works of the Divine Throne/Chariot\") clearly indicate the Midrashic nature of these speculations; they are really based upon Genesis 1 and Ezekiel 1:4–28, while the names Sitrei Torah (Hidden aspects of the Torah) (Talmud Hag. 13a) and Razei Torah (Torah secrets) (Ab. vi. 1) indicate their character as secret lore.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Talmudic doctrine forbade the public teaching of esoteric doctrines and warned of their dangers. In the Mishnah (Hagigah 2:1), rabbis were warned to teach the mystical creation doctrines only to one student at a time. To highlight the danger, in one Jewish aggadic (\"legendary\") anecdote, four prominent rabbis of the Mishnaic period (1st century CE) are said to have visited the Orchard (that is, Paradise, pardes, Hebrew: פרדס lit., orchard):",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Four men entered pardes—Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, Acher (Elisha ben Abuyah), and Akiba. Ben Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma looked and went mad; Acher destroyed the plants; Akiba entered in peace and departed in peace.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In notable readings of this legend, only Rabbi Akiba was fit to handle the study of mystical doctrines. The Tosafot, medieval commentaries on the Talmud, say that the four sages \"did not go up literally, but it appeared to them as if they went up\". On the other hand, Louis Ginzberg, writes in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906) that the journey to paradise \"is to be taken literally and not allegorically\".",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In contrast to the Kabbalists, Maimonides interprets pardes as philosophy and not mysticism.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The mystical methods and doctrines of Hekhalot (Heavenly \"Chambers\") and Merkabah (Divine \"Chariot\") texts, named by modern scholars from these repeated motifs, lasted from the 1st century BCE through to the 10th century CE, before giving way to the documented manuscript emergence of Kabbalah. Initiates were said to \"descend the chariot\", possibly a reference to internal introspection on the Heavenly journey through the spiritual realms. The ultimate aim was to arrive before the transcendent awe, rather than nearness, of the Divine. The mystical protagonists of the texts are famous Talmudic Sages of Rabbinic Judaism, either pseudepigraphic or documenting remnants of a developed tradition. From the 8th to 11th centuries, the Hekhalot texts, and the proto-Kabbalistic early cosmogonic Sefer Yetzirah (\"Book of Creation\") made their way into European Jewish circles. A controversial esoteric work from associated literature describing a cosmic Anthropos, Shi'ur Qomah, was interpreted allegorically by subsequent Kabbalists in their meditation on the Sephirot Divine Persona.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Another, separate influential mystical, theosophical, and pious movement, shortly before the arrival there of Kabbalistic theory, was the \"Hasidei Ashkenaz\" (חסידי אשכנז) or Medieval German Pietists from 1150 to 1250. This ethical-ascetic movement with elite theoretical and Practical Kabbalah speculations arose mostly among a single scholarly family, the Kalonymus family of the French and German Rhineland. Its Jewish ethics of saintly self-sacrifice influenced Ashkenazi Jewry, Musar literature and later emphases of piety in Judaism.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Modern scholars have identified several mystical brotherhoods that functioned in Europe starting in the 12th century. Some, such as the \"Iyyun Circle\" and the \"Unique Cherub Circle\", were truly esoteric, remaining largely anonymous. The first documented historical emergence of Theosophical Kabbalistic doctrine occurred among Jewish Sages of Provence and Languedoc in southern France in the latter 1100s, with the appearance or consolidation of the mysterious work the Bahir (Book of \"Brightness\"), a midrash describing God's sephirot attributes as a dynamic interacting hypostatic drama in the Divine realm, and the school of Isaac the Blind (1160–1235) among critics of the rationalist influence of Maimonides. From there Kabbalah spread to Catalonia in north-east Spain around the central Rabbinic figure of Nahmanides (the Ramban) (1194–1270) in the early 1200s, with a Neoplatonic orientation focused on the upper sephirot. Subsequently, Kabbalistic doctrine reached its fullest classic expression among Castilian Kabbalists from the latter 1200s, with the Zohar (Book of \"Splendor\") literature, concerned with cosmic healing of gnostic dualities between the lower, revealed male and female attributes of God.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Rishonim (\"Elder Sages\") of exoteric Judaism who were deeply involved in Kabbalistic activity, gave the Kabbalah wide scholarly acceptance, including Nahmanides and Bahya ben Asher (Rabbeinu Behaye) (died 1340), whose classic commentaries on the Torah reference Kabbalistic esotericism.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Many Orthodox Jews reject the idea that Kabbalah underwent significant historical development or change such as has been proposed above. After the composition known as the Zohar was presented to the public in the 13th century, the term \"Kabbalah\" began to refer more specifically to teachings derived from, or related to, the Zohar. At an even later time, the term began to generally be applied to Zoharic teachings as elaborated upon by Isaac Luria (the Arizal). Historians generally date the start of Kabbalah as a major influence in Jewish thought and practice with the publication of the Zohar and climaxing with the spread of the Lurianic teachings. The majority of Haredi Jews accept the Zohar as the representative of the Ma'aseh Merkavah and Ma'aseh B'reshit that are referred to in Talmudic texts.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Contemporary with the Zoharic efflorescence of Spanish Theosophical-Theurgic Kabbalah, Spanish exilarch Abraham Abulafia developed his own alternative, Maimonidean system of Ecstatic-Prophetic Kabbalah meditation, each consolidating aspects of a claimed inherited mystical tradition from Biblical times. This was the classic time when various different interpretations of an esoteric meaning to Torah were articulated among Jewish thinkers. Abulafia interpreted Theosophical Kabbalah's Sephirot Divine attributes, not as supernal hypostases which he opposed, but in psychological terms. Instead of influencing harmony in the divine real by theurgy, his meditative scheme aimed for mystical union with God, drawing down prophetic influx on the individual. He saw this meditation using Divine Names as a superior form of Kabbalistic ancient tradition. His version of Kabbalah, followed in the medieval eastern Mediterranean, remained a marginal stream to mainstream Theosophical Kabbalah development. Abulafian elements were later incorporated into the 16th century theosophical Kabbalistic systemisations of Moses Cordovero and Hayim Vital. Through them, later Hasidic Judaism incorporated elements of unio mystica and psychological focus from Abulafia.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Following the upheavals and dislocations in the Jewish world as a result of anti-Judaism during the Middle Ages, and the national trauma of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, closing the Spanish Jewish flowering, Jews began to search for signs of when the long-awaited Jewish Messiah would come to comfort them in their painful exiles. In the 16th century, the community of Safed in the Galilee became the centre of Jewish mystical, exegetical, legal and liturgical developments. The Safed mystics responded to the Spanish expulsion by turning Kabbalistic doctrine and practice towards a messianic focus. Moses Cordovero (The RAMAK 1522–1570) and his school popularized the teachings of the Zohar which had until then been only a restricted work. Cordovero's comprehensive works achieved the first (quasi-rationalistic) of Theosophical Kabbalah's two systemisations, harmonising preceding interpretations of the Zohar on its own apparent terms. The author of the Shulkhan Arukh (the normative Jewish \"Code of Law\"), Yosef Karo (1488–1575), was also a scholar of Kabbalah who kept a personal mystical diary. Moshe Alshich wrote a mystical commentary on the Torah, and Shlomo Alkabetz wrote Kabbalistic commentaries and poems.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The messianism of the Safed mystics culminated in Kabbalah receiving its biggest transformation in the Jewish world with the explication of its new interpretation from Isaac Luria (The ARI 1534–1572), by his disciples Hayim Vital and Israel Sarug. Both transcribed Luria's teachings (in variant forms) gaining them widespread popularity, Sarug taking Lurianic Kabbalah to Europe, Vital authoring the latterly canonical version. Luria's teachings came to rival the influence of the Zohar and Luria stands, alongside Moses de Leon, as the most influential mystic in Jewish history. Lurianic Kabbalah gave Theosophical Kabbalah its second, complete (supra-rational) of two systemisations, reading the Zohar in light of its most esoteric sections (the Idrot), replacing the broken Sephirot attributes of God with rectified Partzufim (Divine Personas), embracing reincarnation, repair, and the urgency of cosmic Jewish messianism dependent on each person's soul tasks.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "From the European Renaissance on, Judaic Kabbalah became a significant influence in non-Jewish culture, fully divorced from the separately evolving Judaic tradition. Kabbalah received the interest of Christian Hebraist scholars and occultists, who freely syncretised and adapted it to diverse non-Jewish spiritual traditions and belief systems of Western esotericism. Christian Cabalists from the 15th-18th centuries adapted what they saw as ancient Biblical wisdom to Christian theology, while Hermeticism lead to Kabbalah's incorporation into Western magic through Hermetic Qabalah. Presentations of Kabbalah in occult and New Age books on Kabbalah bear little resemblance to Judaic Kabbalah.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Rabbinic ban on studying Kabbalah in Jewish society was lifted by the efforts of the 16th-century kabbalist Avraham Azulai (1570–1643).",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "I have found it written that all that has been decreed Above forbidding open involvement in the Wisdom of Truth [Kabbalah] was [only meant for] the limited time period until the year 5,250 (1490 C.E.). From then on after is called the \"Last Generation\", and what was forbidden is [now] allowed. And permission is granted to occupy ourselves in the [study of] Zohar. And from the year 5,300 (1540 C.E.) it is most desirable that the masses both those great and small [in Torah], should occupy themselves [in the study of Kabbalah], as it says in the Raya M'hemna [a section of the Zohar]. And because in this merit King Mashiach will come in the future—and not in any other merit—it is not proper to be discouraged [from the study of Kabbalah].",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The question, however, is whether the ban ever existed in the first place. Concerning the above quote by Avraham Azulai, it has found many versions in English, another is this",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "From the year 1540 and onward, the basic levels of Kabbalah must be taught publicly to everyone, young and old. Only through Kabbalah will we forever eliminate war, destruction, and man's inhumanity to his fellow man.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The lines concerning the year 1490 are also missing from the Hebrew edition of Hesed L'Avraham, the source work that both of these quote from. Furthermore, by Azulai's view the ban was lifted thirty years before his birth, a time that would have corresponded with Haim Vital's publication of the teaching of Isaac Luria. Moshe Isserles understood there to be only a minor restriction, in his words, \"One's belly must be full of meat and wine, discerning between the prohibited and the permitted.\" He is supported by the Bier Hetiv, the Pithei Teshuva as well as the Vilna Gaon. The Vilna Gaon says, \"There was never any ban or enactment restricting the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah. Any who says there is has never studied Kabbalah, has never seen PaRDeS, and speaks as an ignoramus.\"",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Kabbalah of the Sefardi (Iberian Peninsula) and Mizrahi (Middle East, North Africa, and the Caucasus) Torah scholars has a long history. Kabbalah in various forms was widely studied, commented upon, and expanded by North African, Turkish, Yemenite, and Asian scholars from the 16th century onward. It flourished among Sefardic Jews in Tzfat (Safed), even before the arrival of Isaac Luria. Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Arukh was part of the Tzfat school of Kabbalah. Shlomo Alkabetz, author of the hymn Lekhah Dodi, taught there.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "His disciple Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (or Cordoeiro) authored Pardes Rimonim, an organised, exhaustive compilation of kabbalistic teachings on a variety of subjects up to that point. Cordovero headed the academy of Tzfat until his death, when Isaac Luria rose to prominence. Rabbi Moshe's disciple Eliyahu De Vidas authored the classic work, Reishit Chochma, combining kabbalistic and mussar (moral) teachings. Chaim Vital also studied under Cordovero, but with the arrival of Luria became his main disciple. Vital claimed to be the only one authorised to transmit the Ari's teachings, though other disciples also published books presenting Luria's teachings.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "The Oriental Kabbalist tradition continues until today among Sephardi and Mizrachi Hakham sages and study circles. Among leading figures were the Yemenite Shalom Sharabi (1720–1777) of the Beit El Synagogue, the Jerusalemite Hida (1724–1806), the Baghdad leader Ben Ish Chai (1832–1909), and the Abuhatzeira dynasty.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "One of the most innovative theologians in early-modern Judaism was Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1525–1609) known as the \"Maharal of Prague\". Many of his written works survive and are studied for their unusual combination of the mystical and philosophical approaches in Judaism. While conversant in Kabbalistic learning, he expresses Jewish mystical thought in his own individual approach without reference to Kabbalistic terms. The Maharal is most well known in popular culture for the legend of the golem of Prague, associated with him in folklore. However, his thought influenced Hasidism, for example being studied in the introspective Przysucha school. During the 20th century, Isaac Hutner (1906–1980) continued to spread the Maharal's works indirectly through his own teachings and publications within the non-Hasidic yeshiva world.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The spiritual and mystical yearnings of many Jews remained frustrated after the death of Isaac Luria and his disciples and colleagues. No hope was in sight for many following the devastation and mass killings of the pogroms that followed in the wake of the Chmielnicki Uprising (1648–1654), the largest single massacre of Jews until the Holocaust, and it was at this time that a controversial scholar by the name of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) captured the hearts and minds of the Jewish masses of that time with the promise of a newly minted messianic Millennialism in the form of his own personage.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "His charisma, mystical teachings that included repeated pronunciations of the holy Tetragrammaton in public, tied to an unstable personality, and with the help of his greatest enthusiast, Nathan of Gaza, convinced the Jewish masses that the Jewish Messiah had finally come. It seemed that the esoteric teachings of Kabbalah had found their \"champion\" and had triumphed, but this era of Jewish history unravelled when Zevi became an apostate to Judaism by converting to Islam after he was arrested by the Ottoman Sultan and threatened with execution for attempting a plan to conquer the world and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Unwilling to give up their messianic expectations, a minority of Zevi's Jewish followers converted to Islam along with him.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Many of his followers, known as Sabbatians, continued to worship him in secret, explaining his conversion not as an effort to save his life but to recover the sparks of the holy in each religion, and most leading rabbis were always on guard to root them out. The Dönmeh movement in modern Turkey is a surviving remnant of the Sabbatian schism. Theologies developed by leaders of Sabbatian movements dealt with antinomian redemption of the realm of impurity through sin, based on Lurianic theory. Moderate views reserved this dangerous task for the divine messiah Sabbatai Zevi alone, while his followers remained observant Jews. Radical forms spoke of the messianic transcendence of Torah, and required Sabbatean followers to emulate him, either in private or publicly.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Due to the chaos caused in the Jewish world, the rabbinic prohibition against studying Kabbalah established itself firmly within the Jewish religion. One of the conditions allowing a man to study and engage himself in the Kabbalah was to be at least forty years old. This age requirement came about during this period and is not Talmudic in origin but rabbinic. Many Jews are familiar with this ruling, but are not aware of its origins. Moreover, the prohibition is not halakhic in nature. According to Moses Cordovero, halakhically, one must be of age twenty to engage in the Kabbalah. Many famous kabbalists, including the ARI, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, Yehuda Ashlag, were younger than twenty when they began.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Sabbatian movement was followed by that of the Frankists, disciples of Jacob Frank (1726–1791), who eventually became an apostate to Judaism by apparently converting to Catholicism. Frank took the Sabbatean impulse to its nihilistic end, declaring himself part of a messianic trinity along with his daughter, and that breaking all of Torah was its fulfilment. This era of disappointment did not stem the Jewish masses' yearnings for \"mystical\" leadership.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–1746), based in Italy, was a precocious Talmudic scholar who deduced a need for the public teaching and study of Kabbalah. He established a yeshiva for Kabbalah study and actively recruited students. He wrote copious manuscripts in an appealing clear Hebrew style, all of which gained the attention of both admirers and rabbinical critics, who feared another \"Sabbatai Zevi\" (false messiah) in the making. His rabbinical opponents forced him to close his school, hand over and destroy many of his most precious unpublished kabbalistic writings, and go into exile in the Netherlands. He eventually moved to the Land of Israel. Some of his most important works, such as Derekh Hashem, survive and serve as a gateway to the world of Jewish mysticism.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Elijah of Vilna (Vilna Gaon) (1720–1797), based in Lithuania, had his teachings encoded and publicised by his disciples, such as Chaim Volozhin's posthumously published the mystical-ethical work Nefesh HaChaim. He staunchly opposed the new Hasidic movement and warned against their public displays of religious fervour inspired by the mystical teachings of their rabbis. Although the Vilna Gaon did not look with favor on the Hasidic movement, he did not prohibit the study and engagement in the Kabbalah. This is evident from his writings in the Even Shlema. \"He that is able to understand secrets of the Torah and does not try to understand them will be judged harshly, may God have mercy\". (The Vilna Gaon, Even Shlema, 8:24). \"The Redemption will only come about through learning Torah, and the essence of the Redemption depends upon learning Kabbalah\" (The Vilna Gaon, Even Shlema, 11:3).",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In the Oriental tradition of Kabbalah, Shalom Sharabi (1720–1777) from Yemen was a major esoteric clarifier of the works of the Ari. The Beit El Synagogue, \"yeshivah of the kabbalists\", which he came to head, was one of the few communities to bring Lurianic meditation into communal prayer.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In the 20th century, Yehuda Ashlag (1885—1954) in Mandate Palestine became a leading esoteric kabbalist in the traditional mode, who translated the Zohar into Hebrew with a new approach in Lurianic Kabbalah.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Yisrael ben Eliezer Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760), founder of Hasidism in the area of Ukraine, spread teachings based on Lurianic Kabbalah, but adapted to a different aim of immediate psychological perception of Divine Omnipresence amidst the mundane. The emotional, ecstatic fervour of early Hasidism developed from previous Nistarim circles of mystical activity, but instead sought communal revival of the common folk by reframing Judaism around the central principle of devekut (mystical cleaving to God) for all. This new approach turned formerly esoteric elite kabbalistic theory into a popular social mysticism movement for the first time, with its own doctrines, classic texts, teachings and customs. From the Baal Shem Tov sprang the wide ongoing schools of Hasidic Judaism, each with different approaches and thought. Hasidism instituted a new concept of Tzadik leadership in Jewish mysticism, where the elite scholars of mystical texts now took on a social role as embodiments and intercessors of Divinity for the masses. With the 19th-century consolidation of the movement, leadership became dynastic.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Among later Hasidic schools Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810), the great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, revitalised and further expanded the latter's teachings, amassing a following of thousands in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania and Poland. In a unique amalgam of Hasidic and Mitnaged approaches, Rebbe Nachman emphasised study of both Kabbalah and serious Torah scholarship to his disciples. His teachings also differed from the way other Hasidic groups were developing, as he rejected the idea of hereditary Hasidic dynasties and taught that each Hasid must \"search for the tzaddik ('saintly/righteous person')\" for himself and within himself.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "The Habad-Lubavitch intellectual school of Hasidism broke away from General-Hasidism's emotional faith orientation, by making the mind central as the route to the internal heart. Its texts combine what they view as rational investigation with explanation of Kabbalah through articulating unity in a common Divine essence. In recent times, the messianic element latent in Hasidism has come to the fore in Habad.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The Jewish Haskalah (Hebrew: הַשְׂכָּלָה) enlightenment movement from the late 1700s renewed an ideology of rationalism in Judaism, giving birth to critical Judaic scholarship. It presented Judaism in apologetic terms, stripped of mysticism and myth, in line with Jewish emancipation. Many foundational historians of Judaism such as Heinrich Graetz, criticised Kabbalah as a foreign import that compromised historical Judaism. In the 20th century Gershom Scholem overturned Jewish historiography, presenting the centrality of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah to historical Judaism, and their subterranean life as the true creative renewing spirit of Jewish thought and culture. His influence contributed to the flourishing of Jewish mysticism academia today, its impact on wider intellectual currents, and the contribution of mystical spirituality in modernist Jewish denominations today. Traditionalist Kabbalah and Hasidism, meanwhile, continued outside the academic interest in it.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Jewish mysticism has influenced the thought of some major Jewish theologians, philosophers, writers and thinkers in the 20th century, outside of Kabbalistic or Hasidic traditions. The first Chief Rabbi of Mandate Palestine, Abraham Isaac Kook was a mystical thinker who drew heavily on Kabbalistic notions through his own poetic terminology. His writings are concerned with fusing the false divisions between sacred and secular, rational and mystical, legal and imaginative. Students of Joseph B. Soloveitchik, figurehead of American Modern Orthodox Judaism have read the influence of Kabbalistic symbols in his philosophical works. Neo-Hasidism, rather than Kabbalah, shaped Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Abraham Joshua Heschel's Conservative Judaism. Lurianic symbols of Tzimtzum and Shevirah have informed Holocaust theologians. Gershom Scholem's central academic influence on reshaping Jewish historiography in favour of myth and imagination, made historical arcane Kabbalah of relevance to wide intellectual discourse in the 20th century. Moshe Idel traces the influences of Kabbalistic and Hasidic concepts on diverse thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka, Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano, Paul Celan and George Steiner. Harold Bloom has seen Kabbalistic hermeneutics as the paradigm for western literary criticism. Sanford Drob discusses the direct and indirect influence of Kabbalah on the depth psychologies of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, as well as modern and postmodern philosophers, in his project to develop new intellectual relevance and open dialogue for kabbalah. The interaction of Kabbalah with modern physics, as with other mystical traditions, has generated its own literature. Traditional Kabbalist Yitzchak Ginsburgh brings esoteric dimensions of advanced kabbalistic symmetry into relationship with mathematics and the sciences, including renaming the elementary particles of Quantum theory with Kabbalistic Hebrew names, and developing kabbalistic approaches to debates in Evolutionary theory.",
"title": "History of Jewish mysticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The nature of the divine prompted kabbalists to envision two aspects to God: (a) God in essence, absolutely transcendent, unknowable, limitless divine simplicity beyond revelation, and (b) God in manifestation, the revealed persona of God through which he creates and sustains and relates to humankind. Kabbalists speak of the first as Ein/Ayn Sof (אין סוף \"the infinite/endless\", literally \"there is no end\"). Of the impersonal Ein Sof nothing can be grasped. However, the second aspect of divine emanations, are accessible to human perception, dynamically interacting throughout spiritual and physical existence, reveal the divine immanently, and are bound up in the life of man. Kabbalists believe that these two aspects are not contradictory but complement one another, emanations mystically revealing the concealed mystery from within the Godhead.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "As a term describing the Infinite Godhead beyond Creation, Kabbalists viewed the Ein Sof itself as too sublime to be referred to directly in the Torah. It is not a Holy Name in Judaism, as no name could contain a revelation of the Ein Sof. Even terming it \"No End\" is an inadequate representation of its true nature, the description only bearing its designation in relation to Creation. However, the Torah does narrate God speaking in the first person, most memorably the first word of the Ten Commandments, a reference without any description or name to the simple Divine essence (termed also Atzmus Ein Sof – Essence of the Infinite) beyond even the duality of Infinitude/Finitude. In contrast, the term Ein Sof describes the Godhead as Infinite lifeforce first cause, continuously keeping all Creation in existence. The Zohar reads the first words of Genesis, BeReishit Bara Elohim – In the beginning God created, as \"With (the level of) Reishit (Beginning) (the Ein Sof) created Elohim (God's manifestation in creation)\":",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "At the very beginning the King made engravings in the supernal purity. A spark of blackness emerged in the sealed within the sealed, from the mystery of the Ayn Sof, a mist within matter, implanted in a ring, no white, no black, no red, no yellow, no colour at all. When He measured with the standard of measure, He made colours to provide light. Within the spark, in the innermost part, emerged a source, from which the colours are painted below; it is sealed among the sealed things of the mystery of Ayn Sof. It penetrated, yet did not penetrate its air. It was not known at all until, from the pressure of its penetration, a single point shone, sealed, supernal. Beyond this point nothing is known, so it is called reishit (beginning): the first word of all ... \"",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The structure of emanations has been described in various ways: Sephirot (divine attributes) and Partzufim (divine \"faces\"), Ohr (spiritual light and flow), Names of God and the supernal Torah, Olamot (Spiritual Worlds), a Divine Tree and Archetypal Man, Angelic Chariot and Palaces, male and female, enclothed layers of reality, inwardly holy vitality and external Kelipot shells, 613 channels (\"limbs\" of the King) and the divine Souls of Man. These symbols are used to describe various levels and aspects of Divine manifestation, from the Pnimi (inner) dimensions to the Hitzoni (outer). It is solely in relation to the emanations, certainly not the Ein Sof Ground of all Being, that Kabbalah uses anthropomorphic symbolism to relate psychologically to divinity. Kabbalists debated the validity of anthropomorphic symbolism, between its disclosure as mystical allusion, versus its instrumental use as allegorical metaphor; in the language of the Zohar, symbolism \"touches yet does not touch\" its point.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "The Sephirot (also spelled \"sefirot\"; singular sefirah) are the ten emanations and attributes of God with which he continually sustains the existence of the universe. The Zohar and other Kabbalistic texts elaborate on the emergence of the sephirot from a state of concealed potential in the Ein Sof until their manifestation in the mundane world. In particular, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (known as \"the Ramak\"), describes how God emanated the myriad details of finite reality out of the absolute unity of Divine light via the ten sephirot, or vessels.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "According to Lurianic cosmology, the sephirot correspond to various levels of creation (ten sephirot in each of the Four Worlds, and four worlds within each of the larger four worlds, each containing ten sephirot, which themselves contain ten sephirot, to an infinite number of possibilities), and are emanated from the Creator for the purpose of creating the universe. The sephirot are considered revelations of the Creator's will (ratzon), and they should not be understood as ten different \"gods\" but as ten different ways the one God reveals his will through the Emanations. It is not God who changes but the ability to perceive God that changes.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Divine creation by means of the Ten Sephirot is an ethical process. They represent the different aspects of Morality. Loving-Kindness is a possible moral justification found in Chessed, and Gevurah is the Moral Justification of Justice and both are mediated by Mercy which is Rachamim. However, these pillars of morality become immoral once they become extremes. When Loving-Kindness becomes extreme it can lead to sexual depravity and lack of Justice to the wicked. When Justice becomes extreme, it can lead to torture and the Murder of innocents and unfair punishment.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "\"Righteous\" humans (tzadikim plural of Tzadik) ascend these ethical qualities of the ten sephirot by doing righteous actions. If there were no righteous humans, the blessings of God would become completely hidden, and creation would cease to exist. While real human actions are the \"Foundation\" (Yesod) of this universe (Malchut), these actions must accompany the conscious intention of compassion. Compassionate actions are often impossible without faith (Emunah), meaning to trust that God always supports compassionate actions even when God seems hidden. Ultimately, it is necessary to show compassion toward oneself too in order to share compassion toward others. This \"selfish\" enjoyment of God's blessings but only in order to empower oneself to assist others is an important aspect of \"Restriction\", and is considered a kind of golden mean in kabbalah, corresponding to the sefirah of Adornment (Tiferet) being part of the \"Middle Column\".",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, wrote Tomer Devorah (Palm Tree of Deborah), in which he presents an ethical teaching of Judaism in the kabbalistic context of the ten sephirot. Tomer Devorah has become also a foundational Musar text.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "The most esoteric Idrot sections of the classic Zohar make reference to hypostatic male and female Partzufim (Divine Personas) displacing the Sephirot, manifestations of God in particular Anthropomorphic symbolic personalities based on Biblical esoteric exegesis and midrashic narratives. Lurianic Kabbalah places these at the centre of our existence, rather than earlier Kabbalah's Sephirot, which Luria saw as broken in Divine crisis. Contemporary cognitive understanding of the Partzuf symbols relates them to Jungian archetypes of the collective unconscious, reflecting a psychologised progression from youth to sage in therapeutic healing back to the infinite Ein Sof/Unconscious, as Kabbalah is simultaneously both theology and psychology.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Medieval Kabbalists believed that all things are linked to God through these emanations, making all levels in creation part of one great, gradually descending chain of being. Through this any lower creation reflects its particular roots in supernal divinity. Kabbalists agreed with the divine transcendence described by Jewish philosophy, but as only referring to the Ein Sof unknowable Godhead. They reinterpreted the theistic philosophical concept of creation from nothing, replacing God's creative act with panentheistic continual self-emanation by the mystical Ayin Nothingness/No-thing sustaining all spiritual and physical realms as successively more corporeal garments, veils and condensations of divine immanence. The innumerable levels of descent divide into Four comprehensive spiritual worlds, Atziluth (\"Closeness\" – Divine Wisdom), Beriah (\"Creation\" – Divine Understanding), Yetzirah (\"Formation\" – Divine Emotions), Assiah (\"Action\" – Divine Activity), with a preceding Fifth World Adam Kadmon (\"Primordial Man\" – Divine Will) sometimes excluded due to its sublimity. Together the whole spiritual heavens form the Divine Persona/Anthropos.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Hasidic thought extends the divine immanence of Kabbalah by holding that God is all that really exists, all else being completely undifferentiated from God's perspective. This view can be defined as acosmic monistic panentheism. According to this philosophy, God's existence is higher than anything that this world can express, yet he includes all things of this world within his divine reality in perfect unity, so that the creation effected no change in him at all. This paradox as seen from dual human and divine perspectives is dealt with at length in Chabad texts.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Among problems considered in the Hebrew Kabbalah is the theological issue of the nature and origin of evil. In the views of some Kabbalists this conceives \"evil\" as a \"quality of God\", asserting that negativity enters into the essence of the Absolute. In this view it is conceived that the Absolute needs evil to \"be what it is\", i.e., to exist. Foundational texts of Medieval Kabbalism conceived evil as a demonic parallel to the holy, called the Sitra Achra (the \"Other Side\"), and the qlippoth (the \"shells/husks\") that cover and conceal the holy, are nurtured from it, and yet also protect it by limiting its revelation. Scholem termed this element of the Spanish Kabbalah a \"Jewish gnostic\" motif, in the sense of dual powers in the divine realm of manifestation. In a radical notion, the root of evil is found within the 10 holy Sephirot, through an imbalance of Gevurah, the power of \"Strength/Judgement/Severity\".",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "Gevurah is necessary for Creation to exist as it counterposes Chesed (\"loving-kindness\"), restricting the unlimited divine bounty within suitable vessels, so forming the Worlds. However, if man sins (actualising impure judgement within his soul), the supernal Judgement is reciprocally empowered over the Kindness, introducing disharmony among the Sephirot in the divine realm and exile from God throughout Creation. The demonic realm, though illusory in its holy origin, becomes the real apparent realm of impurity in lower Creation. In the Zohar, the sin of Adam and Eve (who embodied Adam Kadmon below) took place in the spiritual realms. Their sin was that they separated the Tree of knowledge (10 sefirot within Malkuth, representing Divine immanence), from the Tree of life within it (10 sefirot within Tiferet, representing Divine transcendence). This introduced the false perception of duality into lower creation, an external Tree of Death nurtured from holiness, and an Adam Belial of impurity. In Lurianic Kabbalah, evil originates from a primordial shattering of the sephirot of God's Persona before creation of the stable spiritual worlds, mystically represented by the 8 Kings of Edom (the derivative of Gevurah) \"who died\" before any king reigned in Israel from Genesis 36. In the divine view from above within Kabbalah, emphasised in Hasidic Panentheism, the appearance of duality and pluralism below dissolves into the absolute Monism of God, psychologising evil. Though impure below, what appears as evil derives from a divine blessing too high to be contained openly. The mystical task of the righteous in the Zohar is to reveal this concealed Divine Oneness and absolute good, to \"convert bitterness into sweetness, darkness into light\".",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Kabbalistic doctrine gives man the central role in Creation, as his soul and body correspond to the supernal divine manifestations. In the Christian Kabbalah this scheme was universalised to describe harmonia mundi, the harmony of Creation within man. In Judaism, it gave a profound spiritualisation of Jewish practice. While the kabbalistic scheme gave a radically innovative, though conceptually continuous, development of mainstream Midrashic and Talmudic rabbinic notions, kabbalistic thought underscored and invigorated conservative Jewish observance. The esoteric teachings of kabbalah gave the traditional mitzvot observances the central role in spiritual creation, whether the practitioner was learned in this knowledge or not. Accompanying normative Jewish observance and worship with elite mystical kavanot intentions gave them theurgic power, but sincere observance by common folk, especially in the Hasidic popularisation of kabbalah, could replace esoteric abilities. Many kabbalists were also leading legal figures in Judaism, such as Nachmanides and Joseph Karo.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Medieval kabbalah elaborates particular reasons for each Biblical mitzvah, and their role in harmonising the supernal divine flow, uniting masculine and feminine forces on High. With this, the feminine Divine presence in this world is drawn from exile to the Holy One Above. The 613 mitzvot are embodied in the organs and soul of man. Lurianic Kabbalah incorporates this in the more inclusive scheme of Jewish messianic rectification of exiled divinity. Jewish mysticism, in contrast to Divine transcendence rationalist human-centred reasons for Jewish observance, gave Divine-immanent providential cosmic significance to the daily events in the worldly life of man in general, and the spiritual role of Jewish observance in particular.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "The Kabbalah posits that the human soul has three elements, the nefesh, ru'ach, and neshamah. The nefesh is found in all humans, and enters the physical body at birth. It is the source of one's physical and psychological nature. The next two parts of the soul are not implanted at birth, but can be developed over time; their development depends on the actions and beliefs of the individual. They are said to only fully exist in people awakened spiritually. A common way of explaining the three parts of the soul is as follows:",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "Reincarnation, the transmigration of the soul after death, was introduced into Judaism as a central esoteric tenet of Kabbalah from the Medieval period onwards, called Gilgul neshamot (\"cycles of the soul\"). The concept does not appear overtly in the Hebrew Bible or classic rabbinic literature, and was rejected by various Medieval Jewish philosophers. However, the Kabbalists explained a number of scriptural passages in reference to Gilgulim. The concept became central to the later Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, who systemised it as the personal parallel to the cosmic process of rectification. Through Lurianic Kabbalah and Hasidic Judaism, reincarnation entered popular Jewish culture as a literary motif.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Tzimtzum (Constriction/Concentration) is the primordial cosmic act whereby God \"contracted\" His infinite light, leaving a \"void\" into which the light of existence was poured. This allowed the emergence of independent existence that would not become nullified by the pristine Infinite Light, reconciling the unity of the Ein Sof with the plurality of creation. This changed the first creative act into one of withdrawal/exile, the antithesis of the ultimate Divine Will. In contrast, a new emanation after the Tzimtzum shone into the vacuum to begin creation, but led to an initial instability called Tohu (Chaos), leading to a new crisis of Shevirah (Shattering) of the sephirot vessels. The shards of the broken vessels fell down into the lower realms, animated by remnants of their divine light, causing primordial exile within the Divine Persona before the creation of man. Exile and enclothement of higher divinity within lower realms throughout existence requires man to complete the Tikkun olam (Rectification) process. Rectification Above corresponds to the reorganization of the independent sephirot into relating Partzufim (Divine Personas), previously referred to obliquely in the Zohar. From the catastrophe stems the possibility of self-aware Creation, and also the Kelipot (Impure Shells) of previous Medieval kabbalah. The metaphorical anthropomorphism of the partzufim accentuates the sexual unifications of the redemption process, while Gilgul reincarnation emerges from the scheme. Uniquely, Lurianism gave formerly private mysticism the urgency of Messianic social involvement.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "According to interpretations of Luria, the catastrophe stemmed from the \"unwillingness\" of the residue imprint after the Tzimtzum to relate to the new vitality that began creation. The process was arranged to shed and harmonise the Divine Infinity with the latent potential of evil. The creation of Adam would have redeemed existence, but his sin caused new shevirah of Divine vitality, requiring the Giving of the Torah to begin Messianic rectification. Historical and individual history becomes the narrative of reclaiming exiled Divine sparks.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "Kabbalistic thought extended Biblical and Midrashic notions that God enacted Creation through the Hebrew language and through the Torah into a full linguistic mysticism. In this, every Hebrew letter, word, number, even accent on words of the Hebrew Bible contain Jewish mystical meanings, describing the spiritual dimensions within exoteric ideas, and it teaches the hermeneutic methods of interpretation for ascertaining these meanings. Names of God in Judaism have further prominence, though infinite meaning turns the whole Torah into a Divine name. As the Hebrew name of things is the channel of their lifeforce, parallel to the sephirot, so concepts such as \"holiness\" and \"mitzvot\" embody ontological Divine immanence, as God can be known in manifestation as well as transcendence. The infinite potential of meaning in the Torah, as in the Ein Sof, is reflected in the symbol of the two trees of the Garden of Eden; the Torah of the Tree of Knowledge is the external, finite Halachic Torah, enclothed within which the mystics perceive the unlimited infinite plurality of meanings of the Torah of the Tree of Life. In Lurianic terms, each of the 600,000 root souls of Israel find their own interpretation in Torah, as \"God, the Torah and Israel are all One\".",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "The reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "As early as the 1st century BCE Jews believed that the Torah and other canonical texts contained encoded messages and hidden meanings. Gematria is one method for discovering its hidden meanings. In this system, each Hebrew letter also represents a number. By converting letters to numbers, Kabbalists were able to find a hidden meaning in each word. This method of interpretation was used extensively by various schools.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 81,
"text": "In contemporary interpretation of kabbalah, Sanford Drob makes cognitive sense of this linguistic mythos by relating it to postmodern philosophical concepts described by Jacques Derrida and others, where all reality embodies narrative texts with infinite plurality of meanings brought by the reader. In this dialogue, kabbalah survives the nihilism of Deconstruction by incorporating its own Lurianic Shevirah, and by the dialectical paradox where man and God imply each other.",
"title": "Concepts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 82,
"text": "The founder of the academic study of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, privileged an intellectual view of the nature of Kabbalistic symbols as dialectic Theosophical speculation. In contrast, contemporary scholarship of Moshe Idel and Elliot R. Wolfson has opened a phenomenological understanding of the mystical nature of Kabbalistic experience, based on a close reading of the historical texts. Wolfson has shown that among the closed elite circles of mystical activity, medieval Theosophical Kabbalists held that an intellectual view of their symbols was secondary to the experiential. In the context of medieval Jewish philosophical debates on the role of imagination in Biblical prophecy, and essentialist versus instrumental kabbalistic debates about the relation of sephirot to God, they saw contemplation on the sephirot as a vehicle for prophecy. Judaism's ban on physical iconography, along with anthropomorphic metaphors for Divinity in the Hebrew Bible and midrash, enabled their internal visualisation of the Divine sephirot Anthropos in imagination. Disclosure of the aniconic in iconic internal psychology, involved sublimatory revelation of Kabbalah's sexual unifications. Previous academic distinction between Theosophical versus Abulafian Ecstatic-Prophetic Kabbalah overstated their division of aims, which revolved around visual versus verbal/auditory views of prophecy. In addition, throughout the history of Judaic Kabbalah, the greatest mystics claimed to receive new teachings from Elijah the Prophet, the souls of earlier sages (a purpose of Lurianic meditation prostrated on the graves of Talmudic Tannaim, Amoraim and Kabbalists), the soul of the mishnah, ascents during sleep, heavenly messengers, etc. A tradition of parapsychology abilities, psychic knowledge, and theurgic intercessions in heaven for the community is recounted in the hagiographic works Praises of the Ari, Praises of the Besht, and in many other Kabbalistic and Hasidic tales. Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts are concerned to apply themselves from exegesis and theory to spiritual practice, including prophetic drawing of new mystical revelations in Torah. The mythological symbols Kabbalah uses to answer philosophical questions, themselves invite mystical contemplation, intuitive apprehension and psychological engagement.",
"title": "Cognition, mysticism, or values"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 83,
"text": "In bringing Theosophical Kabbalah into contemporary intellectual understanding, using the tools of modern and postmodern philosophy and psychology, Sanford Drob shows philosophically how every symbol of the Kabbalah embodies the simultaneous dialectical paradox of mystical Coincidentia oppositorum, the conjoining of two opposite dualities. Thus the Infinite Ein Sof is above the duality of Yesh/Ayin Being/Non-Being transcending Existence/Nothingness (Becoming into Existence through the souls of Man who are the inner dimension of all spiritual and physical worlds, yet simultaneously the Infinite Divine generative lifesource beyond Creation that continuously keeps everything spiritual and physical in existence); Sephirot bridge the philosophical problem of the One and the Many; Man is both Divine (Adam Kadmon) and human (invited to project human psychology onto Divinity to understand it); Tzimtzum is both illusion and real from Divine and human perspectives; evil and good imply each other (Kelipah draws from Divinity, good arises only from overcoming evil); Existence is simultaneously partial (Tzimtzum), broken (Shevirah), and whole (Tikun) from different perspectives; God experiences Himself as Other through Man, Man embodies and completes (Tikun) the Divine Persona Above. In Kabbalah's reciprocal Panentheism, Theism and Atheism/Humanism represent two incomplete poles of a mutual dialectic that imply and include each other's partial validity. This was expressed by the Chabad Hasidic thinker Aaron of Staroselye, that the truth of any concept is revealed only in its opposite.",
"title": "Cognition, mysticism, or values"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 84,
"text": "By expressing itself using symbols and myth that transcend single interpretations, Theosophical Kabbalah incorporates aspects of philosophy, Jewish theology, psychology and unconscious depth psychology, mysticism and meditation, Jewish exegesis, theurgy, and ethics, as well as overlapping with theory from magical elements. Its symbols can be read as questions which are their own existentialist answers (the Hebrew sephirah Chokhmah-Wisdom, the beginning of Existence, is read etymologically by Kabbalists as the question \"Koach Mah?\" the \"Power of What?\"). Alternative listings of the Sephirot start with either Keter (Unconscious Will/Volition), or Chokhmah (Wisdom), a philosophical duality between a Rational or Supra-Rational Creation, between whether the Mitzvot Judaic observances have reasons or transcend reasons in Divine Will, between whether study or good deeds is superior, and whether the symbols of Kabbalah should be read as primarily metaphysical intellectual cognition or Axiology values. Messianic redemption requires both ethical Tikkun olam and contemplative Kavanah. Sanford Drob sees every attempt to limit Kabbalah to one fixed dogmatic interpretation as necessarily bringing its own Deconstruction (Lurianic Kabbalah incorporates its own Shevirah self shattering; the Ein Sof transcends all of its infinite expressions; the infinite mystical Torah of the Tree of Life has no/infinite interpretations). The infinite axiology of the Ein Sof One, expressed through the Plural Many, overcomes the dangers of nihilism, or the antinomian mystical breaking of Jewish observance alluded to throughout Kabbalistic and Hasidic mysticisms.",
"title": "Cognition, mysticism, or values"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 85,
"text": "Like the rest of the rabbinic literature, the texts of kabbalah were once part of an ongoing oral tradition, though, over the centuries, much of the oral tradition has been written down.",
"title": "Primary texts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 86,
"text": "Jewish forms of esotericism existed over 2,000 years ago. Ben Sira (born c. 170 BCE) warns against it, saying: \"You shall have no business with secret things\". Nonetheless, mystical studies were undertaken and resulted in mystical literature, the first being the Apocalyptic literature of the second and first pre-Christian centuries and which contained elements that carried over to later kabbalah.",
"title": "Primary texts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 87,
"text": "Throughout the centuries since, many texts have been produced, among them the ancient descriptions of Sefer Yetzirah, the Heichalot mystical ascent literature, the Bahir, Sefer Raziel HaMalakh and the Zohar, the main text of Kabbalistic exegesis. Classic mystical Bible commentaries are included in fuller versions of the Mikraot Gedolot (Main Commentators). Cordoveran systemisation is presented in Pardes Rimonim, philosophical articulation in the works of the Maharal, and Lurianic rectification in Etz Chayim. Subsequent interpretation of Lurianic Kabbalah was made in the writings of Shalom Sharabi, in Nefesh HaChaim and the 20th-century Sulam. Hasidism interpreted kabbalistic structures to their correspondence in inward perception. The Hasidic development of kabbalah incorporates a successive stage of Jewish mysticism from historical kabbalistic metaphysics.",
"title": "Primary texts"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 88,
"text": "The first modern-academic historians of Judaism, the \"Wissenschaft des Judentums\" school of the 19th century, framed Judaism in solely rational terms in the emancipatory Haskalah spirit of their age. They opposed kabbalah and restricted its significance from Jewish historiography. In the mid-20th century, it was left to Gershom Scholem to overturn their stance, establishing the flourishing present-day academic investigation of Jewish mysticism, and making Heichalot, Kabbalistic and Hasidic texts the objects of scholarly critical-historical study. In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components of Judaism were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the exoteric Halakha or intellectualist Jewish philosophy, were the living subterranean stream in historical Jewish development that periodically broke out to renew the Jewish spirit and social life of the community. Scholem's magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) among his seminal works, though representing scholarship and interpretations that have subsequently been challenged and revised within the field, remains the only academic survey studying all main historical periods of Jewish mysticism",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 89,
"text": "The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been a centre of this research, including Scholem and Isaiah Tishby, and more recently Joseph Dan, Yehuda Liebes, Rachel Elior, and Moshe Idel. Scholars across the eras of Jewish mysticism in America and Britain have included Alexander Altmann, Arthur Green, Lawrence Fine, Elliot Wolfson, Daniel Matt, Louis Jacobs and Ada Rapoport-Albert.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 90,
"text": "Moshe Idel has opened up research on the Ecstatic Kabbalah alongside the theosophical, and has called for new multi-disciplinary approaches, beyond the philological and historical that have dominated until now, to include phenomenology, psychology, anthropology and comparative studies.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 91,
"text": "Historians have noted that most claims for the authority of kabbalah involve an argument of the antiquity of authority. As a result, virtually all early foundational works pseudepigraphically claim, or are ascribed, ancient authorship. For example, Sefer Raziel HaMalach, an astro-magical text partly based on a magical manual of late antiquity, Sefer ha-Razim, was, according to the kabbalists, transmitted by the angel Raziel to Adam after he was evicted from Eden. Another famous work, the early Sefer Yetzirah, is dated back to the patriarch Abraham. This tendency toward pseudepigraphy has its roots in apocalyptic literature, which claims that esoteric knowledge such as magic, divination and astrology was transmitted to humans in the mythic past by the two angels, Aza and Azaz'el (in other places, Azaz'el and Uzaz'el) who fell from heaven (see Genesis 6:4).",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 92,
"text": "As well as ascribing ancient origins to texts, and reception of Oral Torah transmission, the greatest and most innovative Kabbalists claimed mystical reception of direct personal divine revelations, by heavenly mentors such as Elijah the Prophet, the souls of Talmudic sages, prophetic revelation, soul ascents on high, etc. On this basis Arthur Green speculates, that while the Zohar was written by a circle of Kabbalists in medieval Spain, they may have believed they were channeling the souls and direct revelations from the earlier mystic circle of Shimon bar Yochai in 2nd century Galilee depicted in the Zohar's narrative. Academics have compared the Zohar mystic circle of Spain with the romanticised wandering mystic circle of Galilee described in the text. Similarly, Isaac Luria gathered his disciples at the traditional Idra assembly location, placing each in the seat of their former reincarnations as students of Shimon bar Yochai.",
"title": "Scholarship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 93,
"text": "One point of view is represented by the Hasidic work Tanya (1797), in order to argue that Jews have a different character of soul: while a non-Jew, according to the author Shneur Zalman of Liadi (born 1745), can achieve a high level of spirituality, similar to an angel, his soul is still fundamentally different in character, from a Jewish one. A similar view is found in Kuzari, an early medieval philosophical book by Yehuda Halevi (1075–1141 CE).",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 94,
"text": "Another prominent Habad rabbi, Abraham Yehudah Khein (born 1878), believed that spiritually elevated Gentiles have essentially Jewish souls, \"who just lack the formal conversion to Judaism\", and that unspiritual Jews are \"Jewish merely by their birth documents\". The great 20th-century Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag viewed the terms \"Jews\" and \"Gentile\" as different levels of perception, available to every human soul.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 95,
"text": "David Halperin argues that the collapse of Kabbalah's influence among Western European Jews over the course of the 17th and 18th century was a result of the cognitive dissonance they experienced between the negative perception of Gentiles found in some exponents of Kabbalah, and their own positive dealings with non-Jews, which were rapidly expanding and improving during this period due to the influence of the Enlightenment.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 96,
"text": "However, a number of renowned Kabbalists claimed the exact opposite, stressing universality of all human souls and providing universal interpretations of the Kabbalistic tradition, including its Lurianic version. In their view, Kabbalah transcends the borders of Judaism and can serve as a basis of inter-religious theosophy and a universal religion. Pinchas Elijah Hurwitz, a prominent Lithuanian-Galician Kabbalist of the 18th century and a moderate proponent of the Haskalah, called for brotherly love and solidarity between all nations, and believed that Kabbalah can empower everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike, with prophetic abilities.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 97,
"text": "The works of Abraham Cohen de Herrera (1570–1635) are full of references to Gentile mystical philosophers. Such approach was particularly common among the Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian Jews. Late medieval and Renaissance Italian Kabbalists, such as Yohanan Alemanno, David Messer Leon and Abraham Yagel, adhered to humanistic ideals and incorporated teachings of various Christian and pagan mystics.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 98,
"text": "A prime representative of this humanist stream in Kabbalah was Elijah Benamozegh, who explicitly praised Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, as well as a whole range of ancient pagan mystical systems. He believed that Kabbalah can reconcile the differences between the world religions, which represent different facets and stages of the universal human spirituality. In his writings, Benamozegh interprets the New Testament, Hadith, Vedas, Avesta and pagan mysteries according to the Kabbalistic theosophy.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 99,
"text": "E. R. Wolfson provides numerous examples from the 17th to the 20th centuries, which would challenge the view of Halperin as well as the notion that \"modern Judaism\" has rejected or dismissed this \"outdated aspect\" of the religion and, he argues, there are still Kabbalists today who harbor this view. He argues that, while it is accurate to say that many Jews do and would find this distinction offensive, it is inaccurate to say that the idea has been totally rejected in all circles. As Wolfson has argued, it is an ethical demand on the part of scholars to continue to be vigilant with regard to this matter and in this way the tradition can be refined from within.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 100,
"text": "The idea that there are ten divine sephirot could evolve over time into the idea that \"God is One being, yet in that One being there are Ten\" which opens up a debate about what the \"correct beliefs\" in God should be, according to Judaism. The early Kabbalists debated the relationship of the Sephirot to God, adopting a range of essentialist versus instrumental views. Modern Kabbalah, based on the 16th century systemisations of Cordovero and Isaac Luria, takes an intermediate position: the instrumental vessels of the sephirot are created, but their inner light is from the undifferentiated Ohr Ein Sof essence.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 101,
"text": "The pre-Kabbalistic Saadia Gaon wrote that Jews who believe in reincarnation have adopted a non-Jewish belief.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 102,
"text": "Maimonides (12th century), celebrated by followers for his Jewish rationalism, rejected many of the pre-Kabbalistic Hekalot texts, particularly Shi'ur Qomah whose starkly anthropomorphic vision of God he considered heretical. Maimonides, a centrally important medieval sage of Judaism, lived at the time of the first emergence of Kabbalah. Modern scholarship views the systemisation and publication of their historic oral doctrine by Kabbalists, as a move to rebut the threat on Judaic observance by the populance misreading Maimonides' ideal of philosophical contemplation over ritual performance in his philosophical Guide of the Perplexed. They objected to Maimonides equating the Talmudic Maaseh Breishit and Maaseh Merkavah secrets of the Torah with Aristotelean physics and metaphysics in that work and in his legal Mishneh Torah, teaching that their own Theosophy, centred on an esoteric metaphysics of traditional Jewish practice, is the Torah's true inner meaning.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 103,
"text": "The Kabbalist medieval rabbinic sage Nachmanides (13th century), classic debater against Maimonidean rationalism, provides background to many kabbalistic ideas. An entire book entitled Gevuras Aryeh was authored by Yaakov Yehuda Aryeh Leib Frenkel and originally published in 1915, specifically to explain and elaborate on the kabbalistic concepts addressed by Nachmanides in his classic commentary to the Five books of Moses.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 104,
"text": "Abraham Maimonides (in the spirit of his father Maimonides, Saadiah Gaon, and other predecessors) explains at length in his Milḥamot HaShem that God is in no way literally within time or space nor physically outside time or space, since time and space simply do not apply to his being whatsoever, emphasizing the Monotheist Oneness of Divine transcendence unlike any worldly conception. Kabbalah's Panentheism expressed by Moses Cordovero and Hasidic thought, agrees that God's essence transcends all expression, but holds in contrast that existence is a manifestation of God's Being, descending immanently through spiritual and physical condensations of the divine light. By incorporating the pluralist many within God, God's Oneness is deepened to exclude the true existence of anything but God. In Hasidic Panentheism, the world is acosmic from the Divine view, yet real from its own perspective.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 105,
"text": "Around the 1230s, Rabbi Meir ben Simon of Narbonne wrote an epistle (included in his Milḥemet Mitzvah) against his contemporaries, the early Kabbalists, characterizing them as blasphemers who even approach heresy. He particularly singled out the Sefer Bahir, rejecting the attribution of its authorship to the tanna R. Neḥunya ben ha-Kanah and describing some of its content as truly heretical.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 106,
"text": "Leon of Modena, a 17th-century Venetian critic of Kabbalah, wrote that if we were to accept the Kabbalah, then the Christian trinity would be compatible with Judaism, as the Trinity seems to resemble the kabbalistic doctrine of the sephirot. This was in response to the belief that some European Jews of the period addressed individual sephirot in their prayers, although the practice was apparently uncommon. Apologists explained that Jews may have been praying for and not necessarily to the aspects of Godliness represented by the sephirot. In contrast to Christianity, Kabbalists declare that one prays only \"to Him (God's Essence, male solely by metaphor in Hebrew's gendered grammar), not to his attributes (sephirot or any other Divine manifestations or forms of incarnation)\". Kabbalists directed their prayers to God's essence through the channels of particular sephirot using kavanot Divine names intentions. To pray to a manifestation of God introduces false division among the sephirot, disrupting their absolute unity, dependence and dissolving into the transcendent Ein Sof; the sephirot descend throughout Creation, only appearing from man's perception of God, where God manifests by any variety of numbers.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 107,
"text": "Yaakov Emden (1697–1776), himself an Orthodox Kabbalist who venerated the Zohar, concerned to battle Sabbatean misuse of Kabbalah, wrote the Mitpaḥath Sfarim (Veil of the Books), an astute critique of the Zohar in which he concludes that certain parts of the Zohar contain heretical teaching and therefore could not have been written by Shimon bar Yochai.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 108,
"text": "Vilna Gaon (1720–1797) held the Zohar and Luria in deep reverence, critically emending classic Judaic texts from historically accumulated errors by his acute acumen and scholarly belief in the perfect unity of Kabbalah revelation and Rabbinic Judaism. Though a Lurianic Kabbalist, his commentaries sometimes chose Zoharic interpretation over Luria when he felt the matter lent itself to a more exoteric view. Although proficient in mathematics and sciences and recommending their necessity for understanding Talmud, he had no use for canonical medieval Jewish philosophy, declaring that Maimonides had been \"misled by the accursed philosophy\" in denying belief in the external occult matters of demons, incantations and amulets.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 109,
"text": "Views of Kabbalists regarding Jewish philosophy varied from those who appreciated Maimonidean and other classic medieval philosophical works, integrating them with Kabbalah and seeing profound human philosophical and Divine kabbalistic wisdoms as compatible, to those who polemicised against religious philosophy during times when it became overly rationalist and dogmatic. A dictum commonly cited by Kabbalists, \"Kabbalah begins where Philosophy ends\", can be read as either appreciation or polemic. Moses of Burgos (late 13th century) declared, \"these philosophers whose wisdom you are praising end where we begin\". Moses Cordovero appreciated the influence of Maimonides in his quasi-rational systemisation. From its inception, the Theosophical Kabbalah became permeated by terminology adapted from philosophy and given new mystical meanings, such as its early integration with the Neoplatonism of Ibn Gabirol and use of Aristotelian terms of Form over Matter.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 110,
"text": "Pinchas Giller and Adin Steinsaltz write that Kabbalah is best described as the inner part of traditional Jewish religion, the official metaphysics of Judaism, that was essential to normative Judaism until fairly recently. With the decline of Jewish life in medieval Spain, it displaced rationalist Jewish philosophy until the modern rise of Haskalah enlightenment, receiving a revival in our postmodern age. While Judaism always maintained a minority tradition of religious rationalist criticism of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem writes that Lurianic Kabbalah was the last theology that was near predominant in Jewish life. While Lurianism represented the elite of esoteric Kabbalism, its mythic-messianic divine drama and personalisation of reincarnation captured the popular imagination in Jewish folklore and in the Sabbatean and Hasidic social movements. Giller notes that the former Zoharic-Cordoverian classic Kabbalah represented a common exoteric popular view of Kabbalah, as depicted in early modern Musar literature.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 111,
"text": "In contemporary Orthodox Judaism there is dispute as to the status of the Zohar's and Isaac Luria's (the Arizal) Kabbalistic teachings. While a portion of Modern Orthodox, followers of the Dor De'ah movement, and many students of the Rambam reject Arizal's Kabbalistic teachings, as well as deny that the Zohar is authoritative or from Shimon bar Yohai, all three of these groups accept the existence and validity of the Talmudic Maaseh Breishit and Maaseh Merkavah mysticism. Their disagreement concerns whether the Kabbalistic teachings promulgated today are accurate representations of those esoteric teachings to which the Talmud refers. The mainstream Haredi (Hasidic, Lithuanian, Oriental) and Religious Zionist Jewish movements revere Luria and the Kabbalah, but one can find both rabbis who sympathize with such a view, while disagreeing with it, as well as rabbis who consider such a view heresy. The Haredi Eliyahu Dessler and Gedaliah Nadel maintained that it is acceptable to believe that the Zohar was not written by Shimon bar Yochai and that it had a late authorship. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg mentioned the possibility of Christian influence in the Kabbalah with the \"Kabbalistic vision of the Messiah as the redeemer of all mankind\" being \"the Jewish counterpart to Christ.\"",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 112,
"text": "Modern Orthodox Judaism, representing an inclination to rationalism, embrace of academic scholarship, and the individual's autonomy to define Judaism, embodies a diversity of views regarding Kabbalah from a Neo-Hasidic spirituality to Maimonist anti-Kabbalism. In a book to help define central theological issues in Modern Orthodoxy, Michael J. Harris writes that the relationship between Modern Orthodoxy and mysticism has been under-discussed. He sees a deficiency of spirituality in Modern Orthodoxy, as well as the dangers in a fundamentalist adoption of Kabbalah. He suggests the development of neo-Kabbalistic adaptions of Jewish mysticism compatible with rationalism, offering a variety of precedent models from past thinkers ranging from the mystical inclusivism of Abraham Isaac Kook to a compartmentalisation between Halakha and mysticism.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 113,
"text": "Yiḥyeh Qafeḥ, a 20th-century Yemenite Jewish leader and Chief Rabbi of Yemen, spearheaded the Dor De'ah (\"generation of knowledge\") movement to counteract the influence of the Zohar and modern Kabbalah. He authored critiques of mysticism in general and Lurianic Kabbalah in particular; his magnum opus was Milḥamoth ha-Shem (Wars of Hashem) against what he perceived as neo-platonic and gnostic influences on Judaism with the publication and distribution of the Zohar since the 13th Century. Rabbi Yiḥyah founded yeshivot, rabbinical schools, and synagogues that featured a rationalist approach to Judaism based on the Talmud and works of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides (Rambam). In recent years, rationalists holding similar views as those of the Dor De'ah movement have described themselves as \"talmide ha-Rambam\" (disciples of Maimonides) rather than as being aligned with Dor De'ah, and are more theologically aligned with the rationalism of Modern Orthodox Judaism than with Orthodox Ḥasidic or Ḥaredi communities.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 114,
"text": "Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994), an ultra-rationalist Modern Orthodox philosopher, referred to Kabbalah \"a collection of \"pagan superstitions\" and \"idol worship\" in remarks given in 1990.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 115,
"text": "Kabbalah tended to be rejected by most Jews in the Conservative and Reform movements, though its influences were not completely eliminated. While it was generally not studied as a discipline, the Kabbalistic Kabbalat Shabbat service remained part of liberal liturgy, as did the Yedid Nefesh prayer. Nevertheless, in the 1960s, Saul Lieberman of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America is reputed to have introduced a lecture by Scholem on Kabbalah with a statement that Kabbalah itself was \"nonsense\", but the academic study of Kabbalah was \"scholarship\". This view became popular among many Jews, who viewed the subject as worthy of study, but who did not accept Kabbalah as teaching literal truths.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 116,
"text": "According to Bradley Shavit Artson (Dean of the Conservative Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies)",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 117,
"text": "Many western Jews insisted that their future and their freedom required shedding what they perceived as parochial orientalism. They fashioned a Judaism that was decorous and strictly rational (according to 19th-century European standards), denigrating Kabbalah as backward, superstitious, and marginal.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 118,
"text": "However, in the late 20th century and early 21st century there has been a revival in interest in Kabbalah in all branches of liberal Judaism. The Kabbalistic 12th-century prayer Anim Zemirot was restored to the new Conservative Sim Shalom siddur, as was the B'rikh Shmeh passage from the Zohar, and the mystical Ushpizin service welcoming to the Sukkah the spirits of Jewish forebears. Anim Zemirot and the 16th-century mystical poem Lekhah Dodi reappeared in the Reform Siddur Gates of Prayer in 1975. All rabbinical seminaries now teach several courses in Kabbalah—in Conservative Judaism, both the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the American Jewish University in Los Angeles have full-time instructors in Kabbalah and Hasidut, Eitan Fishbane and Pinchas Giller, respectively. In Reform Judaism, Sharon Koren teaches at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Reform rabbis like Herbert Weiner and Lawrence Kushner have renewed interest in Kabbalah among Reform Jews. At the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the only accredited seminary that has curricular requirements in Kabbalah, Joel Hecker is the full-time instructor teaching courses in Kabbalah and Hasidut.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 119,
"text": "According to Artson:",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 120,
"text": "Ours is an age hungry for meaning, for a sense of belonging, for holiness. In that search, we have returned to the very Kabbalah our predecessors scorned. The stone that the builders rejected has become the head cornerstone (Psalm 118:22)... Kabbalah was the last universal theology adopted by the entire Jewish people, hence faithfulness to our commitment to positive-historical Judaism mandates a reverent receptivity to Kabbalah.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 121,
"text": "The Reconstructionist movement, under the leadership of Arthur Green in the 1980s and 1990s, and with the influence of Zalman Schachter Shalomi, brought a strong openness to Kabbalah and hasidic elements that then came to play prominent roles in the Kol ha-Neshamah siddur series.",
"title": "Criticism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 122,
"text": "Teaching of classic esoteric kabbalah texts and practice remained traditional until recent times, passed on in Judaism from master to disciple, or studied by leading rabbinic scholars. This changed in the 20th century, through conscious reform and the secular openness of knowledge. In contemporary times kabbalah is studied in four very different, though sometimes overlapping, ways.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 123,
"text": "The traditional method, employed among Jews since the 16th century, continues in learned study circles. Its prerequisite is to either be born Jewish or be a convert and to join a group of kabbalists under the tutelage of a rabbi, since the 18th century more likely a Hasidic one, though others exist among Sephardi-Mizrachi, and Lithuanian rabbinic scholars. Beyond elite, historical esoteric kabbalah, the public-communally studied texts of Hasidic thought explain kabbalistic concepts for wide spiritual application, through their own concern with popular psychological perception of Divine Panentheism.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 124,
"text": "A second, new universalist form, is the method of modern-style Jewish organisations and writers, who seek to disseminate kabbalah to every man, woman and child regardless of race or class, especially since the Western interest in mysticism from the 1960s. These derive from various cross-denominational Jewish interests in kabbalah, and range from considered theology to popularised forms that often adopt New Age terminology and beliefs for wider communication. These groups highlight or interpret kabbalah through non-particularist, universalist aspects.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 125,
"text": "A third way are non-Jewish organisations, mystery schools, initiation bodies, fraternities and secret societies, the most popular of which are Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and the Golden Dawn, although hundreds of similar societies claim a kabbalistic lineage. These derive from syncretic combinations of Jewish kabbalah with Christian, occultist or contemporary New Age spirituality. As a separate spiritual tradition in Western esotericism since the Renaissance, with different aims from its Jewish origin, the non-Jewish traditions differ significantly and do not give an accurate representation of the Jewish spiritual understanding (or vice versa).",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 126,
"text": "Fourthly, since the mid-20th century, historical-critical scholarly investigation of all eras of Jewish mysticism has flourished into an established department of university Jewish studies. Where the first academic historians of Judaism in the 19th century opposed and marginalised kabbalah, Gershom Scholem and his successors repositioned the historiography of Jewish mysticism as a central, vital component of Judaic renewal through history. Cross-disciplinary academic revisions of Scholem's and others' theories are regularly published for wide readership.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 127,
"text": "In recent decades, Kabbalah has seen a resurgence of interest, with several modern groups and individuals exploring its profound teachings. These contemporary interpretations of Kabbalah offer a fresh perspective on this ancient mystical tradition, often bridging the gap between traditional wisdom and modern thought. Some of these interpretations emphasize universalist and philosophical approaches, seeking to enrich secular disciplines through the lens of Kabbalistic insights. Others have gained attention for their unique blends of spirituality and popular culture, attracting followers from diverse backgrounds. These modern expressions of Kabbalah showcase its enduring appeal and relevance in today's world.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 128,
"text": "Bnei Baruch is a group of Kabbalah students, based in Israel. Study materials are available in over 25 languages for free online or at printing cost. Michael Laitman established Bnei Baruch in 1991, following the passing of his teacher, Ashlag's son Rav Baruch Ashlag. Laitman named his group Bnei Baruch (sons of Baruch) to commemorate the memory of his mentor. The teaching strongly suggests restricting one's studies to 'authentic sources', kabbalists of the direct lineage of master to disciple.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 129,
"text": "The Kabbalah Centre was founded in the United States in 1965 as The National Research Institute of Kabbalah by Philip Berg and Rav Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein, disciple of Yehuda Ashlag's. Later Philip Berg and his wife re-established the organisation as the worldwide Kabbalah Centre. In recent times its outreach teaching in New Age style has been \"derided by critics as Hollywood's new \"non-religion\" and even \"the McDonald's of spirituality\"\" after having attracted a cross-religious celebrity following (see Madonna) and media profile, though the organisation is led by Orthodox Jewish teachers.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 130,
"text": "The Kabbalah Society, run by Warren Kenton, an organisation based instead on pre-Lurianic Medieval Kabbalah presented in universalist style. In contrast, traditional kabbalists read earlier kabbalah through later Lurianism and the systemisations of 16th-century Safed.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 131,
"text": "The New Kabbalah, website and books by Sanford L. Drob, is a scholarly intellectual investigation of the Lurianic symbolism in the perspective of modern and postmodern intellectual thought. It seeks a \"new kabbalah\" rooted in the historical tradition through its academic study, but universalised through dialogue with modern philosophy and psychology. This approach seeks to enrich the secular disciplines, while uncovering intellectual insights formerly implicit in kabbalah's essential myth:",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 132,
"text": "By being equipped with the nonlinear concepts of dialectical, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive thought we can begin to make sense of the kabbalistic symbols in our own time. So equipped, we are today probably in a better position to understand the philosophical aspects of the kabbalah than were the kabbalists themselves.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 133,
"text": "The Kabbalah of Information is described in the 2018 book From Infinity to Man: The Fundamental Ideas of Kabbalah Within the Framework of Information Theory and Quantum Physics written by Ukrainian-born professor and businessman Eduard Shyfrin. The main tenet of the teaching is \"In the beginning He created information\", rephrasing the famous saying of Nahmanides, \"In the beginning He created primordial matter and He didn't create anything else, just shaped it and formed it.\"",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 134,
"text": "Since the 18th century, Jewish mystical development has continued in Hasidic Judaism, turning kabbalah into a social revival with texts that internalise mystical thought. Among different schools, Chabad-Lubavitch and Breslav with related organisations, give outward looking spiritual resources and textual learning for secular Jews. The Intellectual Hasidism of Chabad most emphasises the spread and understanding of kabbalah through its explanation in Hasidic thought, articulating the Divine meaning within kabbalah through human rational analogies, uniting the spiritual and material, esoteric and exoteric in their Divine source:",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 135,
"text": "Hasidic thought instructs in the predominance of spiritual form over physical matter, the advantage of matter when it is purified, and the advantage of form when integrated with matter. The two are to be unified so one cannot detect where either begins or ends, for \"the Divine beginning is implanted in the end and the end in the beginning\" (Sefer Yetzira 1:7). The One God created both for one purpose – to reveal the holy light of His hidden power. Only both united complete the perfection desired by the Creator.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 136,
"text": "From the early 20th century, Neo-Hasidism expressed a modernist or non-Orthodox Jewish interest in Jewish mysticism, becoming influential among Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionalist Jewish denominations from the 1960s, and organised through the Jewish Renewal and Chavurah movements. The writings and teachings of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Arthur Green, Lawrence Kushner, Herbert Weiner and others, has sought a critically selective, non-fundamentalist neo- Kabbalistic and Hasidic study and mystical spirituality among modernist Jews. The contemporary proliferation of scholarship by Jewish mysticism academia has contributed to critical adaptions of Jewish mysticism. Arthur Green's translations from the religious writings of Hillel Zeitlin conceive the latter to be a precursor of contemporary Neo-Hasidism. Reform rabbi Herbert Weiner's Nine and a Half Mystics: The Kabbala Today (1969), a travelogue among Kabbalists and Hasidim, brought perceptive insights into Jewish mysticism to many Reform Jews. Leading Reform philosopher Eugene Borowitz described the Orthodox Hasidic Adin Steinsaltz (The Thirteen Petalled Rose) and Aryeh Kaplan as major presenters of Kabbalistic spirituality for modernists today.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 137,
"text": "The writings of Abraham Isaac Kook (1864–1935), first chief rabbi of Mandate Palestine and visionary, incorporate kabbalistic themes through his own poetic language and concern with human and divine unity. His influence is in the Religious Zionist community, who follow his aim that the legal and imaginative aspects of Judaism should interfuse:",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 138,
"text": "Due to the alienation from the \"secret of God\" [i.e. Kabbalah], the higher qualities of the depths of Godly life are reduced to trivia that do not penetrate the depth of the soul. When this happens, the most mighty force is missing from the soul of nation and individual, and Exile finds favor essentially... We should not negate any conception based on rectitude and awe of Heaven of any form—only the aspect of such an approach that desires to negate the mysteries and their great influence on the spirit of the nation. This is a tragedy that we must combat with counsel and understanding, with holiness and courage.",
"title": "Contemporary study"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 139,
"text": "Nathaniel Deutsch writes:",
"title": "Mandaean parallels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 140,
"text": "Initially, these interactions [between Mandaeans and Jewish mystics in Babylonia from Late Antiquity to the medieval period] resulted in shared magical and angelological traditions. During this phase the parallels which exist between Mandaeism and Hekhalot mysticism would have developed. At some point, both Mandaeans and Jews living in Babylonia began to develop similar cosmogonic and theosophic traditions involving an analogous set of terms, concepts, and images. At present it is impossible to say whether these parallels resulted primarily from Jewish influence on Mandaeans, Mandaean influence on Jews, or from cross fertilization. Whatever their original source, these traditions eventually made their way into the priestly – that is, esoteric – Mandaean texts ... and into the Kabbalah.",
"title": "Mandaean parallels"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 141,
"text": "R.J. Zwi Werblowsky suggests Mandaeism has more commonality with Kabbalah than with Merkabah mysticism such as cosmogony and sexual imagery. The Thousand and Twelve Questions, Scroll of Exalted Kingship, and Alma Rišaia Rba link the alphabet with the creation of the world, a concept found in Sefer Yetzirah and the Bahir. Mandaean names for uthras (angels or guardians) have been found in Jewish magical texts. Abatur appears to be inscribed inside a Jewish magic bowl in a corrupted form as \"Abiṭur\". Ptahil is found in Sefer HaRazim listed among other angels who stand on the ninth step of the second firmament.",
"title": "Mandaean parallels"
}
] |
Kabbalah or Qabalah is an esoteric method, discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal. The definition of Kabbalah varies according to the tradition and aims of those following it, from its origin in medieval Judaism to its later adaptations in Western esotericism. Jewish Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings meant to explain the relationship between the unchanging, eternal God—the mysterious Ein Sof—and the mortal, finite universe. It forms the foundation of mystical religious interpretations within Judaism. Jewish Kabbalists originally developed their own transmission of sacred texts within the realm of Jewish tradition and often use classical Jewish scriptures to explain and demonstrate its mystical teachings. These teachings are held by Kabbalists to define the inner meaning of both the Hebrew Bible and traditional rabbinic literature and their formerly concealed transmitted dimension, as well as to explain the significance of Jewish religious observances. Traditional practitioners believe its earliest origins pre-date world religions, forming the primordial blueprint for Creation's philosophies, religions, sciences, arts, and political systems. Historically, Kabbalah emerged from earlier forms of Jewish mysticism, in 12th- to 13th-century Spain and Southern France, and was reinterpreted during the Jewish mystical renaissance in 16th-century Ottoman Palestine. The Zohar, the foundational text of Kabbalah, was composed in the late 13th century. Isaac Luria is considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah; Lurianic Kabbalah was popularised in the form of Hasidic Judaism from the 18th century onwards. During the 20th century, academic interest in Kabbalistic texts led primarily by the Jewish historian Gershom Scholem has inspired the development of historical research on Kabbalah in the field of Judaic studies. Though innumerable glosses, marginalia, commentaries, precedent works, satellite texts and other minor works contribute to an understanding of the Kabbalah as an evolving tradition, the major texts in the main line of Jewish mysticism that inarguably fall under the heading 'Kabbalah' are the Bahir, Zohar, Pardes Rimonim, and Etz Chayim. The early Hekhalot writings are acknowledged as ancestral to the sensibilities of Kabbalah and the Sefer Yetzirah--a brief document of only few pages written centuries before the high and late medieval works, detailing an alphanumeric vision of cosmology--may be understood as a kind of prelude to the canon of Kabbalah.
|
2001-10-15T11:54:24Z
|
2023-12-27T16:47:50Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah
|
16,908 |
Kadiogo Province
|
Kadiogo is a province of Burkina Faso, located in its Centre Region. Its area is of 2,805 km, containing six departments and a population of 3,032,668 (2019). Its capital is also the state capital, Ouagadougou. It features the central plateau of the country. It is highly urbanized and is both the most populated and the most densely populated province.
Kadiogo is divided into seven departments:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kadiogo is a province of Burkina Faso, located in its Centre Region. Its area is of 2,805 km, containing six departments and a population of 3,032,668 (2019). Its capital is also the state capital, Ouagadougou. It features the central plateau of the country. It is highly urbanized and is both the most populated and the most densely populated province.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kadiogo is divided into seven departments:",
"title": "Departments"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
] |
Kadiogo is a province of Burkina Faso, located in its Centre Region. Its area is of 2,805 km2, containing six departments and a population of 3,032,668 (2019). Its capital is also the state capital, Ouagadougou. It features the central plateau of the country. It is highly urbanized and is both the most populated and the most densely populated province.
|
2001-10-07T21:14:54Z
|
2023-12-13T08:08:54Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadiogo_Province
|
16,910 |
Kagoshima
|
Kagoshima (Japanese: 鹿児島, IPA: [kaɡoɕima]), officially Kagoshima City (鹿児島市, Kagoshima-shi, IPA: [kaɡoɕimaɕi]), is the capital city of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. Located at the southwestern tip of the island of Kyūshū, Kagoshima is the largest city in the prefecture by some margin. It has been nicknamed the "Naples of the Eastern world" for its bay location (Aira Caldera), hot climate, and emblematic stratovolcano, Sakurajima. The city was officially founded on April 1, 1889. It merged with Taniyama City on April 29, 1967 and with Yoshida Town, Sakurajima Town, Kiire Town, Matsumoto Town and Kōriyama Town on November 1, 2004.
Kagoshima is constantly bombarded by ash from the eruptions of Sakurajima and is at risk of a major volcanic disaster; the residents have developed methods to cope with this including school-children wearing helmets to protect from volcanic debris.
The city is historically important as the capital of the powerful Satsuma Domain from 1602 to 1871.
While the kanji used to spell Kagoshima (鹿児島) literally mean "deer child island", or "island of the fawn", the source etymology is not clear, and may refer to "cliff" or "sailor" in the local dialect.
Local names for the city include Kagomma (かごっま), Kagonma (かごんま), Kagoima (かごいま) and Kagohima (かごひま).
Kagoshima Prefecture (also known as the Satsuma Domain) was the center of the territory of the Shimazu clan for many centuries. Kagoshima City was a busy political and commercial port city throughout the medieval period and into the Edo period (1603–1868) when it formally became the capital of the Shimazu's fief, the Satsuma Domain. The official emblem is a modification of the Shimazu's kamon designed to resemble the character 市 (shi, "city"). Satsuma remained one of the most powerful and wealthiest domains in the country throughout the period, and though international trade was banned for much of this period, the city remained quite active and prosperous. It served not only as the political center for Satsuma, but also for the semi-independent vassal kingdom of Ryūkyū; Ryūkyūan traders and emissaries frequented the city, and a special Ryukyuan embassy building was established to help administer relations between the two polities and to house visitors and emissaries. Kagoshima was also a significant center of Christian activity in Japan prior to the imposition of bans against that religion in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Kagoshima was bombarded by the British Royal Navy in 1863 to punish the daimyō of Satsuma for the murder of Charles Lennox Richardson on the Tōkaidō highway the previous year and its refusal to pay an indemnity in compensation.
Kagoshima was the birthplace and scene of the last stand of Saigō Takamori, a legendary figure in Meiji Era Japan in 1877 at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion.
Japan's industrial revolution is said to have started here, stimulated by the young students' train station. Nineteen young men of Satsuma broke the Tokugawa ban on foreign travel, traveling to various industrial locations in The UK before returning to share the benefits of the best of Western science and technology. A statue was erected outside the train station as a tribute to them.
Kagoshima was also the birthplace of Tōgō Heihachirō. After naval studies in England between 1871 and 1878, Togo's role as Chief Admiral of the Grand Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Russo-Japanese War made him a legend in Japanese military history, and earned him the nickname 'Nelson of the Orient' in Britain. He led the Grand Fleet to two startling victories in 1904 and 1905, completely destroying Russia as a naval power in the East, and thereby contributing to the failed revolution in Russia in 1905.
The Japanese diplomat Sadomitsu Sakoguchi revolutionized Kagoshima's environmental economic plan with his dissertation on water pollution and orange harvesting.
The 1914 eruption of the volcano across the bay from the city spread ash throughout the municipality, but relatively little disruption ensued.
On the night of June 17, 1945, the 314th bombardment wing of the Army Air Corps (120 B-29s) dropped 809.6 tons of incendiary and cluster bombs destroying 2.11 square miles (5.46 km) of Kagoshima (44.1 percent of the built-up area). Kagoshima was targeted because of its largely expanded naval port as well as its position as a railway terminus. A single B-29 was lost to unknown circumstances. Area bombing was chosen over precision bombing because of the cloudy weather over Japan during the middle of June. The planes were forced to navigate and bomb entirely by radar.
Japanese intelligence predicted that the Allied Forces would assault Kagoshima and the Ariake Bay areas of southern Kyushu to gain naval and air bases to strike Tokyo.
Kagoshima City is approximately 40 minutes from Kagoshima Airport, and features shopping districts and malls located wide across the city. Transportation options in the city include the Shinkansen (bullet train), local train, city trams, buses, and ferries to-and-from Sakurajima. The large and modern Kagoshima City Aquarium, situated near the Sakurajima Ferry Terminal, was established in 1997 along the docks and offers a direct view of Sakurajima. One of the best places to view the city (and Sakurajima) is from the Amuran Ferris wheel atop of Amu Plaza Kagoshima, and the shopping center attached to the central Kagoshima-Chūō Station. Just outside the city is the early-Edo Period Sengan-en Japanese Garden. The garden was originally a villa belonging to the Shimazu clan and is still maintained by descendants today. Outside the garden grounds is a Satsuma "kiriko" cut glass factory where visitors are welcome to view the glass blowing and cutting processes, and the Shoko Shūseikan Museum, which was built in 1865 and registered as a National Historic Site in 1959. The former Shuseikan industrial complex and the former machine factory were submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage as part of a group list titled Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyushu and Yamaguchi Prefecture.
Kagoshima has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification Cfa), possessing the highest year average temperature and winter average temperature in mainland Japan. It is marked by mild, relatively dry winters; warm, humid springs; hot, humid summers; and mild, relatively dry autumns.
See or edit raw graph data.
As of 1 January 2020, Kagoshima City has an estimated population of 595,049 and a population density of 1,087 persons per km. The total area is 547.58 km (211 sq mi). According to the April 2014 issue of the Kagoshima Prefectural Summary Archived 2015-01-23 at the Wayback Machine by the Kagoshima Prefecture Department of Planning and Promotion, the population of the prefecture at large was 1,680,319. The city's total area nearly doubled between 2003 and 2005 as a result of five towns: the towns of Kōriyama and Matsumoto (both from Hioki District) the town of Kiire (from Ibusuki District) and the towns of Sakurajima and Yoshida (both from Kagoshima District). All areas were merged into Kagoshima City on 1 November 2004.
etc.
All lines are operated by Kyushu Railway Company (JR Kyushu)
Kagoshima Airport in Kirishima (35 km (22 miles) NE of Kagoshima)
Kagoshima was one of the host cities of the official 1998 Women's Volleyball World Championship. Kagoshima is home to Kagoshima United. They play their home games at Kagoshima Kamoike Stadium.
Kagoshima is twinned with:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kagoshima (Japanese: 鹿児島, IPA: [kaɡoɕima]), officially Kagoshima City (鹿児島市, Kagoshima-shi, IPA: [kaɡoɕimaɕi]), is the capital city of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. Located at the southwestern tip of the island of Kyūshū, Kagoshima is the largest city in the prefecture by some margin. It has been nicknamed the \"Naples of the Eastern world\" for its bay location (Aira Caldera), hot climate, and emblematic stratovolcano, Sakurajima. The city was officially founded on April 1, 1889. It merged with Taniyama City on April 29, 1967 and with Yoshida Town, Sakurajima Town, Kiire Town, Matsumoto Town and Kōriyama Town on November 1, 2004.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kagoshima is constantly bombarded by ash from the eruptions of Sakurajima and is at risk of a major volcanic disaster; the residents have developed methods to cope with this including school-children wearing helmets to protect from volcanic debris.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The city is historically important as the capital of the powerful Satsuma Domain from 1602 to 1871.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "While the kanji used to spell Kagoshima (鹿児島) literally mean \"deer child island\", or \"island of the fawn\", the source etymology is not clear, and may refer to \"cliff\" or \"sailor\" in the local dialect.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Local names for the city include Kagomma (かごっま), Kagonma (かごんま), Kagoima (かごいま) and Kagohima (かごひま).",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kagoshima Prefecture (also known as the Satsuma Domain) was the center of the territory of the Shimazu clan for many centuries. Kagoshima City was a busy political and commercial port city throughout the medieval period and into the Edo period (1603–1868) when it formally became the capital of the Shimazu's fief, the Satsuma Domain. The official emblem is a modification of the Shimazu's kamon designed to resemble the character 市 (shi, \"city\"). Satsuma remained one of the most powerful and wealthiest domains in the country throughout the period, and though international trade was banned for much of this period, the city remained quite active and prosperous. It served not only as the political center for Satsuma, but also for the semi-independent vassal kingdom of Ryūkyū; Ryūkyūan traders and emissaries frequented the city, and a special Ryukyuan embassy building was established to help administer relations between the two polities and to house visitors and emissaries. Kagoshima was also a significant center of Christian activity in Japan prior to the imposition of bans against that religion in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kagoshima was bombarded by the British Royal Navy in 1863 to punish the daimyō of Satsuma for the murder of Charles Lennox Richardson on the Tōkaidō highway the previous year and its refusal to pay an indemnity in compensation.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Kagoshima was the birthplace and scene of the last stand of Saigō Takamori, a legendary figure in Meiji Era Japan in 1877 at the end of the Satsuma Rebellion.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Japan's industrial revolution is said to have started here, stimulated by the young students' train station. Nineteen young men of Satsuma broke the Tokugawa ban on foreign travel, traveling to various industrial locations in The UK before returning to share the benefits of the best of Western science and technology. A statue was erected outside the train station as a tribute to them.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Kagoshima was also the birthplace of Tōgō Heihachirō. After naval studies in England between 1871 and 1878, Togo's role as Chief Admiral of the Grand Fleet of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Russo-Japanese War made him a legend in Japanese military history, and earned him the nickname 'Nelson of the Orient' in Britain. He led the Grand Fleet to two startling victories in 1904 and 1905, completely destroying Russia as a naval power in the East, and thereby contributing to the failed revolution in Russia in 1905.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The Japanese diplomat Sadomitsu Sakoguchi revolutionized Kagoshima's environmental economic plan with his dissertation on water pollution and orange harvesting.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The 1914 eruption of the volcano across the bay from the city spread ash throughout the municipality, but relatively little disruption ensued.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "On the night of June 17, 1945, the 314th bombardment wing of the Army Air Corps (120 B-29s) dropped 809.6 tons of incendiary and cluster bombs destroying 2.11 square miles (5.46 km) of Kagoshima (44.1 percent of the built-up area). Kagoshima was targeted because of its largely expanded naval port as well as its position as a railway terminus. A single B-29 was lost to unknown circumstances. Area bombing was chosen over precision bombing because of the cloudy weather over Japan during the middle of June. The planes were forced to navigate and bomb entirely by radar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Japanese intelligence predicted that the Allied Forces would assault Kagoshima and the Ariake Bay areas of southern Kyushu to gain naval and air bases to strike Tokyo.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kagoshima City is approximately 40 minutes from Kagoshima Airport, and features shopping districts and malls located wide across the city. Transportation options in the city include the Shinkansen (bullet train), local train, city trams, buses, and ferries to-and-from Sakurajima. The large and modern Kagoshima City Aquarium, situated near the Sakurajima Ferry Terminal, was established in 1997 along the docks and offers a direct view of Sakurajima. One of the best places to view the city (and Sakurajima) is from the Amuran Ferris wheel atop of Amu Plaza Kagoshima, and the shopping center attached to the central Kagoshima-Chūō Station. Just outside the city is the early-Edo Period Sengan-en Japanese Garden. The garden was originally a villa belonging to the Shimazu clan and is still maintained by descendants today. Outside the garden grounds is a Satsuma \"kiriko\" cut glass factory where visitors are welcome to view the glass blowing and cutting processes, and the Shoko Shūseikan Museum, which was built in 1865 and registered as a National Historic Site in 1959. The former Shuseikan industrial complex and the former machine factory were submitted to the UNESCO World Heritage as part of a group list titled Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyushu and Yamaguchi Prefecture.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kagoshima has a humid subtropical climate (Köppen climate classification Cfa), possessing the highest year average temperature and winter average temperature in mainland Japan. It is marked by mild, relatively dry winters; warm, humid springs; hot, humid summers; and mild, relatively dry autumns.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "See or edit raw graph data.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As of 1 January 2020, Kagoshima City has an estimated population of 595,049 and a population density of 1,087 persons per km. The total area is 547.58 km (211 sq mi). According to the April 2014 issue of the Kagoshima Prefectural Summary Archived 2015-01-23 at the Wayback Machine by the Kagoshima Prefecture Department of Planning and Promotion, the population of the prefecture at large was 1,680,319. The city's total area nearly doubled between 2003 and 2005 as a result of five towns: the towns of Kōriyama and Matsumoto (both from Hioki District) the town of Kiire (from Ibusuki District) and the towns of Sakurajima and Yoshida (both from Kagoshima District). All areas were merged into Kagoshima City on 1 November 2004.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "etc.",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "All lines are operated by Kyushu Railway Company (JR Kyushu)",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Kagoshima Airport in Kirishima (35 km (22 miles) NE of Kagoshima)",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kagoshima was one of the host cities of the official 1998 Women's Volleyball World Championship. Kagoshima is home to Kagoshima United. They play their home games at Kagoshima Kamoike Stadium.",
"title": "Sports"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kagoshima is twinned with:",
"title": "Sister cities and friendship cities"
}
] |
, officially, is the capital city of Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan. Located at the southwestern tip of the island of Kyūshū, Kagoshima is the largest city in the prefecture by some margin. It has been nicknamed the "Naples of the Eastern world" for its bay location, hot climate, and emblematic stratovolcano, Sakurajima. The city was officially founded on April 1, 1889. It merged with Taniyama City on April 29, 1967 and with Yoshida Town, Sakurajima Town, Kiire Town, Matsumoto Town and Kōriyama Town on November 1, 2004. Kagoshima is constantly bombarded by ash from the eruptions of Sakurajima and is at risk of a major volcanic disaster; the residents have developed methods to cope with this including school-children wearing helmets to protect from volcanic debris. The city is historically important as the capital of the powerful Satsuma Domain from 1602 to 1871.
|
2001-10-12T15:30:56Z
|
2023-12-28T07:12:28Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagoshima
|
16,911 |
Kajang
|
Kajang is a town in both Hulu Langat District and Sepang District, Selangor, Malaysia. Kajang, along with much of Hulu Langat District, is governed by the Kajang Municipal Council. Some parts of Kajang such as Seksyen 12 Bandar Baru Bangi, Kampung Sungai Merab, Desa Pinggiran Putra and Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda are located in northeast Dengkil, Sepang District and is governed by the Sepang Municipal Council. Kajang town is located on the eastern banks of the Langat River. It is surrounded by Cheras, Semenyih, Bangi, Putrajaya and Serdang.
According to the 2020 census, the local authority area (which includes Kajang, Cheras, Balakong, Bangi, Semenyih and Pekan Hulu Langat) has a population of 1.05 million people.
The name Kajang is believed to have originated from the language of Temuan tribes (Orang Asli) who populated the Langat valley in the 17th-18th centuries. In their language kajang referred to their art of weaving screwpine or pandanus leaves, which were prevalent in much of the country. A similar theory stated that settlers from the neighboring domain of Sungai Ujong (Negeri Sembilan) once constructed huts (pondok) in the area with thatched roof made from folded (lipat kajang) screwpine leaves.
It is also believed that the name kajang may have originated from the Buginese word berkajang, meaning camp or accommodation.
Kajang is a half hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur's central business district, primarily through Jalan Cheras and the Grand Saga Expressway; both routes are part of the Malaysia Federal Route 1 system.
The first planned township built and developed in Kajang is Bandar Baru Bangi which was first developed in 1974 by the Selangor state government. It has since acted as the satellite town and Central Business District of Kajang, with most banks and government offices operating out of the township. The Kajang bus and taxi terminal called Hentian Kajang is also located at the eastern end of the township. The district capital of Hulu Langat was shifted to Bandar Baru Bangi from Kajang in 1992.
In recent years, a few townships were developed in Kajang, such as Taman Prima Saujana, Sungai Chua and Taman Kajang Perdana (Kajang Highlands). High-end developments in Kajang include Bandar Seri Putra, Bandar Bukit Mahkota, Twin Palms, Sri Banyan, Country Heights, Jade Hills, Saujana Impian, TTDI Grove, Tropicana Heights and Prima Paramount. Areas surrounding these townships are accessible via the SILK Expressway, Kajang-Seremban Expressway, Grand Saga Expressway and the North–South Expressway Southern Route.
Some parts of Kajang such as Kampung Sungai Merab, Desa Pinggiran Putra and Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda are located in northeast Dengkil, Sepang District and is governed by the Sepang Municipal Council. While technically being a part of Sepang District under Mukim Dengkil, the above-mentioned townships are commonly associated with Kajang due to close proximity to Kajang proper (adjacent to Kampung Sungai Ramal which is separated by the North South Expressway) and the rather lengthy distance from Sepang and Dengkil towns proper. The townships uses the postal code of Kajang instead of Sepang and Dengkil, also due to the reasons above.
While Bandar Seri Putra and Bukit Mahkota are located adjacent to Bangi Lama (Bangi old town) as well as Bandar Baru Bangi, the townships along with Bangi Lama uses the postal code of Kajang instead of Bandar Baru Bangi. The townships of Bandar Baru Bangi, Bangi Lama, Bandar Seri Putra and Bukit Mahkota are located in Mukim Kajang.
Orang Asli tribes had already established settlements in what is now Kajang as early as the 16th century, however the first recorded settlement was found in 1709 by additional Orang Asli settlers who relocated from the Klang valley. Kajang town in its present form was founded in the 1870s, in the aftermath of the Klang War. In its early days, it was settled by Mandailings and Minangkabau people from Sumatra in the then-Dutch East Indies, followed by Chinese tin miners.
As with other towns in Selangor, Kajang as a modern town owes its rise in particular to tin mines and plantations which were opened around the 1890s. A famous coffee estates was Inch Kenneth Estate managed by the Kindersley brothers, who were among the first to plant rubber in the country on a commercial basis.
During the Japanese invasion, Kajang was bombed on 12 January 1942, a day after the fall of Kuala Lumpur. The bombs, meant for the railway station, missed its target, and hit a nearby church instead.
In 1948, a Communist insurgency against British forces and their allies across Malaya began, which led to the Malayan Emergency with fighting soon spreading to Kajang. Guerrilla leader Lau Yew died in combat just outside Kajang in July 1948; British forces photographed his corpse and printed the image onto leaflets to distribute around Kajang.
Kajang was granted municipal status on 1 January 1997. Previously it was under the jurisdiction of the Hulu Langat District Council (Majlis Daerah Hulu Langat, MDHL). Kajang was the administrative centre of the Hulu Langat region until it was relocated to Bandar Baru Bangi in 1992.
Kajang's population of 236,240 consists of a wide demographic population.
Kajang's main population centres are Sg. Sekamat, Taman Saujana Impian, Sg. Kantan, Sg. Jelok, Sg. Ramal, Sungai Chua, Jalan Reko, Jalan Bukit, Taman Jenaris, Taman Prima Saujana, Taman Kantan Permai, Taman Kajang Perdana, Taman Sri Ramal, Taman Bukit Mewah, Kajang Prima, Bandar Teknologi Kajang, Hillpark and Bandar Baru Bangi.
The city centre of Kajang is the colonial quarter near the Stadium Kajang MRT station, including the streets of Jalan Mendaling, Jalan Stadium, Jalan Sulaiman and Jalan Raja Haroun. The buildings in the area were constructed around the 1900s to 1930s. The architecture of these shophouses are a combination of traditional Chinese and European designs. The ground floor was used mostly for commercial activities and the upper floor as the family living quarters.
One of Kajang's landmarks is Kajang Stadium which is situated in the heart of the town. The stadium can accommodate up to 5,000 people and is used throughout the year for the community soccer competitions.
Another landmark is the Kajang Jamek Mosque, which is recognisable by its bright yellow facade.
Kajang is served by a network of tolled expressways and federal highways.
Federal Route 1, the premier north–south federal route of Peninsular Malaysia, runs through downtown Kajang as Jalan Cheras from Cheras until Sungai Jernih and Stadium Kajang and then southwards as Jalan Semenyih from Stadium Kajang until Semenyih, Beranang and neighbouring Seremban, Negeri Sembilan with the rest of the route terminating in Johor Bahru, Johor - the route's southern terminus. On Federal Route 1, Kajang is 22 km from Kuala Lumpur, 8 km from Semenyih and 43 km from Seremban.
A stretch of Federal Route 1 is concurrent with the Cheras-Kajang toll road (aka the Grand Saga Expressway) between Taman Connaught and Bukit Dukung. The SILK Expressway starts in Serdang, which then runs through Balakong and then forms a beltway around downtown Kajang before ending near Bandar Baru Bangi. It is the main ring road for Kajang.
PLUS Expressway exit 210 (Kajang Interchange) serves the vicinity of Kajang and Bangi. It also links the expressway to SILK Expressway and SKVE Expressway as well as B11 which runs concurrently with SILK and SKVE from SKVE's Serdang Interchange at Seri Kembangan until SILK's Sungai Chua Interchange at Kajang, before being detoured out of SILK after the interchange. B11 continues on its own separate route until its terminus at Stadium Kajang just before the intersection with Jalan Cheras, Jalan Semenyih and Jalan Reko
From Ampang Jaya, one can reach Kajang with state routes B62 and B52.
KB06 KG35 Kajang railway station is the principal rail station of Kajang. It is an interchange station between the 9 MRT Kajang Line, 1 KTM Seremban Line and ETS KTM ETS. The station is the southern terminal of the MRT line.
Kajang station, though so named, does not directly serve downtown Kajang; Stadium Kajang MRT is located in the actual downtown area, along with Sungai Jernih MRT.
Kajang is famous for its satay, a form of skewered barbecued meat. Informally, Kajang is known as the Satay Town.
The Malaysia Prison Complex (Kompleks Penjara Kajang), Prison Department of Malaysia is headquartered in Kajang.
Kajang has multiple shopping complexes, amongst them is the Billion Shopping Center formerly in Kajang town, which now has relocated to Bandar Teknologi Kajang. Other shopping centres located in Kajang are Plaza Metro Kajang, Metro Point and Kompleks Kota Kajang. Metro Avenue is a new shopping district located opposite SMJK Yu Hua Kajang and Kajang High School.
Hospital Kajang is the primary public hospital in the city.
Private medical centres function 24 hours and include facilities such as Poliklinik MUC @Metro Point, Klinik Mediviron Prima Saujana, Kajang Plaza Medical Centre (KPMC) and KPJ Kajang Specialist Hospital.
The Hulu Langat District Police Headquarters are located in the town centre, across the Highway 1 junction from the Post Office. Federal government agencies with their branch in Kajang include the National Registration Department, Immigration Department, Transportation Department, and Hulu Langat Education Office.
Kajang is home to institutions of higher learning, which includes:
After the 2018 Malaysian general election, Kajang became part of the Bangi parliamentary constituency in the Dewan Rakyat of the Malaysian Parliament. The seat is held by Syahredzan Johan from PH-DAP.
In the Selangor State Legislative Assembly, Kajang is one of three state seats within the Bangi parliamentary district; the other two are Balakong and Sungai Ramal. The incumbent Assemblyperson for Kajang is David Cheong from PH-PKR.
Until 9 May 2018, Kajang was part of the Hulu Langat parliamentary constituency in the Dewan Rakyat of the Malaysian Parliament.
In the Selangor State Legislative Assembly, Kajang was one of three state seats within the Hulu Langat parliamentary district; the other two were Semenyih and Dusun Tua.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kajang is a town in both Hulu Langat District and Sepang District, Selangor, Malaysia. Kajang, along with much of Hulu Langat District, is governed by the Kajang Municipal Council. Some parts of Kajang such as Seksyen 12 Bandar Baru Bangi, Kampung Sungai Merab, Desa Pinggiran Putra and Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda are located in northeast Dengkil, Sepang District and is governed by the Sepang Municipal Council. Kajang town is located on the eastern banks of the Langat River. It is surrounded by Cheras, Semenyih, Bangi, Putrajaya and Serdang.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "According to the 2020 census, the local authority area (which includes Kajang, Cheras, Balakong, Bangi, Semenyih and Pekan Hulu Langat) has a population of 1.05 million people.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The name Kajang is believed to have originated from the language of Temuan tribes (Orang Asli) who populated the Langat valley in the 17th-18th centuries. In their language kajang referred to their art of weaving screwpine or pandanus leaves, which were prevalent in much of the country. A similar theory stated that settlers from the neighboring domain of Sungai Ujong (Negeri Sembilan) once constructed huts (pondok) in the area with thatched roof made from folded (lipat kajang) screwpine leaves.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is also believed that the name kajang may have originated from the Buginese word berkajang, meaning camp or accommodation.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kajang is a half hour's drive from Kuala Lumpur's central business district, primarily through Jalan Cheras and the Grand Saga Expressway; both routes are part of the Malaysia Federal Route 1 system.",
"title": "Geography and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The first planned township built and developed in Kajang is Bandar Baru Bangi which was first developed in 1974 by the Selangor state government. It has since acted as the satellite town and Central Business District of Kajang, with most banks and government offices operating out of the township. The Kajang bus and taxi terminal called Hentian Kajang is also located at the eastern end of the township. The district capital of Hulu Langat was shifted to Bandar Baru Bangi from Kajang in 1992.",
"title": "Geography and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In recent years, a few townships were developed in Kajang, such as Taman Prima Saujana, Sungai Chua and Taman Kajang Perdana (Kajang Highlands). High-end developments in Kajang include Bandar Seri Putra, Bandar Bukit Mahkota, Twin Palms, Sri Banyan, Country Heights, Jade Hills, Saujana Impian, TTDI Grove, Tropicana Heights and Prima Paramount. Areas surrounding these townships are accessible via the SILK Expressway, Kajang-Seremban Expressway, Grand Saga Expressway and the North–South Expressway Southern Route.",
"title": "Geography and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Some parts of Kajang such as Kampung Sungai Merab, Desa Pinggiran Putra and Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda are located in northeast Dengkil, Sepang District and is governed by the Sepang Municipal Council. While technically being a part of Sepang District under Mukim Dengkil, the above-mentioned townships are commonly associated with Kajang due to close proximity to Kajang proper (adjacent to Kampung Sungai Ramal which is separated by the North South Expressway) and the rather lengthy distance from Sepang and Dengkil towns proper. The townships uses the postal code of Kajang instead of Sepang and Dengkil, also due to the reasons above.",
"title": "Geography and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "While Bandar Seri Putra and Bukit Mahkota are located adjacent to Bangi Lama (Bangi old town) as well as Bandar Baru Bangi, the townships along with Bangi Lama uses the postal code of Kajang instead of Bandar Baru Bangi. The townships of Bandar Baru Bangi, Bangi Lama, Bandar Seri Putra and Bukit Mahkota are located in Mukim Kajang.",
"title": "Geography and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Orang Asli tribes had already established settlements in what is now Kajang as early as the 16th century, however the first recorded settlement was found in 1709 by additional Orang Asli settlers who relocated from the Klang valley. Kajang town in its present form was founded in the 1870s, in the aftermath of the Klang War. In its early days, it was settled by Mandailings and Minangkabau people from Sumatra in the then-Dutch East Indies, followed by Chinese tin miners.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "As with other towns in Selangor, Kajang as a modern town owes its rise in particular to tin mines and plantations which were opened around the 1890s. A famous coffee estates was Inch Kenneth Estate managed by the Kindersley brothers, who were among the first to plant rubber in the country on a commercial basis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "During the Japanese invasion, Kajang was bombed on 12 January 1942, a day after the fall of Kuala Lumpur. The bombs, meant for the railway station, missed its target, and hit a nearby church instead.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In 1948, a Communist insurgency against British forces and their allies across Malaya began, which led to the Malayan Emergency with fighting soon spreading to Kajang. Guerrilla leader Lau Yew died in combat just outside Kajang in July 1948; British forces photographed his corpse and printed the image onto leaflets to distribute around Kajang.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Kajang was granted municipal status on 1 January 1997. Previously it was under the jurisdiction of the Hulu Langat District Council (Majlis Daerah Hulu Langat, MDHL). Kajang was the administrative centre of the Hulu Langat region until it was relocated to Bandar Baru Bangi in 1992.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kajang's population of 236,240 consists of a wide demographic population.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kajang's main population centres are Sg. Sekamat, Taman Saujana Impian, Sg. Kantan, Sg. Jelok, Sg. Ramal, Sungai Chua, Jalan Reko, Jalan Bukit, Taman Jenaris, Taman Prima Saujana, Taman Kantan Permai, Taman Kajang Perdana, Taman Sri Ramal, Taman Bukit Mewah, Kajang Prima, Bandar Teknologi Kajang, Hillpark and Bandar Baru Bangi.",
"title": "Demographics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The city centre of Kajang is the colonial quarter near the Stadium Kajang MRT station, including the streets of Jalan Mendaling, Jalan Stadium, Jalan Sulaiman and Jalan Raja Haroun. The buildings in the area were constructed around the 1900s to 1930s. The architecture of these shophouses are a combination of traditional Chinese and European designs. The ground floor was used mostly for commercial activities and the upper floor as the family living quarters.",
"title": "Landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "One of Kajang's landmarks is Kajang Stadium which is situated in the heart of the town. The stadium can accommodate up to 5,000 people and is used throughout the year for the community soccer competitions.",
"title": "Landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Another landmark is the Kajang Jamek Mosque, which is recognisable by its bright yellow facade.",
"title": "Landmarks"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Kajang is served by a network of tolled expressways and federal highways.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Federal Route 1, the premier north–south federal route of Peninsular Malaysia, runs through downtown Kajang as Jalan Cheras from Cheras until Sungai Jernih and Stadium Kajang and then southwards as Jalan Semenyih from Stadium Kajang until Semenyih, Beranang and neighbouring Seremban, Negeri Sembilan with the rest of the route terminating in Johor Bahru, Johor - the route's southern terminus. On Federal Route 1, Kajang is 22 km from Kuala Lumpur, 8 km from Semenyih and 43 km from Seremban.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "A stretch of Federal Route 1 is concurrent with the Cheras-Kajang toll road (aka the Grand Saga Expressway) between Taman Connaught and Bukit Dukung. The SILK Expressway starts in Serdang, which then runs through Balakong and then forms a beltway around downtown Kajang before ending near Bandar Baru Bangi. It is the main ring road for Kajang.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "PLUS Expressway exit 210 (Kajang Interchange) serves the vicinity of Kajang and Bangi. It also links the expressway to SILK Expressway and SKVE Expressway as well as B11 which runs concurrently with SILK and SKVE from SKVE's Serdang Interchange at Seri Kembangan until SILK's Sungai Chua Interchange at Kajang, before being detoured out of SILK after the interchange. B11 continues on its own separate route until its terminus at Stadium Kajang just before the intersection with Jalan Cheras, Jalan Semenyih and Jalan Reko",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "From Ampang Jaya, one can reach Kajang with state routes B62 and B52.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "KB06 KG35 Kajang railway station is the principal rail station of Kajang. It is an interchange station between the 9 MRT Kajang Line, 1 KTM Seremban Line and ETS KTM ETS. The station is the southern terminal of the MRT line.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Kajang station, though so named, does not directly serve downtown Kajang; Stadium Kajang MRT is located in the actual downtown area, along with Sungai Jernih MRT.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Kajang is famous for its satay, a form of skewered barbecued meat. Informally, Kajang is known as the Satay Town.",
"title": "Food and tourism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Malaysia Prison Complex (Kompleks Penjara Kajang), Prison Department of Malaysia is headquartered in Kajang.",
"title": "Government and infrastructure"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kajang has multiple shopping complexes, amongst them is the Billion Shopping Center formerly in Kajang town, which now has relocated to Bandar Teknologi Kajang. Other shopping centres located in Kajang are Plaza Metro Kajang, Metro Point and Kompleks Kota Kajang. Metro Avenue is a new shopping district located opposite SMJK Yu Hua Kajang and Kajang High School.",
"title": "Shopping"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Hospital Kajang is the primary public hospital in the city.",
"title": "Facilities and amenities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Private medical centres function 24 hours and include facilities such as Poliklinik MUC @Metro Point, Klinik Mediviron Prima Saujana, Kajang Plaza Medical Centre (KPMC) and KPJ Kajang Specialist Hospital.",
"title": "Facilities and amenities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Hulu Langat District Police Headquarters are located in the town centre, across the Highway 1 junction from the Post Office. Federal government agencies with their branch in Kajang include the National Registration Department, Immigration Department, Transportation Department, and Hulu Langat Education Office.",
"title": "Facilities and amenities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kajang is home to institutions of higher learning, which includes:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "After the 2018 Malaysian general election, Kajang became part of the Bangi parliamentary constituency in the Dewan Rakyat of the Malaysian Parliament. The seat is held by Syahredzan Johan from PH-DAP.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the Selangor State Legislative Assembly, Kajang is one of three state seats within the Bangi parliamentary district; the other two are Balakong and Sungai Ramal. The incumbent Assemblyperson for Kajang is David Cheong from PH-PKR.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Until 9 May 2018, Kajang was part of the Hulu Langat parliamentary constituency in the Dewan Rakyat of the Malaysian Parliament.",
"title": "Politics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the Selangor State Legislative Assembly, Kajang was one of three state seats within the Hulu Langat parliamentary district; the other two were Semenyih and Dusun Tua.",
"title": "Politics"
}
] |
Kajang is a town in both Hulu Langat District and Sepang District, Selangor, Malaysia. Kajang, along with much of Hulu Langat District, is governed by the Kajang Municipal Council. Some parts of Kajang such as Seksyen 12 Bandar Baru Bangi, Kampung Sungai Merab, Desa Pinggiran Putra and Kampung Dato Abu Bakar Baginda are located in northeast Dengkil, Sepang District and is governed by the Sepang Municipal Council. Kajang town is located on the eastern banks of the Langat River. It is surrounded by Cheras, Semenyih, Bangi, Putrajaya and Serdang. According to the 2020 census, the local authority area has a population of 1.05 million people.
|
2001-10-08T13:11:38Z
|
2023-12-25T18:42:34Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajang
|
16,912 |
Carl Benz
|
Carl (or Karl) Friedrich Benz (German: [kaʁl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈbɛnts] ; born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant; 25 November 1844 – 4 April 1929) was a German engine designer and automotive engineer. His Benz Patent Motorcar from 1885 is considered the first practical modern automobile and first car put into series production. He received a patent for the motorcar in 1886, the same year he first publicly drove the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.
His company Benz & Cie., based in Mannheim, was the world's first automobile plant and largest of its day. In 1926, it merged with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz, which produces the Mercedes-Benz among other brands.
Benz is widely regarded as "the father of the car", as well as the "father of the automobile industry".
Carl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant on 25 November 1844 in Mühlburg, now a borough of Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, which is part of modern Germany. His parents were Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver, Johann Georg Benz, whom she married a few months later. According to German law, the child acquired the name "Benz" by legal marriage of his parents. When he was two years old, his father died of pneumonia, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father.
Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education. Benz attended the local school in Karlsruhe and was a prodigious student. In 1853, at the age of nine, he started at the scientifically oriented Lyceum. Next he studied at Karlsruhe's polytechnical school under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.
Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but he eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering. On 30 September 1860, at age 15, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering for the Karlsruhe polytechnical school, which he subsequently attended. Benz graduated 9 July 1864 aged 19.
Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.
He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory. In 1868 he went to Pforzheim to work for the bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik. Finally, he went to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.
In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Benz joined August Ritter, in launching the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop in Mannheim, later renamed Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working.
The enterprise's first year went very badly. Ritter turned out to be unreliable, and the business's tools were impounded. The difficulty was overcome when Benz's fiancée, Bertha Ringer, bought out Ritter's share in the company, using her dowry.
On 20 July 1872, Benz and Bertha Ringer married. They had five children: Eugen (1873), Richard (1874), Clara (1877), Thilde (1882), and Ellen (1890).
Despite the business misfortunes, Benz led in the development of new engines in the early factory he and his wife owned. To get more revenue, in 1878 he began to work on new patents. First, he concentrated on creating a reliable petrol two-stroke engine. Benz finished his two-stroke engine on 31 December 1879, and was granted a patent for it on 28 June 1880.
While designing what would become the production standard for his two-stroke engine, Benz patented the speed regulation system, the ignition using sparks with battery, the spark plug, the carburetor, the clutch, the gear shift, and the water radiator.
Problems arose again when the banks at Mannheim demanded that the Benz's enterprise be incorporated due to the high production costs it maintained. They were forced to improvise an association with photographer Emil Bühler and his brother (a cheese merchant), to get additional bank support. The company became the joint-stock company Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882.
After all the necessary incorporation agreements, Benz was unhappy because he was left with merely five percent of the shares and a modest position as director. Worst of all, his ideas weren't considered when designing new products, so he withdrew from that corporation just one year later, in 1883.
Benz's lifelong hobby brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Eßlinger. In 1883, the three founded a new company producing industrial machines: Benz & Companie Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, usually referred to as Benz & Cie. Quickly growing to twenty-five employees, it soon began to produce static gas engines as well.
The success of the company gave Benz the opportunity to indulge in his old passion of designing a horseless carriage. Based on his experience with, and fondness for, bicycles, he used similar technology when he created an automobile. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator. Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. Benz finished his creation in 1885 and named it "Benz Patent-Motorwagen".
The Motorwagen was patented on 29 January 1886 as DRP-37435: "automobile fueled by gas". The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. Benz first publicly drove the car on 3 July 1886 in Mannheim at a top speed of 16 km/h (10 mph). The next year Benz created the Motorwagen Model 2, which had several modifications, and in 1889, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year.
Benz began to sell the vehicle (advertising it as "Benz Patent-Motorwagen") in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history. The second customer of the Motorwagen was a Parisian bicycle manufacturer Emile Roger, who had already been building Benz engines under license from Benz for several years. Roger added the Benz automobiles (many built in France) to the line he carried in Paris and initially most were sold there.
The early 1888 version of the Motorwagen had only two gears and could not climb hills unaided. This limitation was rectified after Bertha Benz drove one of the vehicles a great distance and suggested to her husband the addition of a third gear for climbing hills. In the course of this trip she also invented brake pads.
The world's first long distance automobile trip was undertaken by Bertha Benz using a Model 3. On the morning of 5 August 1888 Bertha – supposedly without the knowledge of her husband – took the vehicle on a 104 km (65 mi) trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, taking her sons Eugen and Richard with her. In addition to having to locate pharmacies along the way to refuel, she repaired various technical and mechanical problems. One of these included the invention of brake lining; after some longer downhill slopes she ordered a shoemaker to nail leather onto the brake blocks. Bertha Benz and sons finally arrived at nightfall, announcing the achievement to Karl by telegram. It had been her intention to demonstrate the feasibility of using the Benz Motorwagen for travel and to generate publicity in the manner now referred to as live marketing. Today, the event is celebrated every two years in Germany with an antique automobile rally.
In 2008, the Bertha Benz Memorial Route was officially approved as a route of the industrial heritage of mankind, because it follows Bertha Benz's tracks of the world's first long-distance journey by automobile in 1888. The public can now follow the 194 km (121 mi) of signposted route from Mannheim via Heidelberg to Pforzheim (Black Forest) and back. The return trip – which didn't go through Heidelberg – was along a different, slightly shorter route, as shown on the maps of the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.
Benz's Model 3 made its wide-scale debut to the world in the 1889 World's Fair in Paris; about twenty-five Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893.
The great demand for static internal combustion engines forced Benz to enlarge the factory in Mannheim, and in 1886 a new building located on Waldhofstrasse (operating until 1908) was added. Benz & Cie. had grown in the interim from 50 employees in 1889 to 430 in 1899.
During the last years of the nineteenth century, Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with 572 units produced in 1899.
Because of its size, in 1899, Benz & Cie. became a joint-stock company with the arrival of Friedrich von Fischer and Julius Ganß, who came aboard as members of the Board of Management. Ganß worked in the commercialization department, which is somewhat similar to marketing in contemporary corporations.
The new directors recommended that Benz should create a less expensive automobile suitable for mass production. From 1893 to 1900 Benz sold the four wheel, two seat Victoria, a two-passenger automobile with a 2.2 kW (3.0 hp) engine, which could reach the top speed of 18 km/h (11 mph) and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chained tiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893, and was produced in a four-seated version with face-to-face seat benches called the "Vis-à-Vis".
From 1894 to 1902, Benz produced over 1,200 of what some consider the first mass-produced car, the Velocipede, later known as the Benz Velo. The early Velo had a 1L 1.5-metric-horsepower (1.5 hp; 1.1 kW) engine, and later a 3-metric-horsepower (3 hp; 2 kW) engine. giving a top speed of 19 km/h (12 mph).
The Velo participated in the world's first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen, where Émile Roger finished 14th, after covering the 126 km (78 mi) in 10 hours 01-minute at an average speed of 12.7 km/h (7.9 mph).
In 1895, Benz designed the first truck with an internal combustion engine in history. Benz also built the first motor buses in history in 1895, for the Netphener bus company.
In 1896, Benz was granted a patent for his design of the first flat engine. It had horizontally opposed pistons, a design in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre simultaneously, thus balancing each other with respect to momentum. Many flat engines, particularly those with four or fewer cylinders, are arranged as "boxer engines", boxermotor in German, and also are known as "horizontally opposed engines". This design is still used by Porsche, Subaru, and some high performance engines used in racing cars. In motorcycles, the most famous boxer engine is found in BMW Motorrad, though the boxer engine design was used in many other models, including Victoria, Harley-Davidson XA, Zündapp, Wooler, Douglas Dragonfly, Ratier, Universal, IMZ-Ural, Dnepr, Gnome et Rhône, Chang Jiang, Marusho, and the Honda Gold Wing.
Although Gottlieb Daimler died in March 1900—and there is no evidence that Benz and Daimler knew each other nor that they knew about each other's early achievements—eventually, competition with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG) in Stuttgart began to challenge the leadership of Benz & Cie. In October 1900, the main designer of DMG, Wilhelm Maybach, built the engine that would later be used in the Mercedes-35hp of 1902. The engine was built to the specifications of Emil Jellinek under a contract for him to purchase thirty-six vehicles with the engine, and for him to become a dealer of the special series. Jellinek stipulated the new engine be named Daimler-Mercedes (for his daughter). Maybach would quit DMG in 1907, but he designed the model and all of the important changes. After testing, the first was delivered to Jellinek on 22 December 1900. Jellinek continued to make suggestions for changes to the model and obtained good results racing the automobile in the next few years, encouraging DMG to engage in commercial production of automobiles, which they did in 1902.
Benz countered with Parsifil, introduced in 1903 with a vertical twin engine that achieved a top speed of 60 km/h (37 mph). Then, without consulting Benz, the other directors hired some French designers.
France was a country with an extensive automobile industry based on Maybach's creations. Because of this action, after difficult discussions, Benz announced his retirement from design management on 24 January 1903, although he remained as director on the Board of Management through its merger with DMG in 1926 and, remained on the board of the new Daimler-Benz corporation until his death in 1929.
He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1984 and the European Automotive Hall of Fame.
Benz's sons Eugen and Richard left Benz & Cie. in 1903, but Richard returned to the company in 1904 as the designer of passenger vehicles.
That year, sales of Benz & Cie. reached 3,480 automobiles, and the company remained the leading manufacturer of automobiles.
Along with continuing as a director of Benz & Cie., Benz founded another company, C. Benz Söhne, (with his son Eugen and closely held within the family), a privately held company for manufacturing automobiles. The brand name used the first initial of Benz's first name, "Carl".
In 1909, the Blitzen Benz was built in Mannheim by Benz & Cie. The bird-beaked vehicle had a 21.5-liter (1312ci), 150 kW (200 hp) engine, and on 9 November 1909 in the hands of Victor Hémery of France, the land speed racer at Brooklands, set a record of 226.91 km/h (141.00 mph), said to be "faster than any plane, train, or automobile" at the time, a record that was not exceeded for ten years by any other vehicle. It was transported to several countries, including the United States, to establish multiple records of this achievement.
Carl Benz, Bertha Benz, and their son, Eugen, moved 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) east of Mannheim to live in nearby Ladenburg, and solely with their own capital, founded the private company, C. Benz Sons (German: Benz Söhne) in 1906, producing automobiles and gas engines. The latter type was replaced by petrol engines because of lack of demand.
This company never issued stocks publicly, building its own line of automobiles independently from Benz & Cie., which was located in Mannheim. The Benz Sons automobiles were of good quality and became popular in London as taxis.
In 1912, Benz liquidated all of his shares in Benz Sons and left the family-held company in Ladenburg to Eugen and Richard, but he remained as a director of Benz & Cie.
During a birthday celebration for him in his home town of Karlsruhe on 25 November 1914, the seventy-year-old Benz was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, the Karlsruhe University, thereby becoming—Dr. Ing. h. c. Benz.
Almost from the very beginning of the production of automobiles, participation in sports car racing became a major method to gain publicity for manufacturers. At first, the production models were raced and the Benz Velo participated in the first automobile race: Paris to Rouen 1894. Later, investment in developing racecars for motorsports produced returns through sales generated by the association of the name of the automobile with the winners. Unique race vehicles were built at the time such as the first mid-engine and aerodynamically designed, Tropfenwagen, a "teardrop" body introduced at the 1923 European Grand Prix at Monza.
In the last production year of the Benz Sons company, 1923, three hundred and fifty units were built. During the following year, 1924, Benz built two additional 8/25 hp units of the automobile manufactured by this company, tailored for his personal use, which he never sold; they are still preserved.
The German economic crisis worsened. In 1923 Benz & Cie. produced only 1,382 units in Mannheim, and DMG made only 1,020 in Stuttgart. The average cost of an automobile was 25 million marks because of rapid inflation. Negotiations between the two companies resumed and in 1924 they signed an "Agreement of Mutual Interest" valid until the year 2000. Both enterprises standardized design, production, purchasing, sales, and advertising—marketing their automobile models jointly—although keeping their respective brands.
On 28 June 1926, Benz & Cie. and DMG finally merged as the Daimler-Benz company, baptizing all of its automobiles as Mercedes-Benz, honoring the most important model of the DMG automobiles, the 1902 Mercedes 35 hp, along with the Benz name. The name of Mercedes 35 hp had been chosen for ten-year-old Mercédès Jellinek, the daughter of Emil Jellinek who had set the specifications for the new model. Between 1900 and 1909 he was a member of DMG's board of management, however had resigned long before the merger.
Benz was a member of the new Daimler-Benz board of management for the remainder of his life. A new logo was created in 1926, consisting of a three pointed star (representing Daimler's motto: "engines for land, air, and water") surrounded by traditional laurels from the Benz logo, and the brand of all of its automobiles was labeled Mercedes-Benz. Model names would follow the brand name in the same convention as today.
The next year, 1927, the number of units sold tripled to 7,918 and the diesel line was launched for truck production. In 1928, the Mercedes-Benz SSK was presented.
On 4 April 1929, Benz died at his home in Ladenburg at the age of 84 from a bronchial inflammation. Until her death on 5 May 1944, Bertha Benz continued to reside in their last home. Members of the family resided in the home for thirty more years. The Benz home has now been designated as historic and is used as a scientific meeting facility for a nonprofit foundation, the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation.
The Carl-Benz-Gymnasium Ladenburg [de] in Ladenburg, where he lived until his death, is named in his honor, as is the Automuseum Dr. Carl Benz, also located in Ladenburg.
In 2011, a dramatized television film about the life of Carl and Bertha Benz was made named Carl & Bertha [de], which premiered on 11 May and was aired by Das Erste on 23 May. A trailer of the film and a "making of" special were released on YouTube.
Benz was also featured in the first episode of the History Television miniseries The Cars That Made The World.
Specific
General
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Carl (or Karl) Friedrich Benz (German: [kaʁl ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈbɛnts] ; born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant; 25 November 1844 – 4 April 1929) was a German engine designer and automotive engineer. His Benz Patent Motorcar from 1885 is considered the first practical modern automobile and first car put into series production. He received a patent for the motorcar in 1886, the same year he first publicly drove the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "His company Benz & Cie., based in Mannheim, was the world's first automobile plant and largest of its day. In 1926, it merged with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz, which produces the Mercedes-Benz among other brands.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Benz is widely regarded as \"the father of the car\", as well as the \"father of the automobile industry\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Carl Benz was born Karl Friedrich Michael Vaillant on 25 November 1844 in Mühlburg, now a borough of Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, which is part of modern Germany. His parents were Josephine Vaillant and a locomotive driver, Johann Georg Benz, whom she married a few months later. According to German law, the child acquired the name \"Benz\" by legal marriage of his parents. When he was two years old, his father died of pneumonia, and his name was changed to Karl Friedrich Benz in remembrance of his father.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Despite living in near poverty, his mother strove to give him a good education. Benz attended the local school in Karlsruhe and was a prodigious student. In 1853, at the age of nine, he started at the scientifically oriented Lyceum. Next he studied at Karlsruhe's polytechnical school under the instruction of Ferdinand Redtenbacher.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Benz had originally focused his studies on locksmithing, but he eventually followed his father's steps toward locomotive engineering. On 30 September 1860, at age 15, he passed the entrance exam for mechanical engineering for the Karlsruhe polytechnical school, which he subsequently attended. Benz graduated 9 July 1864 aged 19.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Following his formal education, Benz had seven years of professional training in several companies, but did not fit well in any of them. The training started in Karlsruhe with two years of varied jobs in a mechanical engineering company.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He then moved to Mannheim to work as a draftsman and designer in a scales factory. In 1868 he went to Pforzheim to work for the bridge building company Gebrüder Benckiser Eisenwerke und Maschinenfabrik. Finally, he went to Vienna for a short period to work at an iron construction company.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1871, at the age of twenty-seven, Benz joined August Ritter, in launching the Iron Foundry and Mechanical Workshop in Mannheim, later renamed Factory for Machines for Sheet-metal Working.",
"title": "Benz's first factory and early inventions (1871–1882)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The enterprise's first year went very badly. Ritter turned out to be unreliable, and the business's tools were impounded. The difficulty was overcome when Benz's fiancée, Bertha Ringer, bought out Ritter's share in the company, using her dowry.",
"title": "Benz's first factory and early inventions (1871–1882)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "On 20 July 1872, Benz and Bertha Ringer married. They had five children: Eugen (1873), Richard (1874), Clara (1877), Thilde (1882), and Ellen (1890).",
"title": "Benz's first factory and early inventions (1871–1882)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Despite the business misfortunes, Benz led in the development of new engines in the early factory he and his wife owned. To get more revenue, in 1878 he began to work on new patents. First, he concentrated on creating a reliable petrol two-stroke engine. Benz finished his two-stroke engine on 31 December 1879, and was granted a patent for it on 28 June 1880.",
"title": "Benz's first factory and early inventions (1871–1882)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "While designing what would become the production standard for his two-stroke engine, Benz patented the speed regulation system, the ignition using sparks with battery, the spark plug, the carburetor, the clutch, the gear shift, and the water radiator.",
"title": "Benz's first factory and early inventions (1871–1882)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Problems arose again when the banks at Mannheim demanded that the Benz's enterprise be incorporated due to the high production costs it maintained. They were forced to improvise an association with photographer Emil Bühler and his brother (a cheese merchant), to get additional bank support. The company became the joint-stock company Gasmotoren Fabrik Mannheim in 1882.",
"title": "Benz's Gasmotoren-Fabrik Mannheim (1882–1883)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After all the necessary incorporation agreements, Benz was unhappy because he was left with merely five percent of the shares and a modest position as director. Worst of all, his ideas weren't considered when designing new products, so he withdrew from that corporation just one year later, in 1883.",
"title": "Benz's Gasmotoren-Fabrik Mannheim (1882–1883)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Benz's lifelong hobby brought him to a bicycle repair shop in Mannheim owned by Max Rose and Friedrich Wilhelm Eßlinger. In 1883, the three founded a new company producing industrial machines: Benz & Companie Rheinische Gasmotoren-Fabrik, usually referred to as Benz & Cie. Quickly growing to twenty-five employees, it soon began to produce static gas engines as well.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The success of the company gave Benz the opportunity to indulge in his old passion of designing a horseless carriage. Based on his experience with, and fondness for, bicycles, he used similar technology when he created an automobile. It featured wire wheels (unlike carriages' wooden ones) with a four-stroke engine of his own design between the rear wheels, with a very advanced coil ignition and evaporative cooling rather than a radiator. Power was transmitted by means of two roller chains to the rear axle. Benz finished his creation in 1885 and named it \"Benz Patent-Motorwagen\".",
"title": "Benz and Cie. and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Motorwagen was patented on 29 January 1886 as DRP-37435: \"automobile fueled by gas\". The 1885 version was difficult to control, leading to a collision with a wall during a public demonstration. The first successful tests on public roads were carried out in the early summer of 1886. Benz first publicly drove the car on 3 July 1886 in Mannheim at a top speed of 16 km/h (10 mph). The next year Benz created the Motorwagen Model 2, which had several modifications, and in 1889, the definitive Model 3 with wooden wheels was introduced, showing at the Paris Expo the same year.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Benz began to sell the vehicle (advertising it as \"Benz Patent-Motorwagen\") in the late summer of 1888, making it the first commercially available automobile in history. The second customer of the Motorwagen was a Parisian bicycle manufacturer Emile Roger, who had already been building Benz engines under license from Benz for several years. Roger added the Benz automobiles (many built in France) to the line he carried in Paris and initially most were sold there.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The early 1888 version of the Motorwagen had only two gears and could not climb hills unaided. This limitation was rectified after Bertha Benz drove one of the vehicles a great distance and suggested to her husband the addition of a third gear for climbing hills. In the course of this trip she also invented brake pads.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The world's first long distance automobile trip was undertaken by Bertha Benz using a Model 3. On the morning of 5 August 1888 Bertha – supposedly without the knowledge of her husband – took the vehicle on a 104 km (65 mi) trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, taking her sons Eugen and Richard with her. In addition to having to locate pharmacies along the way to refuel, she repaired various technical and mechanical problems. One of these included the invention of brake lining; after some longer downhill slopes she ordered a shoemaker to nail leather onto the brake blocks. Bertha Benz and sons finally arrived at nightfall, announcing the achievement to Karl by telegram. It had been her intention to demonstrate the feasibility of using the Benz Motorwagen for travel and to generate publicity in the manner now referred to as live marketing. Today, the event is celebrated every two years in Germany with an antique automobile rally.",
"title": "Bertha Benz's long-distance drive"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2008, the Bertha Benz Memorial Route was officially approved as a route of the industrial heritage of mankind, because it follows Bertha Benz's tracks of the world's first long-distance journey by automobile in 1888. The public can now follow the 194 km (121 mi) of signposted route from Mannheim via Heidelberg to Pforzheim (Black Forest) and back. The return trip – which didn't go through Heidelberg – was along a different, slightly shorter route, as shown on the maps of the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.",
"title": "Bertha Benz's long-distance drive"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Benz's Model 3 made its wide-scale debut to the world in the 1889 World's Fair in Paris; about twenty-five Motorwagens were built between 1886 and 1893.",
"title": "Bertha Benz's long-distance drive"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The great demand for static internal combustion engines forced Benz to enlarge the factory in Mannheim, and in 1886 a new building located on Waldhofstrasse (operating until 1908) was added. Benz & Cie. had grown in the interim from 50 employees in 1889 to 430 in 1899.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "During the last years of the nineteenth century, Benz was the largest automobile company in the world with 572 units produced in 1899.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Because of its size, in 1899, Benz & Cie. became a joint-stock company with the arrival of Friedrich von Fischer and Julius Ganß, who came aboard as members of the Board of Management. Ganß worked in the commercialization department, which is somewhat similar to marketing in contemporary corporations.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The new directors recommended that Benz should create a less expensive automobile suitable for mass production. From 1893 to 1900 Benz sold the four wheel, two seat Victoria, a two-passenger automobile with a 2.2 kW (3.0 hp) engine, which could reach the top speed of 18 km/h (11 mph) and had a pivotal front axle operated by a roller-chained tiller for steering. The model was successful with 85 units sold in 1893, and was produced in a four-seated version with face-to-face seat benches called the \"Vis-à-Vis\".",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "From 1894 to 1902, Benz produced over 1,200 of what some consider the first mass-produced car, the Velocipede, later known as the Benz Velo. The early Velo had a 1L 1.5-metric-horsepower (1.5 hp; 1.1 kW) engine, and later a 3-metric-horsepower (3 hp; 2 kW) engine. giving a top speed of 19 km/h (12 mph).",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Velo participated in the world's first automobile race, the 1894 Paris to Rouen, where Émile Roger finished 14th, after covering the 126 km (78 mi) in 10 hours 01-minute at an average speed of 12.7 km/h (7.9 mph).",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1895, Benz designed the first truck with an internal combustion engine in history. Benz also built the first motor buses in history in 1895, for the Netphener bus company.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In 1896, Benz was granted a patent for his design of the first flat engine. It had horizontally opposed pistons, a design in which the corresponding pistons reach top dead centre simultaneously, thus balancing each other with respect to momentum. Many flat engines, particularly those with four or fewer cylinders, are arranged as \"boxer engines\", boxermotor in German, and also are known as \"horizontally opposed engines\". This design is still used by Porsche, Subaru, and some high performance engines used in racing cars. In motorcycles, the most famous boxer engine is found in BMW Motorrad, though the boxer engine design was used in many other models, including Victoria, Harley-Davidson XA, Zündapp, Wooler, Douglas Dragonfly, Ratier, Universal, IMZ-Ural, Dnepr, Gnome et Rhône, Chang Jiang, Marusho, and the Honda Gold Wing.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Although Gottlieb Daimler died in March 1900—and there is no evidence that Benz and Daimler knew each other nor that they knew about each other's early achievements—eventually, competition with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft (DMG) in Stuttgart began to challenge the leadership of Benz & Cie. In October 1900, the main designer of DMG, Wilhelm Maybach, built the engine that would later be used in the Mercedes-35hp of 1902. The engine was built to the specifications of Emil Jellinek under a contract for him to purchase thirty-six vehicles with the engine, and for him to become a dealer of the special series. Jellinek stipulated the new engine be named Daimler-Mercedes (for his daughter). Maybach would quit DMG in 1907, but he designed the model and all of the important changes. After testing, the first was delivered to Jellinek on 22 December 1900. Jellinek continued to make suggestions for changes to the model and obtained good results racing the automobile in the next few years, encouraging DMG to engage in commercial production of automobiles, which they did in 1902.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Benz countered with Parsifil, introduced in 1903 with a vertical twin engine that achieved a top speed of 60 km/h (37 mph). Then, without consulting Benz, the other directors hired some French designers.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "France was a country with an extensive automobile industry based on Maybach's creations. Because of this action, after difficult discussions, Benz announced his retirement from design management on 24 January 1903, although he remained as director on the Board of Management through its merger with DMG in 1926 and, remained on the board of the new Daimler-Benz corporation until his death in 1929.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "He was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1984 and the European Automotive Hall of Fame.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Benz's sons Eugen and Richard left Benz & Cie. in 1903, but Richard returned to the company in 1904 as the designer of passenger vehicles.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "That year, sales of Benz & Cie. reached 3,480 automobiles, and the company remained the leading manufacturer of automobiles.",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Along with continuing as a director of Benz & Cie., Benz founded another company, C. Benz Söhne, (with his son Eugen and closely held within the family), a privately held company for manufacturing automobiles. The brand name used the first initial of Benz's first name, \"Carl\".",
"title": "Benz and Cie. expansion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "In 1909, the Blitzen Benz was built in Mannheim by Benz & Cie. The bird-beaked vehicle had a 21.5-liter (1312ci), 150 kW (200 hp) engine, and on 9 November 1909 in the hands of Victor Hémery of France, the land speed racer at Brooklands, set a record of 226.91 km/h (141.00 mph), said to be \"faster than any plane, train, or automobile\" at the time, a record that was not exceeded for ten years by any other vehicle. It was transported to several countries, including the United States, to establish multiple records of this achievement.",
"title": "Blitzen Benz"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Carl Benz, Bertha Benz, and their son, Eugen, moved 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) east of Mannheim to live in nearby Ladenburg, and solely with their own capital, founded the private company, C. Benz Sons (German: Benz Söhne) in 1906, producing automobiles and gas engines. The latter type was replaced by petrol engines because of lack of demand.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "This company never issued stocks publicly, building its own line of automobiles independently from Benz & Cie., which was located in Mannheim. The Benz Sons automobiles were of good quality and became popular in London as taxis.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In 1912, Benz liquidated all of his shares in Benz Sons and left the family-held company in Ladenburg to Eugen and Richard, but he remained as a director of Benz & Cie.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "During a birthday celebration for him in his home town of Karlsruhe on 25 November 1914, the seventy-year-old Benz was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, the Karlsruhe University, thereby becoming—Dr. Ing. h. c. Benz.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Almost from the very beginning of the production of automobiles, participation in sports car racing became a major method to gain publicity for manufacturers. At first, the production models were raced and the Benz Velo participated in the first automobile race: Paris to Rouen 1894. Later, investment in developing racecars for motorsports produced returns through sales generated by the association of the name of the automobile with the winners. Unique race vehicles were built at the time such as the first mid-engine and aerodynamically designed, Tropfenwagen, a \"teardrop\" body introduced at the 1923 European Grand Prix at Monza.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In the last production year of the Benz Sons company, 1923, three hundred and fifty units were built. During the following year, 1924, Benz built two additional 8/25 hp units of the automobile manufactured by this company, tailored for his personal use, which he never sold; they are still preserved.",
"title": "Benz Söhne (1906–1923)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "The German economic crisis worsened. In 1923 Benz & Cie. produced only 1,382 units in Mannheim, and DMG made only 1,020 in Stuttgart. The average cost of an automobile was 25 million marks because of rapid inflation. Negotiations between the two companies resumed and in 1924 they signed an \"Agreement of Mutual Interest\" valid until the year 2000. Both enterprises standardized design, production, purchasing, sales, and advertising—marketing their automobile models jointly—although keeping their respective brands.",
"title": "Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On 28 June 1926, Benz & Cie. and DMG finally merged as the Daimler-Benz company, baptizing all of its automobiles as Mercedes-Benz, honoring the most important model of the DMG automobiles, the 1902 Mercedes 35 hp, along with the Benz name. The name of Mercedes 35 hp had been chosen for ten-year-old Mercédès Jellinek, the daughter of Emil Jellinek who had set the specifications for the new model. Between 1900 and 1909 he was a member of DMG's board of management, however had resigned long before the merger.",
"title": "Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Benz was a member of the new Daimler-Benz board of management for the remainder of his life. A new logo was created in 1926, consisting of a three pointed star (representing Daimler's motto: \"engines for land, air, and water\") surrounded by traditional laurels from the Benz logo, and the brand of all of its automobiles was labeled Mercedes-Benz. Model names would follow the brand name in the same convention as today.",
"title": "Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The next year, 1927, the number of units sold tripled to 7,918 and the diesel line was launched for truck production. In 1928, the Mercedes-Benz SSK was presented.",
"title": "Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "On 4 April 1929, Benz died at his home in Ladenburg at the age of 84 from a bronchial inflammation. Until her death on 5 May 1944, Bertha Benz continued to reside in their last home. Members of the family resided in the home for thirty more years. The Benz home has now been designated as historic and is used as a scientific meeting facility for a nonprofit foundation, the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation.",
"title": "Toward Daimler-Benz and the first Mercedes-Benz in 1926"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Carl-Benz-Gymnasium Ladenburg [de] in Ladenburg, where he lived until his death, is named in his honor, as is the Automuseum Dr. Carl Benz, also located in Ladenburg.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "In 2011, a dramatized television film about the life of Carl and Bertha Benz was made named Carl & Bertha [de], which premiered on 11 May and was aired by Das Erste on 23 May. A trailer of the film and a \"making of\" special were released on YouTube.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Benz was also featured in the first episode of the History Television miniseries The Cars That Made The World.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Specific",
"title": "References"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "General",
"title": "References"
}
] |
Carl Friedrich Benz was a German engine designer and automotive engineer. His Benz Patent Motorcar from 1885 is considered the first practical modern automobile and first car put into series production. He received a patent for the motorcar in 1886, the same year he first publicly drove the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. His company Benz & Cie., based in Mannheim, was the world's first automobile plant and largest of its day. In 1926, it merged with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to form Daimler-Benz, which produces the Mercedes-Benz among other brands. Benz is widely regarded as "the father of the car", as well as the "father of the automobile industry".
|
2001-10-08T13:46:16Z
|
2023-12-28T08:12:19Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
|
16,913 |
Ceiba pentandra
|
Ceiba pentandra is a tropical tree of the order Malvales and the family Malvaceae (previously emplaced in the family Bombacaceae), native to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, northern South America, and (as the variety C. pentandra var guineensis) West Africa. A somewhat smaller variety has been introduced to South and Southeast Asia, where it is cultivated.
The tree and the cotton-like fluff obtained from its seed pods are commonly known in English as kapok, a Malay-derived name which originally applied to Bombax ceiba, a native of tropical Asia. In Spanish-speaking countries the tree is commonly known as "ceiba" and in French-speaking countries as fromager. The tree is cultivated for its cottonlike seed fibre, particularly in south-east Asia, and is also known as the Java cotton, Java kapok, silk-cotton or samauma.
The tree grows up to 240 ft (73 m) tall as confirmed by climbing and tape drop with reports of Kapoks up to 77 meters (252 feet) tall. These very large trees are in the Neotropics or tropical Africa. The Southeast Asian form of C. pentandra only reaches ninety feet (27 meters). Trunks can often be up to 3 m (10 ft) in diameter above the extensive buttress roots. The very largest individuals, however, can be 5.8 m (19 ft) thick or more above the buttresses.
The buttress roots can be clearly seen in photographs extending 12 to 15 m (40 to 50 ft) up the trunk of some specimens and extending out from the trunk as much as 20 m (65 ft) and then continuing below ground to a total length of 50 m (165 ft)
The trunk and many of the larger branches are often crowded with large simple thorns. These major branches, usually 4 to 6 in number, can be up to 1.8 m (6 ft) thick and form a crown of foliage as much as 61 m (201 ft) in width. The palmate leaves are composed of 5 to 9 leaflets, each up to 20 cm (8 in) long.
The trees produce several hundred 15 cm (6 in) pods containing seeds surrounded by a fluffy, yellowish fibre that is a mix of lignin and cellulose.
The referenced reports make it clear that C. pentandra is among the largest trees in the world.
The commercial tree is most heavily cultivated in the rainforests of Asia, notably in Java (hence one of its common names), the Philippines, Malaysia, and Hainan Island in China, as well as in South America.
The flowers are an important source of nectar and pollen for honey bees and bats.
Bats are the primary pollinators of the night-blooming flowers.
Native tribes along the Amazon River harvest the fibre to wrap around their blowgun darts. The fibres create a seal that allows the pressure to force the dart through the tube.
The fiber is light, very buoyant, resilient, resistant to water, but very flammable. The process of harvesting and separating the fiber is labor-intensive and menial. It is difficult to spin, but is used as an alternative to down as filling in mattresses, pillows, upholstery, zafus, and stuffed toys such as teddy bears, and for insulation. It was previously popularly used in life jackets and similar devices - until synthetic materials largely replaced the fiber. The seeds produce an oil that is used locally in soap and which can also be used as fertilizer.
Ceiba pentandra bark decoction has been used as a diuretic, as an aphrodisiac, and to treat headache, as well as type II diabetes. It is used as an additive in some versions of the psychedelic drink Ayahuasca.
A vegetable oil can be pressed from the seeds. The oil has a yellow colour and a pleasant, mild odour and taste, resembling cottonseed oil. It becomes rancid quickly when exposed to air. Kapok oil is produced in India, Indonesia and Malaysia. It has an iodine value of 85–100; this makes it a nondrying oil, which means that it does not dry out significantly when exposed to air. The oil has some potential as a biofuel and in paint preparation.
The tree is a sacred symbol in Maya mythology.
It is a sacred tree in Palo, Arará and Santería.
According to the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago, the Castle of the Devil is a huge C. pentandra growing deep in the forest in which Bazil the demon of death was imprisoned by a carpenter. The carpenter tricked the devil into entering the tree in which he carved seven rooms, one above the other, into the trunk. Folklore claims that Bazil still resides in that tree.
Most masks from Burkina Faso, especially those of Bobo and Mossi people, are carved from C. pentandra timber.
Ceiba pentandra is the national emblem of Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Equatorial Guinea. It appears on the coat of arms and flag of Equatorial Guinea.
The Cotton Tree was a landmark in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone, and is considered a symbol of freedom for the former slaves that immigrated there. The 70-metre-tall trunk snapped near the base, and fell in a storm on 24 May 2023.
Saigon, one of a number of older names for Ho Chi Minh City, may be derived from Sài (Sino-Vietnamese "palisade" etc.) and the Vietnamese name for the Kapok tree (bông) gòn, although, in this instance, the tree intended to be named may well be, not the New World Ceiba pentandra, but the Old World Bombax ceiba.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ceiba pentandra is a tropical tree of the order Malvales and the family Malvaceae (previously emplaced in the family Bombacaceae), native to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, northern South America, and (as the variety C. pentandra var guineensis) West Africa. A somewhat smaller variety has been introduced to South and Southeast Asia, where it is cultivated.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The tree and the cotton-like fluff obtained from its seed pods are commonly known in English as kapok, a Malay-derived name which originally applied to Bombax ceiba, a native of tropical Asia. In Spanish-speaking countries the tree is commonly known as \"ceiba\" and in French-speaking countries as fromager. The tree is cultivated for its cottonlike seed fibre, particularly in south-east Asia, and is also known as the Java cotton, Java kapok, silk-cotton or samauma.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The tree grows up to 240 ft (73 m) tall as confirmed by climbing and tape drop with reports of Kapoks up to 77 meters (252 feet) tall. These very large trees are in the Neotropics or tropical Africa. The Southeast Asian form of C. pentandra only reaches ninety feet (27 meters). Trunks can often be up to 3 m (10 ft) in diameter above the extensive buttress roots. The very largest individuals, however, can be 5.8 m (19 ft) thick or more above the buttresses.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The buttress roots can be clearly seen in photographs extending 12 to 15 m (40 to 50 ft) up the trunk of some specimens and extending out from the trunk as much as 20 m (65 ft) and then continuing below ground to a total length of 50 m (165 ft)",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The trunk and many of the larger branches are often crowded with large simple thorns. These major branches, usually 4 to 6 in number, can be up to 1.8 m (6 ft) thick and form a crown of foliage as much as 61 m (201 ft) in width. The palmate leaves are composed of 5 to 9 leaflets, each up to 20 cm (8 in) long.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The trees produce several hundred 15 cm (6 in) pods containing seeds surrounded by a fluffy, yellowish fibre that is a mix of lignin and cellulose.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The referenced reports make it clear that C. pentandra is among the largest trees in the world.",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The commercial tree is most heavily cultivated in the rainforests of Asia, notably in Java (hence one of its common names), the Philippines, Malaysia, and Hainan Island in China, as well as in South America.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The flowers are an important source of nectar and pollen for honey bees and bats.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Bats are the primary pollinators of the night-blooming flowers.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Native tribes along the Amazon River harvest the fibre to wrap around their blowgun darts. The fibres create a seal that allows the pressure to force the dart through the tube.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The fiber is light, very buoyant, resilient, resistant to water, but very flammable. The process of harvesting and separating the fiber is labor-intensive and menial. It is difficult to spin, but is used as an alternative to down as filling in mattresses, pillows, upholstery, zafus, and stuffed toys such as teddy bears, and for insulation. It was previously popularly used in life jackets and similar devices - until synthetic materials largely replaced the fiber. The seeds produce an oil that is used locally in soap and which can also be used as fertilizer.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Ceiba pentandra bark decoction has been used as a diuretic, as an aphrodisiac, and to treat headache, as well as type II diabetes. It is used as an additive in some versions of the psychedelic drink Ayahuasca.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A vegetable oil can be pressed from the seeds. The oil has a yellow colour and a pleasant, mild odour and taste, resembling cottonseed oil. It becomes rancid quickly when exposed to air. Kapok oil is produced in India, Indonesia and Malaysia. It has an iodine value of 85–100; this makes it a nondrying oil, which means that it does not dry out significantly when exposed to air. The oil has some potential as a biofuel and in paint preparation.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The tree is a sacred symbol in Maya mythology.",
"title": "Religion and folklore"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It is a sacred tree in Palo, Arará and Santería.",
"title": "Religion and folklore"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "According to the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago, the Castle of the Devil is a huge C. pentandra growing deep in the forest in which Bazil the demon of death was imprisoned by a carpenter. The carpenter tricked the devil into entering the tree in which he carved seven rooms, one above the other, into the trunk. Folklore claims that Bazil still resides in that tree.",
"title": "Religion and folklore"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Most masks from Burkina Faso, especially those of Bobo and Mossi people, are carved from C. pentandra timber.",
"title": "Religion and folklore"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ceiba pentandra is the national emblem of Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Equatorial Guinea. It appears on the coat of arms and flag of Equatorial Guinea.",
"title": "Symbolism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The Cotton Tree was a landmark in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone, and is considered a symbol of freedom for the former slaves that immigrated there. The 70-metre-tall trunk snapped near the base, and fell in a storm on 24 May 2023.",
"title": "Symbolism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Saigon, one of a number of older names for Ho Chi Minh City, may be derived from Sài (Sino-Vietnamese \"palisade\" etc.) and the Vietnamese name for the Kapok tree (bông) gòn, although, in this instance, the tree intended to be named may well be, not the New World Ceiba pentandra, but the Old World Bombax ceiba.",
"title": "Symbolism"
}
] |
Ceiba pentandra is a tropical tree of the order Malvales and the family Malvaceae, native to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, northern South America, and West Africa. A somewhat smaller variety has been introduced to South and Southeast Asia, where it is cultivated. The tree and the cotton-like fluff obtained from its seed pods are commonly known in English as kapok, a Malay-derived name which originally applied to Bombax ceiba, a native of tropical Asia. In Spanish-speaking countries the tree is commonly known as "ceiba" and in French-speaking countries as fromager. The tree is cultivated for its cottonlike seed fibre, particularly in south-east Asia, and is also known as the Java cotton, Java kapok, silk-cotton or samauma.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-23T13:37:39Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceiba_pentandra
|
16,914 |
Kyushu
|
Kyūshū (九州, Kyūshū, pronounced [kʲɯꜜːɕɯː] , lit. "Nine Provinces") is the third-largest island of Japan's four main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands (i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as Kyūkoku (九国, "Nine Countries"), Chinzei (鎮西, "West of the Pacified Area") and Tsukushi-no-shima (筑紫島, "Island of Tsukushi"). The historical regional name Saikaidō (西海道, lit. West Sea Circuit) referred to Kyushu and its surrounding islands. Kyushu has a land area of 36,782 square kilometres (14,202 sq mi) and a population of 14,311,224 in 2018.
In the 8th-century Taihō Code reforms, Dazaifu was established as a special administrative term for the region.
The island is mountainous, and Japan's most active volcano, Mount Aso at 1,591 metres (5,220 ft), is on Kyushu. There are many other signs of tectonic activity, including numerous areas of hot springs. The most famous of these are in Beppu, on the east shore, and around Mt. Aso in central Kyushu. The island is separated from Honshu by the Kanmon Straits. Being the nearest island to the Asian continent, historically it is the gateway to Japan.
The total area is 36,782.37 km (14,201.75 sq mi) which makes it the 37th largest island in the world. It's slightly larger than Taiwan island 35,808 km (13,826 sq mi). The highest elevation is 1791 meters (5876 feet) on Mount Kujū.
The name Kyūshū comes from the nine ancient provinces of Saikaidō situated on the island: Chikuzen, Chikugo, Hizen, Higo, Buzen, Bungo, Hyūga, Osumi, and Satsuma.
Today's Kyushu Region (九州地方, Kyūshū-chihō) is a politically defined region that consists of the seven prefectures on the island of Kyushu (which also includes the former Tsushima and Iki as part of Nagasaki), plus Okinawa Prefecture to the south. The list of islands in and Prefectures is too large to incorporate here.
Kyushu has 10.3 percent of the population of Japan. Most of Kyushu's population is concentrated along the northwest, in the cities of Fukuoka and Kitakyushu, with population corridors stretching southwest into Sasebo and Nagasaki and south into Kumamoto and Kagoshima. Except for Oita and Miyazaki, the eastern seaboard shows a general decline in population.
Politically, Kyushu is described as a stronghold of the Liberal Democratic Party.
Per Japanese census data, the Kyushu region's population with Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures) has experienced a large population decline since around 2000. However, the population decline in total is mild because of the relatively high birth rate of Ryukyuans both within the Ryukyuan lands (Okinawa and Kagoshima) and throughout the Kyushu region. In addition, the other prefectures in Kyushu also have exceptionally high TFRs compared to the rest of Japan. The Ryukyuans are an indigenous minority group in Japan.
Parts of Kyushu have a subtropical climate, particularly Miyazaki Prefecture and Kagoshima Prefecture. Major agricultural products are rice, tea, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and soy; also, silk is widely produced.
Besides the volcanic area of the south, there are significant mud hot springs in the northern part of the island, around Beppu. The springs are the site of occurrence of certain extremophile microorganisms, which are capable of surviving in extremely hot environments.
There are two World Natural Heritage sites in Kyushu: Yakushima (registered in 1993) and Amami-Ōshima Island, Tokunoshima Island, northern part of Okinawa Island, and Iriomote Island (registered in 2021).
Kyushu's economy accounts for about 10% of Japan's total, and with a GDP equivalent to that of Iran, the 26th largest country in the world, it is the fourth largest economic zone after the three major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya.
Kyushu's economy has a well-balanced industrial structure, ranging from primary industries such as agriculture, to secondary industries such as manufacturing, and tertiary industries such as retail, services, and tourism. Agricultural output in the region amounts to 1.8 trillion yen (20% share of the national total), and the region is a major domestic production center for the automobile and semiconductor industries. Kyushu also has a thriving healthcare industry, including medical and nursing care, and numerous research and manufacturing facilities in the fields of hydrogen, solar power, and other renewable energies. Furthermore, Fukuoka City, Kitakyushu City and Okinawa Prefecture have been designated as National Strategic Special Zones, which are expected to have an economic ripple effect on the entire Kyushu region through the creation of innovation in industry and the promotion of new entrepreneurship and start-ups.
Kyushu is a region with strong economic ties to Asia. For example, Asia accounted for 420 (77.9%) of the 539 overseas expansion cases of Kyushu-Yamaguchi companies from 2010 to 2019, and Asia accounted for 61.1% of Kyushu-Yamaguchi's total exports in 2019, 7.4 percentage points higher than the nation as a whole. As the logistics node between Japan and Asia, the ports of Hakata and Kitakyushu handle a large number of international containers. In addition, the number of cruise ship calls in 2019 was 772, with Kyushu accounting for 26.9% of the nation's total.
Kyushu is noted for various types of porcelain, including Arita, Imari, Satsuma, and Karatsu. Heavy industry is concentrated in the north around Fukuoka, Kitakyushu, Nagasaki, and Oita and includes chemicals, automobiles, semiconductors, metal processing, shipbuilding, etc. The island of Tanegashima hosts the Tanegashima Space Center, which is the largest rocket-launch complex in Japan.
In 2010, the graduate employment rate in the region was the lowest nationwide, at 88.9%.
Kyushu is linked to the larger island of Honshu by the Kanmon Railway Tunnel, which carries the non-Shinkansen trains of the Kyushu Railway Company, and the newer Shin-Kanmon Tunnel carrying the San'yō Shinkansen. Railways on the island are operated by the Kyushu Railway Company and West Japan Railway Company, as well as a variety of smaller companies such as Amagi Railway and Nishitetsu Railway. Kyushu Shinkansen trains operate between major cities on the island, such as Fukuoka and Kagoshima, with an additional route between Takeo-Onsen and Nagasaki which is in operation since September 2022. Kyushu is also known for its scenic train services, such as the Limited Express Yufuin no Mori and Limited Express Kawasemi Yamasemi.
The Kanmon Bridge and Kanmon Roadway Tunnel also connect the island with Honshu, allowing for vehicular transport between the two. The Kyushu Expressway spans the length of the island, linking the Higashikyushu Expressway and Ibusuki Skyline, connecting major cities such as Fukuoka and Kumamoto along the way. There are also many quiet country roads, including popular tourist routes such as the Nichinan coast road and the Aso Panorama Line in Kumamoto Prefecture. Bus services are available and cover 2,400 routes within Kyushu's cities, connecting many other destinations.
Several passenger and car ferry services connect both northern and southern Kyushu with main port cities on the main island of Honshu (Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo) and Shikoku.
Major universities and colleges in Kyushu:
World Heritage Sites in Kyushu
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kyūshū (九州, Kyūshū, pronounced [kʲɯꜜːɕɯː] , lit. \"Nine Provinces\") is the third-largest island of Japan's four main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands (i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as Kyūkoku (九国, \"Nine Countries\"), Chinzei (鎮西, \"West of the Pacified Area\") and Tsukushi-no-shima (筑紫島, \"Island of Tsukushi\"). The historical regional name Saikaidō (西海道, lit. West Sea Circuit) referred to Kyushu and its surrounding islands. Kyushu has a land area of 36,782 square kilometres (14,202 sq mi) and a population of 14,311,224 in 2018.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the 8th-century Taihō Code reforms, Dazaifu was established as a special administrative term for the region.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The island is mountainous, and Japan's most active volcano, Mount Aso at 1,591 metres (5,220 ft), is on Kyushu. There are many other signs of tectonic activity, including numerous areas of hot springs. The most famous of these are in Beppu, on the east shore, and around Mt. Aso in central Kyushu. The island is separated from Honshu by the Kanmon Straits. Being the nearest island to the Asian continent, historically it is the gateway to Japan.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The total area is 36,782.37 km (14,201.75 sq mi) which makes it the 37th largest island in the world. It's slightly larger than Taiwan island 35,808 km (13,826 sq mi). The highest elevation is 1791 meters (5876 feet) on Mount Kujū.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name Kyūshū comes from the nine ancient provinces of Saikaidō situated on the island: Chikuzen, Chikugo, Hizen, Higo, Buzen, Bungo, Hyūga, Osumi, and Satsuma.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Today's Kyushu Region (九州地方, Kyūshū-chihō) is a politically defined region that consists of the seven prefectures on the island of Kyushu (which also includes the former Tsushima and Iki as part of Nagasaki), plus Okinawa Prefecture to the south. The list of islands in and Prefectures is too large to incorporate here.",
"title": "Geography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kyushu has 10.3 percent of the population of Japan. Most of Kyushu's population is concentrated along the northwest, in the cities of Fukuoka and Kitakyushu, with population corridors stretching southwest into Sasebo and Nagasaki and south into Kumamoto and Kagoshima. Except for Oita and Miyazaki, the eastern seaboard shows a general decline in population.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Politically, Kyushu is described as a stronghold of the Liberal Democratic Party.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Per Japanese census data, the Kyushu region's population with Ryukyu Islands (Okinawa and Kagoshima Prefectures) has experienced a large population decline since around 2000. However, the population decline in total is mild because of the relatively high birth rate of Ryukyuans both within the Ryukyuan lands (Okinawa and Kagoshima) and throughout the Kyushu region. In addition, the other prefectures in Kyushu also have exceptionally high TFRs compared to the rest of Japan. The Ryukyuans are an indigenous minority group in Japan.",
"title": "Population"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Parts of Kyushu have a subtropical climate, particularly Miyazaki Prefecture and Kagoshima Prefecture. Major agricultural products are rice, tea, tobacco, sweet potatoes, and soy; also, silk is widely produced.",
"title": "Environment and agriculture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Besides the volcanic area of the south, there are significant mud hot springs in the northern part of the island, around Beppu. The springs are the site of occurrence of certain extremophile microorganisms, which are capable of surviving in extremely hot environments.",
"title": "Environment and agriculture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "There are two World Natural Heritage sites in Kyushu: Yakushima (registered in 1993) and Amami-Ōshima Island, Tokunoshima Island, northern part of Okinawa Island, and Iriomote Island (registered in 2021).",
"title": "Environment and agriculture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kyushu's economy accounts for about 10% of Japan's total, and with a GDP equivalent to that of Iran, the 26th largest country in the world, it is the fourth largest economic zone after the three major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Kyushu's economy has a well-balanced industrial structure, ranging from primary industries such as agriculture, to secondary industries such as manufacturing, and tertiary industries such as retail, services, and tourism. Agricultural output in the region amounts to 1.8 trillion yen (20% share of the national total), and the region is a major domestic production center for the automobile and semiconductor industries. Kyushu also has a thriving healthcare industry, including medical and nursing care, and numerous research and manufacturing facilities in the fields of hydrogen, solar power, and other renewable energies. Furthermore, Fukuoka City, Kitakyushu City and Okinawa Prefecture have been designated as National Strategic Special Zones, which are expected to have an economic ripple effect on the entire Kyushu region through the creation of innovation in industry and the promotion of new entrepreneurship and start-ups.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Kyushu is a region with strong economic ties to Asia. For example, Asia accounted for 420 (77.9%) of the 539 overseas expansion cases of Kyushu-Yamaguchi companies from 2010 to 2019, and Asia accounted for 61.1% of Kyushu-Yamaguchi's total exports in 2019, 7.4 percentage points higher than the nation as a whole. As the logistics node between Japan and Asia, the ports of Hakata and Kitakyushu handle a large number of international containers. In addition, the number of cruise ship calls in 2019 was 772, with Kyushu accounting for 26.9% of the nation's total.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kyushu is noted for various types of porcelain, including Arita, Imari, Satsuma, and Karatsu. Heavy industry is concentrated in the north around Fukuoka, Kitakyushu, Nagasaki, and Oita and includes chemicals, automobiles, semiconductors, metal processing, shipbuilding, etc. The island of Tanegashima hosts the Tanegashima Space Center, which is the largest rocket-launch complex in Japan.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 2010, the graduate employment rate in the region was the lowest nationwide, at 88.9%.",
"title": "Economy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Kyushu is linked to the larger island of Honshu by the Kanmon Railway Tunnel, which carries the non-Shinkansen trains of the Kyushu Railway Company, and the newer Shin-Kanmon Tunnel carrying the San'yō Shinkansen. Railways on the island are operated by the Kyushu Railway Company and West Japan Railway Company, as well as a variety of smaller companies such as Amagi Railway and Nishitetsu Railway. Kyushu Shinkansen trains operate between major cities on the island, such as Fukuoka and Kagoshima, with an additional route between Takeo-Onsen and Nagasaki which is in operation since September 2022. Kyushu is also known for its scenic train services, such as the Limited Express Yufuin no Mori and Limited Express Kawasemi Yamasemi.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Kanmon Bridge and Kanmon Roadway Tunnel also connect the island with Honshu, allowing for vehicular transport between the two. The Kyushu Expressway spans the length of the island, linking the Higashikyushu Expressway and Ibusuki Skyline, connecting major cities such as Fukuoka and Kumamoto along the way. There are also many quiet country roads, including popular tourist routes such as the Nichinan coast road and the Aso Panorama Line in Kumamoto Prefecture. Bus services are available and cover 2,400 routes within Kyushu's cities, connecting many other destinations.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Several passenger and car ferry services connect both northern and southern Kyushu with main port cities on the main island of Honshu (Kobe, Osaka, Tokyo) and Shikoku.",
"title": "Transportation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Major universities and colleges in Kyushu:",
"title": "Education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "World Heritage Sites in Kyushu",
"title": "Culture"
}
] |
is the third-largest island of Japan's four main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands. In the past, it has been known as Kyūkoku, Chinzei and Tsukushi-no-shima. The historical regional name Saikaidō referred to Kyushu and its surrounding islands. Kyushu has a land area of 36,782 square kilometres (14,202 sq mi) and a population of 14,311,224 in 2018. In the 8th-century Taihō Code reforms, Dazaifu was established as a special administrative term for the region.
|
2001-10-12T15:38:37Z
|
2023-11-27T08:20:16Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyushu
|
16,915 |
KAB-500KR
|
The KAB-500Kr (Correctable air bomb - 500 kg) is an electro-optical TV-guided fire and forget bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force in the 1980s. It remains in service with the CIS and various export customers.
The KAB-500Kr is analogous to the American GBU-15 weapon. It uses a standard Soviet/Russian FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, with a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), as a warhead, adding a television seeker and guidance fins to turn it into a guided, unpowered glide bomb.
The seeker employs a gimballed daylight television imaging sensor under a wide angle glass dome. Unlike the earlier US GBU-8 HOBOS and AGM-65 Maverick which employed contrast lock technology, the -Kr series guidance system employs Scene Matching Area Correlation technology more akin to the US Navy DAMASK seeker or Tomahawk DSMAC. This results in the ability to attack low contrast targets by exploiting the contrast of nearby terrain features or objects.
The bomb is 305 cm (10 ft) long and weighs 520 kg (1,150 lb), of which 380 kg (840 lb) is a hardened, armor-piercing warhead capable of penetrating up to 1.5 metres (5 ft) of reinforced concrete. The weapon's seeker can lock onto a target at ranges of up to 15 to 17 km (9.3 to 10.6 mi), depending on visibility. The KAB-500-OD variant is equipped with a fuel-air explosive warhead. The technology of KAB-500Kr is also used for larger bombs, such as KAB-1500Kr based on the 1500 kg class FAB-1500 iron bomb. There is also the training bomb KAB-500Kr-U.
The KAB-500S-E is a version with satellite guidance.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The KAB-500Kr (Correctable air bomb - 500 kg) is an electro-optical TV-guided fire and forget bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force in the 1980s. It remains in service with the CIS and various export customers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The KAB-500Kr is analogous to the American GBU-15 weapon. It uses a standard Soviet/Russian FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, with a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), as a warhead, adding a television seeker and guidance fins to turn it into a guided, unpowered glide bomb.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The seeker employs a gimballed daylight television imaging sensor under a wide angle glass dome. Unlike the earlier US GBU-8 HOBOS and AGM-65 Maverick which employed contrast lock technology, the -Kr series guidance system employs Scene Matching Area Correlation technology more akin to the US Navy DAMASK seeker or Tomahawk DSMAC. This results in the ability to attack low contrast targets by exploiting the contrast of nearby terrain features or objects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The bomb is 305 cm (10 ft) long and weighs 520 kg (1,150 lb), of which 380 kg (840 lb) is a hardened, armor-piercing warhead capable of penetrating up to 1.5 metres (5 ft) of reinforced concrete. The weapon's seeker can lock onto a target at ranges of up to 15 to 17 km (9.3 to 10.6 mi), depending on visibility. The KAB-500-OD variant is equipped with a fuel-air explosive warhead. The technology of KAB-500Kr is also used for larger bombs, such as KAB-1500Kr based on the 1500 kg class FAB-1500 iron bomb. There is also the training bomb KAB-500Kr-U.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The KAB-500S-E is a version with satellite guidance.",
"title": ""
}
] |
The KAB-500Kr is an electro-optical TV-guided fire and forget bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force in the 1980s. It remains in service with the CIS and various export customers. The KAB-500Kr is analogous to the American GBU-15 weapon. It uses a standard Soviet/Russian FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, with a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), as a warhead, adding a television seeker and guidance fins to turn it into a guided, unpowered glide bomb. The seeker employs a gimballed daylight television imaging sensor under a wide angle glass dome. Unlike the earlier US GBU-8 HOBOS and AGM-65 Maverick which employed contrast lock technology, the -Kr series guidance system employs Scene Matching Area Correlation technology more akin to the US Navy DAMASK seeker or Tomahawk DSMAC. This results in the ability to attack low contrast targets by exploiting the contrast of nearby terrain features or objects. The bomb is 305 cm (10 ft) long and weighs 520 kg (1,150 lb), of which 380 kg (840 lb) is a hardened, armor-piercing warhead capable of penetrating up to 1.5 metres (5 ft) of reinforced concrete. The weapon's seeker can lock onto a target at ranges of up to 15 to 17 km, depending on visibility. The KAB-500-OD variant is equipped with a fuel-air explosive warhead. The technology of KAB-500Kr is also used for larger bombs, such as KAB-1500Kr based on the 1500 kg class FAB-1500 iron bomb.
There is also the training bomb KAB-500Kr-U. The KAB-500S-E is a version with satellite guidance.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-12T21:15:41Z
|
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"Template:Reflist",
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAB-500KR
|
16,916 |
KAB-500L
|
The KAB-500L is a laser-guided bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force, entering service in 1975. It remains in service with the CIS and post-Soviet Russian Aerospace Forces.
The KAB-500L is a standard FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, which has a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), fitted with a semi-active laser seeker and guidance fins, turning it into an unpowered guided bomb.
The KAB-500L is 3.05 m (10.0 ft) long and weighs 525 kg (1,157 lb). Its warhead makes up 450 kg (990 lb) of the total weight, of which roughly 50% is blast-effect high explosive. Russian sources credit it with a CEP of 7 meters (23 feet). The technology of KAB-500L is also used for larger bombs, such as the KAB-1500L family.
It is also deployed by the Indian Air Force. The primary launch platform is Su-30MKI. This bomb is also used by Royal Malaysian Air Force on its Sukhoi Su-30MKM.
KAB-500S-E is a Precision-Guided Munition (PGM) whose guidance system is based on GLONASS. The weapon can be dropped from aircraft flying at an altitude from 500 meters to 5000 meters and with an airspeed of 500–1150 km/h. The CEP is 7–12 meters. These bombs were used for the first time in the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War in September 2015.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The KAB-500L is a laser-guided bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force, entering service in 1975. It remains in service with the CIS and post-Soviet Russian Aerospace Forces.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The KAB-500L is a standard FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, which has a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), fitted with a semi-active laser seeker and guidance fins, turning it into an unpowered guided bomb.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The KAB-500L is 3.05 m (10.0 ft) long and weighs 525 kg (1,157 lb). Its warhead makes up 450 kg (990 lb) of the total weight, of which roughly 50% is blast-effect high explosive. Russian sources credit it with a CEP of 7 meters (23 feet). The technology of KAB-500L is also used for larger bombs, such as the KAB-1500L family.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It is also deployed by the Indian Air Force. The primary launch platform is Su-30MKI. This bomb is also used by Royal Malaysian Air Force on its Sukhoi Su-30MKM.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "KAB-500S-E is a Precision-Guided Munition (PGM) whose guidance system is based on GLONASS. The weapon can be dropped from aircraft flying at an altitude from 500 meters to 5000 meters and with an airspeed of 500–1150 km/h. The CEP is 7–12 meters. These bombs were used for the first time in the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War in September 2015.",
"title": "KAB-500S-E"
}
] |
The KAB-500L is a laser-guided bomb developed by the Soviet Air Force, entering service in 1975. It remains in service with the CIS and post-Soviet Russian Aerospace Forces. The KAB-500L is a standard FAB-500 general-purpose bomb, which has a nominal weight of 500 kg (1,100 lb), fitted with a semi-active laser seeker and guidance fins, turning it into an unpowered guided bomb. The KAB-500L is 3.05 m (10.0 ft) long and weighs 525 kg (1,157 lb). Its warhead makes up 450 kg (990 lb) of the total weight, of which roughly 50% is blast-effect high explosive. Russian sources credit it with a CEP of 7 meters. The technology of KAB-500L is also used for larger bombs, such as the KAB-1500L family. It is also deployed by the Indian Air Force. The primary launch platform is Su-30MKI. This bomb is also used by Royal Malaysian Air Force on its Sukhoi Su-30MKM.
|
2023-07-08T03:42:04Z
|
[
"Template:Short description",
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAB-500L
|
|
16,917 |
Kamov Ka-50
|
The Kamov Ka-50 "Black Shark" (Russian: Чёрная акула, romanized: Chyornaya akula, English: kitefin shark), NATO reporting name Hokum A, is a Soviet/Russian single-seat attack helicopter with the distinctive coaxial rotor system of the Kamov design bureau. It was designed in the 1980s and adopted for service in the Russian army in 1995. The Ka-50 is manufactured by the Progress company in Arsenyev. It is used as a heavily armed scout helicopter, and is notable for having a rescue ejection system, rare for helicopters.
During the late 1990s, Kamov and Israel Aerospace Industries developed a tandem-seat cockpit version, the Kamov Ka-50-2 "Erdogan" (Russian: Эрдоган, Turkish: Erdoğan), to compete in Turkey's attack helicopter competition. Kamov also designed another two-seat variant, the Kamov Ka-52 "Alligator" (Russian: Аллигатор, NATO reporting name: Hokum B). The Ka-52's unit cost is approximately ₽840 million (rubles or US$10 million) as of 2023.
The Ka-50 is the production version of the V-80Sh-1 prototype. Production of the attack helicopter was ordered by the Soviet Council of Ministers on 14 December 1987. Development of the helicopter was first reported in the West in 1984, while the first photograph appeared in 1989. During operational testing from 1985 to 1986, the workload on the pilot was found to be similar to that of a fighter-bomber pilot, such that the pilot could perform both flying and navigation duties.
Like other Kamov helicopters, it features Kamov's characteristic coaxial contra-rotating rotor system, which removes the need for the entire tail rotor assembly and improves the aircraft's aerobatic qualities—it can perform loops, rolls and "the funnel" (circle-strafing), where the aircraft maintains a line-of-sight to the target while flying circles of varying altitude and airspeed around it. The omission of the tail rotor is a qualitative advantage, because the torque-countering tail rotor can use up to 30% of engine power. The Ka-50's entire transmission presents a comparatively small target to ground fire.
For improved pilot survivability the Ka-50 is fitted with a NPP Zvezda (transl. Star) K-37-800 ejection seat, which is a rare feature for a helicopter. Before the rocket in the ejection seat deploys, the rotor blades are blown away by explosive charges in the rotor disc and the canopy is jettisoned.
Following initial flight testing and system tests, the Council ordered the first batch of helicopters in 1990. The attack helicopter was first described publicly as the "Ka-50" in March 1992 at a symposium in the United Kingdom. The helicopter was unveiled at the Mosaeroshow '92 at Zhukovskiy in August 1992. The following month, the second production example made its foreign debut at the Farnborough Airshow, where it was displayed with an image of a werewolf on its rudder—gaining the popular nickname "Werewolf". The fifth prototype, painted black, played the title role in the movie Чёрная акула (Black Shark), which made the Ka-50 known by its current nickname.
In November 1993, four production helicopters were flown to the Army Aviation Combat Training Centre at Torzhok to begin field trials. The president of the Russian Federation authorized the fielding of the Ka-50 with the Russian Ground Forces (army) on 28 August 1995. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a severe drop in defense procurement. This resulted in only a dozen Ka-50s delivered, instead of the planned several hundred to replace the Mil Mi-24.
The single-seat configuration was considered undesirable by NATO. The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them, which successfully misled the first western reports of the aircraft in the mid-1980s, to the point of some analysts even concluding that its primary mission was as an air superiority aircraft for hunting and killing NATO attack helicopters, an alarming but expected Soviet move by NATO planners following the recent J-CATCH program evaluation.
The Ka-50 and its modifications have been chosen as the special forces' support helicopter, while the Mil Mi-28 has become the main army's gunship. The production of Ka-50 was recommenced in 2006. In 2009, the Russian Air Force received three units built from incomplete airframes dating from the mid-1990s.
From the time the Ka-50 was ordered in 1987, it was known that the limited night-time capability of the original version would have to be upgraded to meet night attack requirements. Initially, Ka-50N was meant to be fitted with the Merkury Low-Light TV (LLTV) system. Due to lack of funding, the system was late and experienced reliability and capability issues. As a result, focus shifted to forward looking infrared (FLIR) systems. Kamov drafted a design in 1993 that included the Shkval-N sighting system with an infrared sensor. Many variants were tried. On some, the original Shkval was supplemented by a thermal imaging system, while others saw a complete replacement by the Samshit day-and-night system (also used on Ka-52). Some of the imagers included in the trials were manufactured by the French SAGEM and Thomson companies. Kamov was forced to consider foreign analogues as a temporary replacement for domestic imaging systems because of their slow development.
Trials led to two "final" versions: Ka-50N "Night Shark" (Russian: Ночная акула, "velvet belly lanternshark") and Ka-50Sh (Russian: Шар, romanized: Shar, "ball"; because of the spherical FLIR turret). The first Ka-50Sh, which was the 8th pre-production aircraft, Bort 018, first flew on 4 March 1997. The Kamov company and Black Shark logos were displayed on the endplate fins and the vertical tail. It featured the Samshit-50 system installed within a 640 mm (25 in) diameter sphere under the nose. Shkval system was moved to the nose cone area. Neither of the Ka-50 night-attack versions has entered full production.
In 1997, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in cooperation with the Kamov bureau entered the Ka-50-2 Erdoğan in a Turkish design competition for a $4 billion contract for 145 (later changed to 50) combat helicopters.
The Ka-50-2 is a tandem cockpit variant of the Ka-50. It featured a modern, Israeli-made "glass cockpit" avionics and a turret-mounted folding (for landing clearance) 30 mm cannon instead of the fixed cannon on the Ka-50. It features combat-proven avionics and advanced anti-tank guided missiles for a high level of combat effectiveness. It is equipped with IAI's flexible modular avionics suite, which can be readily tailored to meet the TLF's operational requirements and provides growth potential.
IAI and Kamov performed flights of the variant with IAI's Core Avionics. These flights demonstrated the helicopter's "glass cockpit" with multifunctional displays and Control and Display Unit (CDU) driven by centralized mission computers. Also tested were its flight navigation and the operation of the Helicopter Multi-Mission Optronic Stabilized Payload (HMOSP) targeting system. The demonstration flights included night mission capability demonstrations using Night Vision Goggles (NVG) and the day/night targeting system.
Turkey initially selected an improved version of the Bell AH-1 SuperCobra over the Erdogan, Eurocopter Tiger, AH-64 Apache, Denel Rooivalk, and A129 Mangusta. In the end, the contract was awarded to the A129 in 2007.
In the early 1980s, while comparative tests of the V-80 (Ka-50 prototype) and the Mi-28 were being conducted, the Kamov design team came up with a proposal to develop a dedicated helicopter to conduct battlefield reconnaissance, provide target designation, support and coordinate group attack helicopter operations based on the Ka-60. However, the economic hardships that hit the nation in the late 1980s hampered this new development program. This prompted Kamov's Designer General to choose a modified version of Ka-50 on which to install the reconnaissance and target designation system. The modified "Black Shark" required a second crew member to operate the optronics/radar reconnaissance suite. Kamov decided to use side-by-side seating arrangement, due to the verified improvements in co-operation between the crew members. This twin-seat version was designated Ka-52.
In comparison to the original Ka-50, the Ka-52 has a new radome with a nose-mounted radar system for targeting giving the Ka-52 a rounder nose profile. A day-and-night TV/thermal sighting system is fitted in a spherical turret under the nose (some examples have an additional mast radar for aerial targets and a second sighting system above the cockpit). The Ka-52 has the side-mounted cannon of the original Ka-50. It features six wing-mounted hardpoints compared to four on the Ka-50. To keep the weight and performance on par with that of the Ka-50, the armor and the capacity of the cannon magazine/feed were reduced. Also some flight parameters deteriorated: rate of climb dropped from 10 to 8 m/s and maximum positive load factor became 3.0 g. Most of the problems were solved by installing the new VK-2500 engine. The Ka-52 is approved for day, night and adverse weather conditions.
Manufacturing of the first Ka-52 airframe began in mid-1996. Series production was started in autumn 2008. As of September 2010, the 696th Instructor and Research Helicopter Regiment, based at Torzhok (air base), is operating eight helicopters, in varying degrees of capability and/or modification, for research and development. In December 2010, four new, series-production Ka-52s were delivered to the Air Base of the 344th Centre for Combat Training and Aircrew Conversion.
The first phase of the official tests (ГСИ) was completed in December 2008 and after that permission was given for the production of an experimental batch for phase 2 (ГСИ, including fire tests and the search for targets)
Serial production of the Ka-52 began at the Progress Arsenyev Aviation Company plant in Arsenyev, Primorsky Krai by end of the 2008. After the completion of the state trials, the Ka-52 entered service in May 2011 with first operational units joining the Russian Air Force the same month. Under previous State Defense Procurement Plans, the Russian Armed Forces was to receive 2 experimental and 24 serial Ka-52s by 2012. The second long-term contract signed in 2011 worth 120 billion rubles is to provide the Russian Aerospace Forces with 146 Ka-52 helicopters in total until 2020. In February 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defence expressed an interest to purchase 114 Ka-52s of a new version within the new State Armament Program for 2018–2027.
In 2015, Egypt signed a deal for the purchase of 46 Ka-52 helicopters, with a stated completion year of 2020. Russian Helicopters started producing its first export models in early 2017, the overall production was doubled in order to meet new demands. The first batch of 3 Ka-52 attack helicopters was delivered to Egypt in July 2017, with a second batch of another 3 helicopters being delivered in August. By year-end 2017, Egypt had received 19 Ka-52s, but these early units came with issues related to power, night vision, navigation systems, and other avionics equipment. On 6 December 2018, it was announced at the Egypt Defence Expo (EDEX) that Ka-52s had officially entered service with the Egyptian Air Force.
Egypt's helicopter is a modified version of the basic Ka-52 Alligator that serves in the Russian Aerospace Forces. Unlike the basic model, the Egyptian Ka-52 utilizes anti-corrosion materials and has a reinforced fuselage structure. It received new landing gear and wheels, designed for the increased takeoff weight of the helicopter. The Egyptian model features updated avionics and a new cooling system for operating in hot climate. Dmitry Rogozin, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia on defense and space industry, proposed to name it the "Nile Crocodile".
The helicopter is equipped with the new OES-52 electro-optical observation and laser targeting system, replacing the standard GOES-451 mounted under the nose. The new optronic system began development in 2011 as a collaboration between Kamov and Sagem, and is based on the French company's STRIX sighting System. The OES-52 provides greater range of target detection and recognition.
The helicopter features the Arbalet-52 dual-band coherent pulse radar, which has an Earth mapping range of 32 km and a detection range of 25 km for ground targets and 15 km for aerial targets.
The Nile Crocodiles use President-S airborne defense systems for protection against guided missiles. The system includes both radar and laser warning receivers, MAW sensors, chaff/flare dispensers, in addition to ECM and DIRCM jammers. Egyptian Ka-52s feature two new DIRCM sets installed on either side of the fuselage, which are different from the standard L370-5 sets. Moreover, the laser-warning system present on the Russian variants of the Ka-52 has been removed, and a L-150 Pastel radar warning receiver has been installed instead.
Egypt plans to arm its Ka-52s with Russian anti-tank guided missiles. The Air Force has chosen two types of missiles; namely the laser-guided Vikhr and the radar-guided Ataka beam-riding missiles.
The Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, ordered by the Russian Defense Ministry, were to contain rotary-wing assets, formed into aviation groups. Each of these groups was planned to include eight attack and eight assault/transport helicopters. The Ka-52K "Katran" (Russian: Катран, 'mud shark'), a navalised derivative of the Ka-52, has been selected as the new ship-borne attack type for the Russian Naval Aviation. Its features include folding rotor blades, folding wings, and reinforced landing gear. Since its wings are shorter than those of the land-based variants, the Ka-52K only has four weapons pylons, instead of six on the land-based Ka-52. There are plans to install a new radar in the Ka-52K, with longer range compared to the Ka-52's radar. The Ka-52K will also be able to use Kh-35 and Kh-38 missiles. However, they haven't yet been integrated in the helicopter's mission suite. Russian Naval Aviation will need at least 40 Ka-52Ks, the first of which was tentatively slated to enter squadron service by early 2015, coinciding with the delivery of the first carrier.
However, following the Russian annexation of Crimea the sale of the Mistrals was cancelled and they have since been sold to Egypt. Later, Egypt bought 46 Ka-52s, with deliveries lasting from 2017 to 2019. These helicopters have been deployed on the Mistrals originally built for Russia; however, Egyptian Ka-52s are regular land-based variants, not Ka-52Ks.
Still, the first of four Ka-52Ks ordered for the Russian Navy flew on 7 March 2015; the Navy also had an option for a further 28 helicopters. As of 2017, 4 pre-series Ka-52Ks were operated and used for testing by the Russian Navy. After a period of uncertainty, the Ka-52K's future with the Russian Navy now appears clearer. In July 2020, the keel was laid for two new Project 23900 amphibious assault ships in the Zalyv Shipbuilding yard. Each ship will be able to carry up to 18 helicopters, including Ka-52Ks. The Ka-52K has passed all tests and was ready for serial production as of September 2020.
According to the SCMP, China is considering the purchase of 36 Ka-52Ks to be used aboard the Type 075 helicopter carrier, which would fulfil the role of a heavy attack helicopter. These helicopters are necessary to equip the carrier with powerful attack weapons, which it currently lacks.
The new version announced by the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2018 eventually crystalized into the Ka-52M; 114 helicopters of this new version are to be acquired. Additionally, older Ka-52s are to be upgraded to Ka-52M standard. The contract for the first 30 Ka-52Ms was signed in August 2021. A new contract was signed in August 2022. Upgrades embodied in the Ka-52M include a modernized GOES-451M electro-optical targeting turret with an increased range, stronger undercarriage wheels, and improved cockpit ergonomics, with better adaptation to the use of night-vision goggles. The LMUR missile is added to the helicopter's armament options. Several new radar types are being considered for the Ka-52M. A new self-protection system will also be fitted to the Ka-52M, replacing the current L370-5 Vitebsk. Lastly, the Ka-52M is adapted to work within a new battlefield command and control system. The Russian military received its first 10 modified Ka-52M helicopters on 4 January 2023. The state defense order for the helicopters was doubled in 2023.
The Ka-50 and its two-seat version Ka-52 are high-performance combat helicopters with day and night capability, high survivability and fire power, to defeat air targets and heavily armoured tanks armed with air defence weapons. It was designed to be small, fast and agile to improve survivability and lethality.
The hovering ceiling is 4,000 m and vertical rate of climb 10 m/s at an altitude of 2,500 m. Having a coaxial rotor with blades of polymer results in low inertia both relative to vertical and lateral axes, at 50%–75% as compared to a single rotor helicopter with tail rotor. No tail rotor also means it can perform flat turns at all speeds. A maximum vertical load of 3.5 g combined with low inertia makes the Ka-50 highly agile.
Flight systems include an inertial navigation system (INS), autopilot and head-up display (HUD). Sensors include forward-looking infrared (FLIR) and terrain-following radar.
The Kamov Ka-50 is also fitted with an electronic radio and sighting-piloting-navigating system allowing flights at day and night in VFR and IFR weather conditions. The novelty of this avionics is based on the system of precise target designation with digital coded communication system, which ensures the exchange of information (precise enemy coordinates) between helicopters flying far apart from each other as well as with ground command posts. The Ka-52 is also equipped with a "Phazotron" cockpit radio-locator, allowing flights in adverse meteorological conditions and at night. The necessary information acquired by this radio-locator is transferred to the cockpit's multi-functional display screen. For conducting a fight, both pilots are equipped with range-finders built-in their helmets and they can use night vision eyepieces for night flights.
For its own protection, Ka-50 is fitted with a radar warning receiver, electronic warfare system and chaff and flare dispensers. Aerodynamic cases at wings' ends each contain two dispensers, which in turn have 32 x 26 mm countermeasures each. The whole system works on principle of evaluated response based on infrared or electronic impulse irradiation. Extensive all-round armour in the cockpit protects the pilot against 12.7 mm armour-piercing bullets and 23 mm projectile fragments. The rotor blades are rated to withstand several hits of ground-based automatic weapons.
Other survivability features include armour protection for vital aircraft systems, and crash-absorbing landing gear and seats. Also, not having a tail rotor can improve survivability, since the tail boom isn't load-bearing; during testing, a Ka-50 lost its tail, but still managed to return to base without a problem.
It is the world's first operational helicopter with a rescue ejection system allowing the pilot to escape at all altitudes and speeds. The rotor blades detach using explosive bolts prior to ejection to prevent damage to the crew. The K-37-800 rocket-assisted ejection system is manufactured by NPP Zvezda.
The aircraft has one Shipunov 2A42 autocannon with selective fire, and a dual-feed, giving it a cyclic rate of fire between 200 and 800 rounds per minute. It is mounted near centre of gravity for accuracy, and carries 460 high-fragmentation, explosive incendiary, or armour-piercing rounds. The type of ammunition is selected by the pilot during flight. The integrated 30 mm cannon is semi-rigidly fixed on the helicopter's side, movable only slightly in elevation and azimuth. Semi-rigid mounting improves the cannon's accuracy, giving the 30 mm a longer practical range and better hit ratio at medium ranges than with a free-turning turret mount.
The fire control system automatically shares all target information in real time, allowing one helicopter to engage a target spotted by another aircraft, and the system can also input target information from ground-based forward scouts with personnel-carried target designation gear.
Weapons can be carried on four external hardpoints under the stub wings, plus two on the wingtips, a total of more than 2,000 kg (depending on the mix). The pylons can be tilted up to 10 degrees downward. Fuel tanks may be mounted on a suspension point, whenever necessary.
Anti-tank armament comprises twelve Vikhr laser-guided anti-tank missiles (transl. Vortex or whirlwind), with a maximum range of some 8 km. The laser guidance is reported to be virtually jam-proof and the system features automatic guidance to target, enabling evasive action immediately after missile launch, alternatively it can also use Ataka laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Before firing laser-guided missiles it often must hover a few hundred feet off the ground to direct a laser at a target, leaving itself briefly exposed.
Ka-50/52 can also carry several rocket pods, including the S-13 and S-8 rockets. The "dumb" rockets could be upgraded to laser guided with the proposed Ugroza system.
The Ka-50 took part in the Russian Army's operations against separatists in the Chechen Republic during the Second Chechen War. In December 2000, a pair of production Ka-50s arrived in the area. With the Ka-50s was a Ka-29 to provide reconnaissance and target designation. On 6 January 2001, the Ka-50 used live weapons against a real enemy for the first time. On 9 January, at the entry into a mountain gorge in the area of a settlement named Komsomolskoye, a single Ka-50 accompanied by an Mi-24 used S-8 unguided rockets to destroy a warehouse full of ammunition belonging to Chechen insurgents. On 6 February, in the forest-covered mountain area to the south of the village of Tsentoroj, a strike group composed of two Ka-50s and the sole Ka-29 discovered and, from a range of 3 km, destroyed a fortified camp of insurgents using two "9K121 Vikhr" guided missiles. On 14 February, a similar strike group carried out a "hunting" mission in the area of Oak-Yurt and Hatun. In difficult conditions, pilots found and destroyed eight targets. These missions tested the type's airframe, as well as its on-board systems and armament. Its successful performance in difficult, mountainous terrain confirmed the usefulness of the many advanced features of the Ka-50's design, and its power and maneuverability.
Ka-52 helicopters were spotted being deployed in support of the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War in 2015, various sources stating they were involved in defense of the Russian base in Latakia, providing escort for search and rescue helicopters, and supporting Russian special forces.
On 5 May 2018, a Ka-52 crashed near Mayadin due to a technical failure, according to some sources.
On 24 February 2022, during the initial stages of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at least one Russian Ka-52 helicopter was damaged but was able to land on its own. On 2 March, a Russian Ka-52 was hit by a surface-to-air missile and crash landed. On 12 March, Ukrainian forces reported that Ka-52 tail number RF-13409 had been shot down in Novomykolaivka near Kherson. Ukraine officials claimed on 16 March 2022 that Ka-52 number RF-13411 was shot down at an undisclosed location in Ukraine, providing footage of the airframe wreckage. Footage appeared on social media on 5 April 2022 that appeared to show a hovering Ka-52 shot down by a Ukrainian Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile. On 15 April, Ukrainian forces claimed to have shot down another Ka-52 and published footage of the wreckage; the crew were reported to have died. On 1 May footage appeared of another Ka-52 shot down using a Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile. On 4 June, Ukrainian forces of the 128th Mountain Brigade reported the downing of a Russian Ka-52 in the north. According to Ukrainian officials, the helicopter was shot down by MANPADS. On 27 June, another helicopter was hit by a British made Martlet MANPADS forcing it to land. On 15 August, Ukrainian forces damaged a Russian Ka-52 helicopter flying in Donetsk Oblast. By April 2023, at least 33 Russian Ka-52s had been shot down since the start of the February 24 invasion.
Reportedly, a few Ka-52s have suffered from wing vibration under heavy-load attack missions. This was observed months after the invasion. It has been suggested that this may be due to causes such as fatigue, inadequate design, lack of maintenance, and poor management.
A Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that the Ka-52 can be "disabled with a 7.62mm machine gun" despite a claimed ability to withstand 12.7mm rounds.
Ka-52s have been heavily used by Russian forces to defend against the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. They have been successful, due in part, to a shortage of Ukrainian short-range air defence, or SHORAD, weapons. Due to the unique design of the coaxial main rotors, the helicopter can withstand the destruction of the tail. A video released on 19 June 2023 shows a Ka-52 losing its tail. The UK MOD has noted the movement of additional Ka-52s to an airfield near Berdiansk, "In the constant contest between aviation measures and counter-measures, it is likely that Russia has gained a temporary advantage in southern Ukraine, especially with attack helicopters employing longer-range missiles against ground targets".
As of late July 2023, the UK MoD claimed that Russia has lost 40 Ka-52s since the start of the Russian invasion. Oryx, a Dutch open source website, visually confirmed 38 Ka-52s were destroyed or damaged. At the same time the UK MoD said on 27 July 2023: “One of the single most influential Russian weapon systems in the sector is the Ka-52 HOKUM attack helicopter,” With the LMUR missile, the Ka-52 has an attack range of 15 kms, putting it beyond the range of Ukrainian air defences.
On 7 August 2023, a Russian Ka-52 was reported shot down over Robotyne, making it the 40th lost during the current invasion according to Oryx. Oryx only counts losses confirmed through open sources.
On 17 August 2023, Ukrainian military claimed to have shot down two Ka-52s in one day. One was downed near Robotyne with a MANPAD by the 47th Mechanized Brigade, a second was claimed by the Ukrainian Air Force near Bakhmut. Ukraine has reported that the missile system used to shoot down a Ka-52 near Robotyne was the RBS-70. While a Ka-52 has countermeasures for infra-red and laser guided missiles, it appears to lack radar jamming. It has to rely flying with helicopters like the Mi-28s that have radar jamming technology. Despite sanctions Russia has continued to manufacture Ka-52s.
Additionally five Ka-52s have been destroyed by Ukrainian tactical missiles on 18 October on the grounds of Berdiansk airport, as reported by Oryx (via satellite imaging). As of 19 October 2023, at least 58 Ka-52s have been confirmed lost during the invasion, with 45 destroyed, 12 damaged, and one damaged and captured by Ukrainian forces.
It has participated in a number of exercises, including "Boundary 2004" at the Edelweiss training center in Kyrgyzstan during August 2004. The "Shark" demonstrated its advantages by operating at a high altitude and an air temperature of more than 30 °C. A Ka-50 provided cover for the landing of troops and then worked on the ground targets using its cannons and rockets.
India issued a request for proposal for 22 attack helicopters for the Indian Air Force in May 2008. The Ka-50, the Mil Mi-28, and the Eurocopter Tiger were the front-runners for this order as of October 2008. The tender though was eventually cancelled and later India announced a new tender, with revised conditions. Russia again offered the Mi-28N and Ka-52.
The Russian Air Force has accepted 12 Ka-52 helicopters for operational service in 2011, and the total number of completed Ka-52s was already 65 units. 20 Ka-52 aircraft were located at the 575th Airbase Chernigovsky District, Eastern Military District. 16 were at 393rd "Sevastopol" Airbase Korenovsk, Southern Military District, 12 were transferred to newly formed 15th Army Aviation Brigade of the Western Military District at the airport of Ostrov, 8 – Torzhok 344th Centre for Combat Training and Flight Personnel Training. Five test aircraft are owned by JSC "Kamov"; two machines were lost in accidents. The Ka-52 was displayed to the international community at the 2013 Paris Air Show.
In 2013, the AAC "Progress" has completed the contract with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, signed in 2009, and would begin the next long-term contract for supplying 143 Ka-52, worth about 120 billion rubles (≈US$3.5 bln).
In June 2015, Sergei Kornev, the head of Rosoboronexport's delegation, said that Russia has signed its first contracts on the export of Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters. "We have the Ka-52 in its export model and we have contracts for it, and it's already being spun because it has a good, firm future" he said at the airshow outside Paris. Kornev did not specify the volume of contracts or with whom they were signed.
The Algerian Air Force is negotiating a sale for 12 Ka-52Es as of 2022. In September 2015, the Ka-52 was presented at Aïn Oussera Air Base.
North Macedonia reportedly bought two Ka-52s (or Ka-50s) from Russia in June 2001 for its North Macedonia Air Brigade. However, the Ministry of Defense of Macedonia denied this report.
A Ka-52 was shot down during the Wagner Group rebellion. Another Ka-52 was able to decoy a missile fired from a Wagner operated 9K35 Strela-10 by use of flares.
Data from Manufacturer sources Donald, naval-technology.com, Federation of American Scientists
General characteristics
Performance
Armament
Related development
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kamov Ka-50 \"Black Shark\" (Russian: Чёрная акула, romanized: Chyornaya akula, English: kitefin shark), NATO reporting name Hokum A, is a Soviet/Russian single-seat attack helicopter with the distinctive coaxial rotor system of the Kamov design bureau. It was designed in the 1980s and adopted for service in the Russian army in 1995. The Ka-50 is manufactured by the Progress company in Arsenyev. It is used as a heavily armed scout helicopter, and is notable for having a rescue ejection system, rare for helicopters.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "During the late 1990s, Kamov and Israel Aerospace Industries developed a tandem-seat cockpit version, the Kamov Ka-50-2 \"Erdogan\" (Russian: Эрдоган, Turkish: Erdoğan), to compete in Turkey's attack helicopter competition. Kamov also designed another two-seat variant, the Kamov Ka-52 \"Alligator\" (Russian: Аллигатор, NATO reporting name: Hokum B). The Ka-52's unit cost is approximately ₽840 million (rubles or US$10 million) as of 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Ka-50 is the production version of the V-80Sh-1 prototype. Production of the attack helicopter was ordered by the Soviet Council of Ministers on 14 December 1987. Development of the helicopter was first reported in the West in 1984, while the first photograph appeared in 1989. During operational testing from 1985 to 1986, the workload on the pilot was found to be similar to that of a fighter-bomber pilot, such that the pilot could perform both flying and navigation duties.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Like other Kamov helicopters, it features Kamov's characteristic coaxial contra-rotating rotor system, which removes the need for the entire tail rotor assembly and improves the aircraft's aerobatic qualities—it can perform loops, rolls and \"the funnel\" (circle-strafing), where the aircraft maintains a line-of-sight to the target while flying circles of varying altitude and airspeed around it. The omission of the tail rotor is a qualitative advantage, because the torque-countering tail rotor can use up to 30% of engine power. The Ka-50's entire transmission presents a comparatively small target to ground fire.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "For improved pilot survivability the Ka-50 is fitted with a NPP Zvezda (transl. Star) K-37-800 ejection seat, which is a rare feature for a helicopter. Before the rocket in the ejection seat deploys, the rotor blades are blown away by explosive charges in the rotor disc and the canopy is jettisoned.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Following initial flight testing and system tests, the Council ordered the first batch of helicopters in 1990. The attack helicopter was first described publicly as the \"Ka-50\" in March 1992 at a symposium in the United Kingdom. The helicopter was unveiled at the Mosaeroshow '92 at Zhukovskiy in August 1992. The following month, the second production example made its foreign debut at the Farnborough Airshow, where it was displayed with an image of a werewolf on its rudder—gaining the popular nickname \"Werewolf\". The fifth prototype, painted black, played the title role in the movie Чёрная акула (Black Shark), which made the Ka-50 known by its current nickname.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In November 1993, four production helicopters were flown to the Army Aviation Combat Training Centre at Torzhok to begin field trials. The president of the Russian Federation authorized the fielding of the Ka-50 with the Russian Ground Forces (army) on 28 August 1995. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to a severe drop in defense procurement. This resulted in only a dozen Ka-50s delivered, instead of the planned several hundred to replace the Mil Mi-24.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The single-seat configuration was considered undesirable by NATO. The first two Ka-50 prototypes had false windows painted on them, which successfully misled the first western reports of the aircraft in the mid-1980s, to the point of some analysts even concluding that its primary mission was as an air superiority aircraft for hunting and killing NATO attack helicopters, an alarming but expected Soviet move by NATO planners following the recent J-CATCH program evaluation.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The Ka-50 and its modifications have been chosen as the special forces' support helicopter, while the Mil Mi-28 has become the main army's gunship. The production of Ka-50 was recommenced in 2006. In 2009, the Russian Air Force received three units built from incomplete airframes dating from the mid-1990s.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "From the time the Ka-50 was ordered in 1987, it was known that the limited night-time capability of the original version would have to be upgraded to meet night attack requirements. Initially, Ka-50N was meant to be fitted with the Merkury Low-Light TV (LLTV) system. Due to lack of funding, the system was late and experienced reliability and capability issues. As a result, focus shifted to forward looking infrared (FLIR) systems. Kamov drafted a design in 1993 that included the Shkval-N sighting system with an infrared sensor. Many variants were tried. On some, the original Shkval was supplemented by a thermal imaging system, while others saw a complete replacement by the Samshit day-and-night system (also used on Ka-52). Some of the imagers included in the trials were manufactured by the French SAGEM and Thomson companies. Kamov was forced to consider foreign analogues as a temporary replacement for domestic imaging systems because of their slow development.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Trials led to two \"final\" versions: Ka-50N \"Night Shark\" (Russian: Ночная акула, \"velvet belly lanternshark\") and Ka-50Sh (Russian: Шар, romanized: Shar, \"ball\"; because of the spherical FLIR turret). The first Ka-50Sh, which was the 8th pre-production aircraft, Bort 018, first flew on 4 March 1997. The Kamov company and Black Shark logos were displayed on the endplate fins and the vertical tail. It featured the Samshit-50 system installed within a 640 mm (25 in) diameter sphere under the nose. Shkval system was moved to the nose cone area. Neither of the Ka-50 night-attack versions has entered full production.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1997, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) in cooperation with the Kamov bureau entered the Ka-50-2 Erdoğan in a Turkish design competition for a $4 billion contract for 145 (later changed to 50) combat helicopters.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Ka-50-2 is a tandem cockpit variant of the Ka-50. It featured a modern, Israeli-made \"glass cockpit\" avionics and a turret-mounted folding (for landing clearance) 30 mm cannon instead of the fixed cannon on the Ka-50. It features combat-proven avionics and advanced anti-tank guided missiles for a high level of combat effectiveness. It is equipped with IAI's flexible modular avionics suite, which can be readily tailored to meet the TLF's operational requirements and provides growth potential.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "IAI and Kamov performed flights of the variant with IAI's Core Avionics. These flights demonstrated the helicopter's \"glass cockpit\" with multifunctional displays and Control and Display Unit (CDU) driven by centralized mission computers. Also tested were its flight navigation and the operation of the Helicopter Multi-Mission Optronic Stabilized Payload (HMOSP) targeting system. The demonstration flights included night mission capability demonstrations using Night Vision Goggles (NVG) and the day/night targeting system.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Turkey initially selected an improved version of the Bell AH-1 SuperCobra over the Erdogan, Eurocopter Tiger, AH-64 Apache, Denel Rooivalk, and A129 Mangusta. In the end, the contract was awarded to the A129 in 2007.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In the early 1980s, while comparative tests of the V-80 (Ka-50 prototype) and the Mi-28 were being conducted, the Kamov design team came up with a proposal to develop a dedicated helicopter to conduct battlefield reconnaissance, provide target designation, support and coordinate group attack helicopter operations based on the Ka-60. However, the economic hardships that hit the nation in the late 1980s hampered this new development program. This prompted Kamov's Designer General to choose a modified version of Ka-50 on which to install the reconnaissance and target designation system. The modified \"Black Shark\" required a second crew member to operate the optronics/radar reconnaissance suite. Kamov decided to use side-by-side seating arrangement, due to the verified improvements in co-operation between the crew members. This twin-seat version was designated Ka-52.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In comparison to the original Ka-50, the Ka-52 has a new radome with a nose-mounted radar system for targeting giving the Ka-52 a rounder nose profile. A day-and-night TV/thermal sighting system is fitted in a spherical turret under the nose (some examples have an additional mast radar for aerial targets and a second sighting system above the cockpit). The Ka-52 has the side-mounted cannon of the original Ka-50. It features six wing-mounted hardpoints compared to four on the Ka-50. To keep the weight and performance on par with that of the Ka-50, the armor and the capacity of the cannon magazine/feed were reduced. Also some flight parameters deteriorated: rate of climb dropped from 10 to 8 m/s and maximum positive load factor became 3.0 g. Most of the problems were solved by installing the new VK-2500 engine. The Ka-52 is approved for day, night and adverse weather conditions.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Manufacturing of the first Ka-52 airframe began in mid-1996. Series production was started in autumn 2008. As of September 2010, the 696th Instructor and Research Helicopter Regiment, based at Torzhok (air base), is operating eight helicopters, in varying degrees of capability and/or modification, for research and development. In December 2010, four new, series-production Ka-52s were delivered to the Air Base of the 344th Centre for Combat Training and Aircrew Conversion.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The first phase of the official tests (ГСИ) was completed in December 2008 and after that permission was given for the production of an experimental batch for phase 2 (ГСИ, including fire tests and the search for targets)",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Serial production of the Ka-52 began at the Progress Arsenyev Aviation Company plant in Arsenyev, Primorsky Krai by end of the 2008. After the completion of the state trials, the Ka-52 entered service in May 2011 with first operational units joining the Russian Air Force the same month. Under previous State Defense Procurement Plans, the Russian Armed Forces was to receive 2 experimental and 24 serial Ka-52s by 2012. The second long-term contract signed in 2011 worth 120 billion rubles is to provide the Russian Aerospace Forces with 146 Ka-52 helicopters in total until 2020. In February 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defence expressed an interest to purchase 114 Ka-52s of a new version within the new State Armament Program for 2018–2027.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2015, Egypt signed a deal for the purchase of 46 Ka-52 helicopters, with a stated completion year of 2020. Russian Helicopters started producing its first export models in early 2017, the overall production was doubled in order to meet new demands. The first batch of 3 Ka-52 attack helicopters was delivered to Egypt in July 2017, with a second batch of another 3 helicopters being delivered in August. By year-end 2017, Egypt had received 19 Ka-52s, but these early units came with issues related to power, night vision, navigation systems, and other avionics equipment. On 6 December 2018, it was announced at the Egypt Defence Expo (EDEX) that Ka-52s had officially entered service with the Egyptian Air Force.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Egypt's helicopter is a modified version of the basic Ka-52 Alligator that serves in the Russian Aerospace Forces. Unlike the basic model, the Egyptian Ka-52 utilizes anti-corrosion materials and has a reinforced fuselage structure. It received new landing gear and wheels, designed for the increased takeoff weight of the helicopter. The Egyptian model features updated avionics and a new cooling system for operating in hot climate. Dmitry Rogozin, Deputy Prime Minister of Russia on defense and space industry, proposed to name it the \"Nile Crocodile\".",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The helicopter is equipped with the new OES-52 electro-optical observation and laser targeting system, replacing the standard GOES-451 mounted under the nose. The new optronic system began development in 2011 as a collaboration between Kamov and Sagem, and is based on the French company's STRIX sighting System. The OES-52 provides greater range of target detection and recognition.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The helicopter features the Arbalet-52 dual-band coherent pulse radar, which has an Earth mapping range of 32 km and a detection range of 25 km for ground targets and 15 km for aerial targets.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Nile Crocodiles use President-S airborne defense systems for protection against guided missiles. The system includes both radar and laser warning receivers, MAW sensors, chaff/flare dispensers, in addition to ECM and DIRCM jammers. Egyptian Ka-52s feature two new DIRCM sets installed on either side of the fuselage, which are different from the standard L370-5 sets. Moreover, the laser-warning system present on the Russian variants of the Ka-52 has been removed, and a L-150 Pastel radar warning receiver has been installed instead.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Egypt plans to arm its Ka-52s with Russian anti-tank guided missiles. The Air Force has chosen two types of missiles; namely the laser-guided Vikhr and the radar-guided Ataka beam-riding missiles.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, ordered by the Russian Defense Ministry, were to contain rotary-wing assets, formed into aviation groups. Each of these groups was planned to include eight attack and eight assault/transport helicopters. The Ka-52K \"Katran\" (Russian: Катран, 'mud shark'), a navalised derivative of the Ka-52, has been selected as the new ship-borne attack type for the Russian Naval Aviation. Its features include folding rotor blades, folding wings, and reinforced landing gear. Since its wings are shorter than those of the land-based variants, the Ka-52K only has four weapons pylons, instead of six on the land-based Ka-52. There are plans to install a new radar in the Ka-52K, with longer range compared to the Ka-52's radar. The Ka-52K will also be able to use Kh-35 and Kh-38 missiles. However, they haven't yet been integrated in the helicopter's mission suite. Russian Naval Aviation will need at least 40 Ka-52Ks, the first of which was tentatively slated to enter squadron service by early 2015, coinciding with the delivery of the first carrier.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "However, following the Russian annexation of Crimea the sale of the Mistrals was cancelled and they have since been sold to Egypt. Later, Egypt bought 46 Ka-52s, with deliveries lasting from 2017 to 2019. These helicopters have been deployed on the Mistrals originally built for Russia; however, Egyptian Ka-52s are regular land-based variants, not Ka-52Ks.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Still, the first of four Ka-52Ks ordered for the Russian Navy flew on 7 March 2015; the Navy also had an option for a further 28 helicopters. As of 2017, 4 pre-series Ka-52Ks were operated and used for testing by the Russian Navy. After a period of uncertainty, the Ka-52K's future with the Russian Navy now appears clearer. In July 2020, the keel was laid for two new Project 23900 amphibious assault ships in the Zalyv Shipbuilding yard. Each ship will be able to carry up to 18 helicopters, including Ka-52Ks. The Ka-52K has passed all tests and was ready for serial production as of September 2020.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "According to the SCMP, China is considering the purchase of 36 Ka-52Ks to be used aboard the Type 075 helicopter carrier, which would fulfil the role of a heavy attack helicopter. These helicopters are necessary to equip the carrier with powerful attack weapons, which it currently lacks.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The new version announced by the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2018 eventually crystalized into the Ka-52M; 114 helicopters of this new version are to be acquired. Additionally, older Ka-52s are to be upgraded to Ka-52M standard. The contract for the first 30 Ka-52Ms was signed in August 2021. A new contract was signed in August 2022. Upgrades embodied in the Ka-52M include a modernized GOES-451M electro-optical targeting turret with an increased range, stronger undercarriage wheels, and improved cockpit ergonomics, with better adaptation to the use of night-vision goggles. The LMUR missile is added to the helicopter's armament options. Several new radar types are being considered for the Ka-52M. A new self-protection system will also be fitted to the Ka-52M, replacing the current L370-5 Vitebsk. Lastly, the Ka-52M is adapted to work within a new battlefield command and control system. The Russian military received its first 10 modified Ka-52M helicopters on 4 January 2023. The state defense order for the helicopters was doubled in 2023.",
"title": "Development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The Ka-50 and its two-seat version Ka-52 are high-performance combat helicopters with day and night capability, high survivability and fire power, to defeat air targets and heavily armoured tanks armed with air defence weapons. It was designed to be small, fast and agile to improve survivability and lethality.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The hovering ceiling is 4,000 m and vertical rate of climb 10 m/s at an altitude of 2,500 m. Having a coaxial rotor with blades of polymer results in low inertia both relative to vertical and lateral axes, at 50%–75% as compared to a single rotor helicopter with tail rotor. No tail rotor also means it can perform flat turns at all speeds. A maximum vertical load of 3.5 g combined with low inertia makes the Ka-50 highly agile.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Flight systems include an inertial navigation system (INS), autopilot and head-up display (HUD). Sensors include forward-looking infrared (FLIR) and terrain-following radar.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Kamov Ka-50 is also fitted with an electronic radio and sighting-piloting-navigating system allowing flights at day and night in VFR and IFR weather conditions. The novelty of this avionics is based on the system of precise target designation with digital coded communication system, which ensures the exchange of information (precise enemy coordinates) between helicopters flying far apart from each other as well as with ground command posts. The Ka-52 is also equipped with a \"Phazotron\" cockpit radio-locator, allowing flights in adverse meteorological conditions and at night. The necessary information acquired by this radio-locator is transferred to the cockpit's multi-functional display screen. For conducting a fight, both pilots are equipped with range-finders built-in their helmets and they can use night vision eyepieces for night flights.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "For its own protection, Ka-50 is fitted with a radar warning receiver, electronic warfare system and chaff and flare dispensers. Aerodynamic cases at wings' ends each contain two dispensers, which in turn have 32 x 26 mm countermeasures each. The whole system works on principle of evaluated response based on infrared or electronic impulse irradiation. Extensive all-round armour in the cockpit protects the pilot against 12.7 mm armour-piercing bullets and 23 mm projectile fragments. The rotor blades are rated to withstand several hits of ground-based automatic weapons.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Other survivability features include armour protection for vital aircraft systems, and crash-absorbing landing gear and seats. Also, not having a tail rotor can improve survivability, since the tail boom isn't load-bearing; during testing, a Ka-50 lost its tail, but still managed to return to base without a problem.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "It is the world's first operational helicopter with a rescue ejection system allowing the pilot to escape at all altitudes and speeds. The rotor blades detach using explosive bolts prior to ejection to prevent damage to the crew. The K-37-800 rocket-assisted ejection system is manufactured by NPP Zvezda.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The aircraft has one Shipunov 2A42 autocannon with selective fire, and a dual-feed, giving it a cyclic rate of fire between 200 and 800 rounds per minute. It is mounted near centre of gravity for accuracy, and carries 460 high-fragmentation, explosive incendiary, or armour-piercing rounds. The type of ammunition is selected by the pilot during flight. The integrated 30 mm cannon is semi-rigidly fixed on the helicopter's side, movable only slightly in elevation and azimuth. Semi-rigid mounting improves the cannon's accuracy, giving the 30 mm a longer practical range and better hit ratio at medium ranges than with a free-turning turret mount.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The fire control system automatically shares all target information in real time, allowing one helicopter to engage a target spotted by another aircraft, and the system can also input target information from ground-based forward scouts with personnel-carried target designation gear.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Weapons can be carried on four external hardpoints under the stub wings, plus two on the wingtips, a total of more than 2,000 kg (depending on the mix). The pylons can be tilted up to 10 degrees downward. Fuel tanks may be mounted on a suspension point, whenever necessary.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Anti-tank armament comprises twelve Vikhr laser-guided anti-tank missiles (transl. Vortex or whirlwind), with a maximum range of some 8 km. The laser guidance is reported to be virtually jam-proof and the system features automatic guidance to target, enabling evasive action immediately after missile launch, alternatively it can also use Ataka laser-guided anti-tank missiles. Before firing laser-guided missiles it often must hover a few hundred feet off the ground to direct a laser at a target, leaving itself briefly exposed.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Ka-50/52 can also carry several rocket pods, including the S-13 and S-8 rockets. The \"dumb\" rockets could be upgraded to laser guided with the proposed Ugroza system.",
"title": "Design"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The Ka-50 took part in the Russian Army's operations against separatists in the Chechen Republic during the Second Chechen War. In December 2000, a pair of production Ka-50s arrived in the area. With the Ka-50s was a Ka-29 to provide reconnaissance and target designation. On 6 January 2001, the Ka-50 used live weapons against a real enemy for the first time. On 9 January, at the entry into a mountain gorge in the area of a settlement named Komsomolskoye, a single Ka-50 accompanied by an Mi-24 used S-8 unguided rockets to destroy a warehouse full of ammunition belonging to Chechen insurgents. On 6 February, in the forest-covered mountain area to the south of the village of Tsentoroj, a strike group composed of two Ka-50s and the sole Ka-29 discovered and, from a range of 3 km, destroyed a fortified camp of insurgents using two \"9K121 Vikhr\" guided missiles. On 14 February, a similar strike group carried out a \"hunting\" mission in the area of Oak-Yurt and Hatun. In difficult conditions, pilots found and destroyed eight targets. These missions tested the type's airframe, as well as its on-board systems and armament. Its successful performance in difficult, mountainous terrain confirmed the usefulness of the many advanced features of the Ka-50's design, and its power and maneuverability.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Ka-52 helicopters were spotted being deployed in support of the Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War in 2015, various sources stating they were involved in defense of the Russian base in Latakia, providing escort for search and rescue helicopters, and supporting Russian special forces.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "On 5 May 2018, a Ka-52 crashed near Mayadin due to a technical failure, according to some sources.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "On 24 February 2022, during the initial stages of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, at least one Russian Ka-52 helicopter was damaged but was able to land on its own. On 2 March, a Russian Ka-52 was hit by a surface-to-air missile and crash landed. On 12 March, Ukrainian forces reported that Ka-52 tail number RF-13409 had been shot down in Novomykolaivka near Kherson. Ukraine officials claimed on 16 March 2022 that Ka-52 number RF-13411 was shot down at an undisclosed location in Ukraine, providing footage of the airframe wreckage. Footage appeared on social media on 5 April 2022 that appeared to show a hovering Ka-52 shot down by a Ukrainian Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile. On 15 April, Ukrainian forces claimed to have shot down another Ka-52 and published footage of the wreckage; the crew were reported to have died. On 1 May footage appeared of another Ka-52 shot down using a Stugna-P anti-tank guided missile. On 4 June, Ukrainian forces of the 128th Mountain Brigade reported the downing of a Russian Ka-52 in the north. According to Ukrainian officials, the helicopter was shot down by MANPADS. On 27 June, another helicopter was hit by a British made Martlet MANPADS forcing it to land. On 15 August, Ukrainian forces damaged a Russian Ka-52 helicopter flying in Donetsk Oblast. By April 2023, at least 33 Russian Ka-52s had been shot down since the start of the February 24 invasion.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Reportedly, a few Ka-52s have suffered from wing vibration under heavy-load attack missions. This was observed months after the invasion. It has been suggested that this may be due to causes such as fatigue, inadequate design, lack of maintenance, and poor management.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "A Ukrainian military intelligence claimed that the Ka-52 can be \"disabled with a 7.62mm machine gun\" despite a claimed ability to withstand 12.7mm rounds.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Ka-52s have been heavily used by Russian forces to defend against the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. They have been successful, due in part, to a shortage of Ukrainian short-range air defence, or SHORAD, weapons. Due to the unique design of the coaxial main rotors, the helicopter can withstand the destruction of the tail. A video released on 19 June 2023 shows a Ka-52 losing its tail. The UK MOD has noted the movement of additional Ka-52s to an airfield near Berdiansk, \"In the constant contest between aviation measures and counter-measures, it is likely that Russia has gained a temporary advantage in southern Ukraine, especially with attack helicopters employing longer-range missiles against ground targets\".",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "As of late July 2023, the UK MoD claimed that Russia has lost 40 Ka-52s since the start of the Russian invasion. Oryx, a Dutch open source website, visually confirmed 38 Ka-52s were destroyed or damaged. At the same time the UK MoD said on 27 July 2023: “One of the single most influential Russian weapon systems in the sector is the Ka-52 HOKUM attack helicopter,” With the LMUR missile, the Ka-52 has an attack range of 15 kms, putting it beyond the range of Ukrainian air defences.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "On 7 August 2023, a Russian Ka-52 was reported shot down over Robotyne, making it the 40th lost during the current invasion according to Oryx. Oryx only counts losses confirmed through open sources.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "On 17 August 2023, Ukrainian military claimed to have shot down two Ka-52s in one day. One was downed near Robotyne with a MANPAD by the 47th Mechanized Brigade, a second was claimed by the Ukrainian Air Force near Bakhmut. Ukraine has reported that the missile system used to shoot down a Ka-52 near Robotyne was the RBS-70. While a Ka-52 has countermeasures for infra-red and laser guided missiles, it appears to lack radar jamming. It has to rely flying with helicopters like the Mi-28s that have radar jamming technology. Despite sanctions Russia has continued to manufacture Ka-52s.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Additionally five Ka-52s have been destroyed by Ukrainian tactical missiles on 18 October on the grounds of Berdiansk airport, as reported by Oryx (via satellite imaging). As of 19 October 2023, at least 58 Ka-52s have been confirmed lost during the invasion, with 45 destroyed, 12 damaged, and one damaged and captured by Ukrainian forces.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "It has participated in a number of exercises, including \"Boundary 2004\" at the Edelweiss training center in Kyrgyzstan during August 2004. The \"Shark\" demonstrated its advantages by operating at a high altitude and an air temperature of more than 30 °C. A Ka-50 provided cover for the landing of troops and then worked on the ground targets using its cannons and rockets.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "India issued a request for proposal for 22 attack helicopters for the Indian Air Force in May 2008. The Ka-50, the Mil Mi-28, and the Eurocopter Tiger were the front-runners for this order as of October 2008. The tender though was eventually cancelled and later India announced a new tender, with revised conditions. Russia again offered the Mi-28N and Ka-52.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The Russian Air Force has accepted 12 Ka-52 helicopters for operational service in 2011, and the total number of completed Ka-52s was already 65 units. 20 Ka-52 aircraft were located at the 575th Airbase Chernigovsky District, Eastern Military District. 16 were at 393rd \"Sevastopol\" Airbase Korenovsk, Southern Military District, 12 were transferred to newly formed 15th Army Aviation Brigade of the Western Military District at the airport of Ostrov, 8 – Torzhok 344th Centre for Combat Training and Flight Personnel Training. Five test aircraft are owned by JSC \"Kamov\"; two machines were lost in accidents. The Ka-52 was displayed to the international community at the 2013 Paris Air Show.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In 2013, the AAC \"Progress\" has completed the contract with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, signed in 2009, and would begin the next long-term contract for supplying 143 Ka-52, worth about 120 billion rubles (≈US$3.5 bln).",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "In June 2015, Sergei Kornev, the head of Rosoboronexport's delegation, said that Russia has signed its first contracts on the export of Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters. \"We have the Ka-52 in its export model and we have contracts for it, and it's already being spun because it has a good, firm future\" he said at the airshow outside Paris. Kornev did not specify the volume of contracts or with whom they were signed.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "The Algerian Air Force is negotiating a sale for 12 Ka-52Es as of 2022. In September 2015, the Ka-52 was presented at Aïn Oussera Air Base.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "North Macedonia reportedly bought two Ka-52s (or Ka-50s) from Russia in June 2001 for its North Macedonia Air Brigade. However, the Ministry of Defense of Macedonia denied this report.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "A Ka-52 was shot down during the Wagner Group rebellion. Another Ka-52 was able to decoy a missile fired from a Wagner operated 9K35 Strela-10 by use of flares.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Data from Manufacturer sources Donald, naval-technology.com, Federation of American Scientists",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-50)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "General characteristics",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-50)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Performance",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-50)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Armament",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-50)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Related development",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "",
"title": "See also"
}
] |
The Kamov Ka-50 "Black Shark", NATO reporting name Hokum A, is a Soviet/Russian single-seat attack helicopter with the distinctive coaxial rotor system of the Kamov design bureau. It was designed in the 1980s and adopted for service in the Russian army in 1995. The Ka-50 is manufactured by the Progress company in Arsenyev. It is used as a heavily armed scout helicopter, and is notable for having a rescue ejection system, rare for helicopters. During the late 1990s, Kamov and Israel Aerospace Industries developed a tandem-seat cockpit version, the Kamov Ka-50-2 "Erdogan", to compete in Turkey's attack helicopter competition. Kamov also designed another two-seat variant, the Kamov Ka-52 "Alligator". The Ka-52's unit cost is approximately ₽840 million as of 2023.
|
2002-02-12T07:38:27Z
|
2023-12-29T18:27:34Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50
|
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Kenny Dalglish
|
Sir Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish MBE (born 4 March 1951) is a Scottish former football player and manager. He is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time as well as one of Liverpool's and Britain's greatest ever players. During his career, he made 338 appearances for Celtic and 515 for Liverpool, playing as a forward, and earned a record 102 caps for the Scotland national team, scoring 30 goals, also a joint record. Dalglish won the Ballon d'Or Silver Award in 1983, the PFA Players' Player of the Year in 1983, and the FWA Footballer of the Year in 1979 and 1983. In 2009, FourFourTwo magazine named Dalglish the greatest striker in post-war British football, and he has been inducted into both the Scottish and English Football Halls of Fame. He is very highly regarded by Liverpool fans, who still affectionately refer to him as King Kenny, and in 2006 voted him top of the fans' poll "100 Players Who Shook the Kop".
Dalglish began his career with Celtic in 1971, going on to win four Scottish league championships, four Scottish Cups and one Scottish League Cup with the club. In 1977, Liverpool manager Bob Paisley paid a British transfer record of £440,000 to take Dalglish to Liverpool. His years at Liverpool were among the club's most successful periods, as he won six English league championships, the FA Cup, four League Cups, five FA Charity Shields, three European Cups and one European Super Cup. In international football, Dalglish made 102 appearances and scored 30 goals for Scotland between 1971 and 1986, becoming their most capped player and joint-leading goal scorer (with Denis Law). He was chosen for Scotland's FIFA World Cup squads in 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1986, playing in all of those tournaments except the latter, due to injury.
Dalglish became player-manager of Liverpool in 1985 after the resignation of Joe Fagan, winning a further three First Divisions, two FA Cups and four FA Charity Shields, before resigning in 1991. Eight months later, Dalglish made a return to football management with Blackburn Rovers, whom he led from the Second Division to win the Premier League in 1995. Soon afterwards, he stepped down as manager to become Director of Football at the club, before leaving altogether in 1996. In January 1997, Dalglish took over as manager at Newcastle United. Newcastle finished as runners-up in the Premier League during his first season, but they only finished 13th in 1997–98, which led to his dismissal the following season. Dalglish went on to be appointed Director of Football at Celtic in 1999, and later briefly manager. He won the Scottish League Cup in 2000 before an acrimonious departure that year.
Between 2000 and 2010, Dalglish focused on charitable concerns, founding The Marina Dalglish Appeal with his wife to raise money for cancer care. In January 2011, Dalglish returned to Liverpool for a spell as caretaker manager after the dismissal of Roy Hodgson, becoming the permanent manager in May 2011. Despite winning the League Cup, which was the club's first trophy since 2006, earning them a place in the UEFA Europa League, and reaching the FA Cup Final, Liverpool only finished 8th in the Premier League, and Dalglish was dismissed in May 2012. In October 2013, Dalglish returned to Anfield as a non-executive director, and Anfield's Centenary Stand was renamed after him in May 2017.
The son of an engineer, Dalglish was born in Dalmarnock in the east end of Glasgow and was brought up in Milton in the north of the city. When he was 14 the family moved to a newly built tower block in Ibrox overlooking the home ground of Rangers, the club he had grown up supporting.
Dalglish attended Miltonbank Primary School in Milton and started out as a goalkeeper. He then attended High Possil Senior Secondary School, where he won the inter-schools five-a-side and the inter-year five-a-side competitions. He won the Scottish Cup playing for Glasgow Schoolboys and Glasgow Schools, and was then selected for the Scottish schoolboys team that went undefeated in a Home Nations Victory Shield tournament. In 1966, Dalglish had unsuccessful trials at West Ham United and Liverpool.
Dalglish signed a professional contract with Celtic in May 1967. The club's assistant manager Sean Fallon went to see Dalglish and his parents at their home, which had Rangers-related pictures on the walls. In his first season, Dalglish was loaned out to Cumbernauld United, for whom he scored 37 goals. During this time he also worked as an apprentice joiner. Celtic manager Jock Stein wanted Dalglish to spend a second season at Cumbernauld, but the youngster wanted to turn professional. Dalglish got his wish and became a regular in the reserve team known as the Quality Street Gang, due to it containing a large number of highly rated players, including future Scottish internationals Danny McGrain, George Connelly, Lou Macari and David Hay. Dalglish made his first-team competitive debut for Celtic in a Scottish League Cup quarter-final tie against Hamilton Academical on 25 September 1968, coming on as a second-half substitute in a 4–2 win.
He spent the 1968–69 season playing for the reserves, though scored just four goals in 17 games. The following season he changed his position, moving into midfield, and enjoyed a good season as he helped the reserve team to the league and cup double, scoring 19 goals in 31 games. Stein put Dalglish in the starting XI for the first team in a league match against Raith Rovers on 4 October 1969. Celtic won 7–1 but Dalglish didn't score, nor did he score in the next three first-team games he played in during the 1969–70 season.
Dalglish continued his goal-scoring form in the reserves into the next season, scoring 23 goals. A highlight of his season came in the Reserve Cup Final against Rangers; Dalglish scored one goal in a 4–1 win in the first leg, then in the second leg scored a hat-trick in a 6–1 win to clinch the cup. Still not a first-team regular, Dalglish was in the stands when the Ibrox disaster occurred at an Old Firm match in January 1971, when 66 Rangers fans died. On 17 May 1971, he played for Celtic against Kilmarnock in a testimonial match for the Rugby Park club's long serving midfielder Frank Beattie, and scored six goals in a 7–2 win for Celtic.
The 1971–72 season saw Dalglish finally establish himself in the Celtic first team,. He scored his first competitive goal for the first team on 14 August 1971, Celtic's second goal with a penalty kick in a 2–0 win over Rangers at Ibrox Stadium. He went on to score 29 goals in 53 games that season, including a hat-trick against Dundee and braces against Kilmarnock and Motherwell and helped Celtic win their seventh consecutive league title. Dalglish also played in Celtic's 6–1 win over Hibernian in the 1972 Scottish Cup Final. In 1972–73 Dalglish was Celtic's leading scorer, with 39 goals in all competitions, and the club won the league championship once again. Celtic won a league and cup double in 1973–74 and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup. The ties against Atlético Madrid were acrimonious, and Dalglish described the first leg in Glasgow where the Spanish side had three players sent off as "without doubt the worst game I have ever played in as far as violence is concerned." Dalglish won a further Scottish Cup winner's medal in 1975, providing the cross for Paul Wilson's opening goal in a 3–1 win over Airdrieonians in what transpired to be captain Billy McNeill's last match before retiring from playing football.
Dalglish was made Celtic captain in the 1975–76 season, during which the club failed to win a trophy for the first time in 12 years. Jock Stein had been badly injured in a car crash and missed most of that season while recovering from his injuries. Celtic won another league and cup double in 1976–77, with Dalglish scoring 27 goals in all competitions. On 10 August 1977, after making 320 appearances and scoring 167 goals for Celtic, Dalglish was signed by Liverpool manager Bob Paisley for a British transfer fee record of £440,000 (£2,908,000 today). The deal was unpopular with the Celtic fans, and Dalglish was booed by the crowd when he returned to Celtic Park in August 1978 to play in a testimonial match for Stein.
Dalglish was signed to replace Kevin Keegan and quickly settled into his new club. He made his debut on 13 August 1977 in the season opener at Wembley, in the 1977 FA Charity Shield against Manchester United. He scored his first goal for Liverpool in his league debut a week later on 20 August, against Middlesbrough. Dalglish also scored three days later on his Anfield debut in a 2–0 victory over Newcastle United, and he scored Liverpool's sixth goal when they beat Keegan's Hamburg 6–0 in the second leg of the 1977 European Super Cup. By the end of his first season with Liverpool, Dalglish had played 62 times and scored 31 goals, including the winning goal in the 1978 European Cup Final at Wembley against Bruges.
In his second season, Dalglish recorded a personal best of 21 league goals for the club and was also named Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year. He did not miss a league game for Liverpool until the 1980–81 season, when he appeared in 34 out of 42 league games and scored only eight goals as Liverpool finished fifth in the league, but still won the European Cup and Football League Cup. He recovered his goal-scoring form the following season, and was an ever-present player in the league once again, scoring 13 goals as Liverpool became league champions for the 13th time, and the third time since Dalglish's arrival. It was also around this time that he began to form a potent strike partnership with Ian Rush; Dalglish began to play just off Rush, "running riot in the extra space afforded to him in the hole". Dalglish was voted PFA Players' Player of the Year for the 1982–83 season, during which he scored 18 league goals as Liverpool retained their title. From 1983 Dalglish became less prolific as a goal-scorer, though he remained a regular player.
After becoming player-manager on the retirement of Joe Fagan in the 1985 close season and in the aftermath of the Heysel Stadium disaster, Dalglish selected himself for just 21 First Division games in 1985–86 as Liverpool won the double, but he started the FA Cup final win over Everton. On the last day of the league season, his goal in a 1–0 away win over Chelsea gave Liverpool their 16th league title. Dalglish had a personally better campaign in the 1986–87 season, scoring six goals in 18 league appearances, but by then he was committed to giving younger players priority for a first-team place.
With the sale of Ian Rush to Juventus in 1987, Dalglish formed a new striker partnership of new signings John Aldridge and Peter Beardsley for the 1987–88 season, and he played only twice in a league campaign which saw Liverpool gain their 17th title. Dalglish did not play in Liverpool's 1988–89 campaign, and he made his final league appearance on 5 May 1990 as a substitute against Derby. At 39, he was one of the oldest players ever to play for Liverpool. His final goal had come three years earlier, in a 3–0 home league win over Nottingham Forest on 18 April 1987.
Tommy Docherty gave Dalglish his debut for the Scottish national side as a substitute in the 1–0 Euro 1972 qualifier victory over Belgium on 10 November 1971 at Pittodrie. Dalglish scored his first goal for Scotland a year later on 15 November 1972 in the 2–0 World Cup qualifier win over Denmark at Hampden Park. Scotland would go on to qualify for the final tournament and he was part of Scotland's 1974 World Cup squad in West Germany. He started in all three games as Scotland were eliminated during the group stages despite not losing any of their three games.
In 1976, Dalglish scored the winning goal for Scotland at Hampden Park against England, by nutmegging Ray Clemence. A year later Dalglish scored against the same opponents and goalkeeper at Wembley, in another 2–1 win. Dalglish went on to play in both the 1978 World Cup in Argentina where he started in all of Scotland's games – scoring against eventual runners-up the Netherlands in a famous 3–2 win – and the 1982 World Cup in Spain, scoring against New Zealand. On both occasions Scotland failed to get past the group stage. Dalglish was selected for the 22-man squad travelling to Mexico for the 1986 World Cup, but had to withdraw due to injury.
In total, Dalglish played 102 times for Scotland (a national record) and he scored 30 goals (also a national record, which matched that set by Denis Law). His final appearance for Scotland, after 15 years as a full international, was on 12 November 1986 at Hampden Park in a Euro 1988 qualifying game against Luxembourg, which Scotland won 3–0. His 30th and final international goal had been two years earlier, on 14 November 1984, in a 3–1 win over Spain in a World Cup qualifier, also at Hampden Park.
After the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 and Joe Fagan's subsequent resignation as manager, Dalglish became player-manager of Liverpool. In his first season in charge in 1985–86, he guided the club to its first "double". Liverpool achieved this by winning the League Championship by two points over Everton (Dalglish himself scored the winner in a 1–0 victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to secure the title on the final day of the season), and the FA Cup by beating Everton in the final.
The 1986–87 season was trophyless for Liverpool. They lost 2–1 to Arsenal in the League Cup final at Wembley. Before the 1987–88 season, Dalglish signed two new players: striker Peter Beardsley from Newcastle and winger John Barnes from Watford. He had already purchased goalscorer John Aldridge from Oxford United (a replacement for Ian Rush, who was moving to Italy) in the spring of 1987 and early into the new campaign, bought Oxford United midfielder Ray Houghton. The new-look Liverpool side shaped by Dalglish topped the league for almost the entire season, and had a run of 37 matches unbeaten in all competitions (including 29 in the league; 22 wins and 7 draws) from the beginning of the season to 21 February 1988, when they lost to Everton in the league. Liverpool were crowned champions with four games left to play, having suffered just two defeats from 40 games. However, Dalglish's side lost the 1988 FA Cup Final to underdogs Wimbledon.
In the summer of 1988, Dalglish re-signed Ian Rush. Liverpool beat Everton 3–2 after extra time in the second all-Merseyside FA Cup final in 1989, but was deprived of a second Double in the final game of the season, when Arsenal secured a last-minute goal to take the title from Liverpool. In the 1989–90 season Liverpool won their third league title under Dalglish. They missed out on the Double and a third successive FA Cup final appearance when they lost 4–3 in extra-time to Crystal Palace in an FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park. At the end of the season Dalglish received his third Manager of the Year award. Dalglish resigned as manager of Liverpool on 22 February 1991, two days after a 4–4 draw with rivals Everton in an FA Cup fifth round tie at Goodison Park, in which Liverpool surrendered the lead four times. At the time of his resignation, the club were three points ahead in the league and still in contention for the FA Cup.
Dalglish was the manager of Liverpool at the time of the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989. The disaster claimed 94 lives on the day, with the final death toll reaching 97. Dalglish attended many funerals of the victims, including four in one day. His presence in the aftermath of the disaster has been described as "colossal and heroic". Dalglish broke a twenty-year silence about the disaster in March 2009, expressing regret that the police and the FA did not consider delaying the kick-off of the match. During the Hillsborough Memorial Service on 15 April 2011, Liverpool MP Steve Rotheram announced he would submit an Early Day Motion to have Dalglish knighted, "not only for his outstanding playing and managerial career, but also the charity work he has done with his wife, Marina, for breast cancer support and what he did after Hillsborough. It is common knowledge it affected him deeply".
Dalglish returned to management in October 1991 at Second Division Blackburn Rovers who had recently been purchased by multi-millionaire Jack Walker. By the turn of 1992 they were top of the Second Division, and then suffered a dip in form before recovering to qualify for the playoffs, during which Dalglish led Blackburn into the new Premier League by beating Leicester City 1–0 in the Second Division play-off final at Wembley. The resulting promotion meant that Blackburn were back in the top flight of English football for the first time since 1966. In the 1992 pre-season, Dalglish signed Southampton's Alan Shearer for a British record fee of £3.5 million. Despite a serious injury which ruled Shearer out for half the season, Dalglish achieved fourth position with the team in the first year of the new Premier League. The following year, Dalglish failed in an attempt to sign Roy Keane. Blackburn finished two positions higher the following season, as runners-up to Manchester United. By this time, Dalglish had added England internationals Tim Flowers and David Batty to his squad.
At the start of the 1994–95 season Dalglish paid a record £5 million for Chris Sutton, with whom Shearer formed an effective strike partnership. By the last game of the season, both Blackburn and Manchester United were in contention for the title. Blackburn had to travel to Liverpool, and Manchester United faced West Ham United in London. Blackburn lost 2–1, but still won the title since United failed to win in London. The title meant that Dalglish was only the fourth football manager in history to lead two different clubs to top-flight league championships in England, after Tom Watson, Herbert Chapman and Brian Clough. Dalglish became Director of Football at Blackburn in June 1995. He left the club at the start of the 1996–97 season after a disappointing campaign under his replacement, Ray Harford.
Following his departure from Blackburn Dalglish was appointed for a brief spell as an "international talent scout" at his boyhood club Rangers. He was reported as having played a central role in the signing of Chile international Sebastián Rozental.
In January 1997, Dalglish was appointed manager of Premier League side Newcastle United on a three-and-a-half-year contract, taking over from Kevin Keegan. Dalglish guided the club from fourth position to a runner-up spot in May and a place in the new format of the following season's UEFA Champions League. He then broke up the team which had finished second two years running, selling popular players like Peter Beardsley, Lee Clark, Les Ferdinand and David Ginola and replacing them with ageing stars like John Barnes (34), Ian Rush (36) and Stuart Pearce (35), as well as virtual unknowns like Des Hamilton and Garry Brady. He also made some good long-term signings like Gary Speed and Shay Given. The 1997–98 campaign saw Newcastle finish in only 13th place and, despite Dalglish achieving some notable successes during the season (including a 3–2 UEFA Champions League win over Barcelona and an FA Cup final appearance against Arsenal), he was dismissed by Freddie Shepherd after two draws in the opening two games of the subsequent 1998–99 season, and replaced by former Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit. One commentator from The Independent has since written, "His 20 months at Newcastle United are the only part of Kenny Dalglish's career that came anywhere near failure".
In June 1999 he was appointed director of football operations at Celtic, with his former Liverpool player John Barnes appointed as head coach. Barnes was dismissed in February 2000 and Dalglish took charge of the first team on a temporary basis. He guided them to the Scottish League Cup final, where they beat Aberdeen 2–0 at Hampden Park. Dalglish was dismissed in June 2000, after the appointment of Martin O'Neill as manager. After a brief legal battle, Dalglish accepted a settlement of £600,000 from Celtic.
In April 2009 Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez invited Dalglish to take up a role at the club's youth academy. The appointment was confirmed in July 2009, and Dalglish was also made the club's ambassador. Following Benítez's departure from Liverpool in June 2010, Dalglish was asked to help find a replacement, and in July Fulham's Roy Hodgson was appointed manager.
A poor run of results at the start of the 2010–11 season led to Liverpool fans calling for Dalglish's return as manager as early as October 2010, and with no subsequent improvement in Liverpool's results up to the end of the year (during which time the club was bought by New England Sports Ventures), Hodgson left Liverpool and Dalglish was appointed caretaker manager on 8 January 2011. Dalglish's first game in charge was on 9 January 2011 at Old Trafford against Manchester United in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, which Liverpool lost 1–0. Dalglish's first league game in charge was against Blackpool on 12 January 2011; Liverpool lost 2–1. After the game, Dalglish admitted that Liverpool faced "a big challenge".
Shortly after his appointment, Dalglish indicated he would like the job on a permanent basis if it was offered to him, and on 19 January the Liverpool chairman Tom Werner stated that the club's owners would favour this option. On 22 January 2011, Dalglish led Liverpool to their first win since his return, against Wolves at Molineux. After signing Andy Carroll from Newcastle for a British record transfer fee of £35 million and Luis Suárez from Ajax for £22.8 million at the end of January (in the wake of Fernando Torres's sale to Chelsea for £50 million), some journalists noted that Dalglish had begun to assert his authority at the club. Following a 1–0 victory against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in February 2011, described by Alan Smith as "a quite brilliant display in terms of discipline and spirit" and a "defensive masterplan" by David Pleat, Henry Winter wrote, "it can only be a matter of time before he [Dalglish] is confirmed as long-term manager".
On 12 May 2011, Liverpool announced that Dalglish had been given a three-year contract. His first official match in charge was 2–0 defeat to Harry Redknapp's Spurs at Anfield. Dalglish's second stint in charge at Anfield proved controversial at times. The Scot defended Luis Suárez in the wake of the striker's eight-match ban for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra when the teams met in October 2011. After the Uruguayan's apparent refusal to shake Evra's hand in the return fixture in February 2012, an apology from both player and manager came only after the intervention of the owners.
In February 2012, Dalglish led Liverpool to their first trophy in six years, with victory in the 2011–12 Football League Cup. In the same season he also led Liverpool to the 2012 FA Cup Final where they lost 2–1 to Chelsea. Despite the success in domestic cups, Liverpool finished eighth in the league, their worst showing in the league since 1994, failing to qualify for the Champions League for a third straight season. Following the end of the season, Liverpool dismissed Dalglish on 16 May 2012.
In October 2013, Dalglish returned to Liverpool as a non-executive director.
On 13 October 2017, Anfield's Centenary Stand was officially renamed the Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand in recognition of his unique contribution to the club.
Dalglish has been married to Marina since 26 November 1974. The couple have four children, Kelly, Paul, Lynsey and Lauren. Kelly has worked as a football presenter for BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky Sports. Paul followed in his father's footsteps as a footballer, playing in the Premier League and Scottish Premiership before travelling to the United States to play for the Houston Dynamo in Major League Soccer. He retired in 2008 and became a coach, spending time as head coach of Ottawa Fury FC and Miami FC in the second-division leagues of North America. Dalglish's wife Marina was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2003, but was treated at Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool and recovered. She later launched a charity to fund new cancer treatment equipment for UK hospitals.
Dalglish was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1985 New Year Honours for services to football. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to football, charity and the City of Liverpool. He dedicated the award to former Celtic and Liverpool coaches Jock Stein, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley stating that he was "Humbled" and "A wee bit embarrassed".
In 2002, Celtic supporters voted for what they considered to be the greatest Celtic XI of all time. Dalglish was voted into the team, which was; Simpson, McGrain, Gemmell, Murdoch, McNeill, Auld, Johnstone, P. McStay, Dalglish, Larsson and Lennox. He was an inaugural inductee to the English Football Hall of Fame the same year, and later also an inaugural inductee to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in 2004. He is very highly regarded by Liverpool fans, who still affectionately refer to him as King Kenny, as do supporters of the Scotland National team from the 70’s and 80’s when he was a world-class player. In 2006 Liverpool fans voted him top of the fans' poll "100 Players Who Shook the Kop". In 2009, FourFourTwo magazine named Dalglish the greatest striker in post-war British football.
In early April 2020, while in hospital for treatment for an unrelated condition, Dalglish was found to be positive for COVID-19, though asymptomatic.
On 19 December 2023, Dalglish won the BBC Lifetime Achievement Award, BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
In 2005 when Dalglish and his wife founded the charity The Marina Dalglish Appeal to raise money to help treat cancer. Dalglish has participated in a number of events to raise money for the charity, including a replay of the 1986 FA Cup Final. In June 2007 a Centre for Oncology at Aintree University Hospital was opened, after the charity had raised £1.5 million. In 2012, the foundation made a £2 million donation to The Walton Centre which allowed the purchase of a new MRI scanner. Dalglish often competes in the annual Gary Player Invitational Tournament, a charity golfing event which raises money for children's causes around the world. On 1 July 2011, Dalglish was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Ulster, for services to football and charity.
Celtic
Liverpool
Scotland
Individual
Liverpool
Blackburn Rovers
Celtic
Individual
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Sir Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish MBE (born 4 March 1951) is a Scottish former football player and manager. He is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time as well as one of Liverpool's and Britain's greatest ever players. During his career, he made 338 appearances for Celtic and 515 for Liverpool, playing as a forward, and earned a record 102 caps for the Scotland national team, scoring 30 goals, also a joint record. Dalglish won the Ballon d'Or Silver Award in 1983, the PFA Players' Player of the Year in 1983, and the FWA Footballer of the Year in 1979 and 1983. In 2009, FourFourTwo magazine named Dalglish the greatest striker in post-war British football, and he has been inducted into both the Scottish and English Football Halls of Fame. He is very highly regarded by Liverpool fans, who still affectionately refer to him as King Kenny, and in 2006 voted him top of the fans' poll \"100 Players Who Shook the Kop\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Dalglish began his career with Celtic in 1971, going on to win four Scottish league championships, four Scottish Cups and one Scottish League Cup with the club. In 1977, Liverpool manager Bob Paisley paid a British transfer record of £440,000 to take Dalglish to Liverpool. His years at Liverpool were among the club's most successful periods, as he won six English league championships, the FA Cup, four League Cups, five FA Charity Shields, three European Cups and one European Super Cup. In international football, Dalglish made 102 appearances and scored 30 goals for Scotland between 1971 and 1986, becoming their most capped player and joint-leading goal scorer (with Denis Law). He was chosen for Scotland's FIFA World Cup squads in 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1986, playing in all of those tournaments except the latter, due to injury.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Dalglish became player-manager of Liverpool in 1985 after the resignation of Joe Fagan, winning a further three First Divisions, two FA Cups and four FA Charity Shields, before resigning in 1991. Eight months later, Dalglish made a return to football management with Blackburn Rovers, whom he led from the Second Division to win the Premier League in 1995. Soon afterwards, he stepped down as manager to become Director of Football at the club, before leaving altogether in 1996. In January 1997, Dalglish took over as manager at Newcastle United. Newcastle finished as runners-up in the Premier League during his first season, but they only finished 13th in 1997–98, which led to his dismissal the following season. Dalglish went on to be appointed Director of Football at Celtic in 1999, and later briefly manager. He won the Scottish League Cup in 2000 before an acrimonious departure that year.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Between 2000 and 2010, Dalglish focused on charitable concerns, founding The Marina Dalglish Appeal with his wife to raise money for cancer care. In January 2011, Dalglish returned to Liverpool for a spell as caretaker manager after the dismissal of Roy Hodgson, becoming the permanent manager in May 2011. Despite winning the League Cup, which was the club's first trophy since 2006, earning them a place in the UEFA Europa League, and reaching the FA Cup Final, Liverpool only finished 8th in the Premier League, and Dalglish was dismissed in May 2012. In October 2013, Dalglish returned to Anfield as a non-executive director, and Anfield's Centenary Stand was renamed after him in May 2017.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The son of an engineer, Dalglish was born in Dalmarnock in the east end of Glasgow and was brought up in Milton in the north of the city. When he was 14 the family moved to a newly built tower block in Ibrox overlooking the home ground of Rangers, the club he had grown up supporting.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Dalglish attended Miltonbank Primary School in Milton and started out as a goalkeeper. He then attended High Possil Senior Secondary School, where he won the inter-schools five-a-side and the inter-year five-a-side competitions. He won the Scottish Cup playing for Glasgow Schoolboys and Glasgow Schools, and was then selected for the Scottish schoolboys team that went undefeated in a Home Nations Victory Shield tournament. In 1966, Dalglish had unsuccessful trials at West Ham United and Liverpool.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Dalglish signed a professional contract with Celtic in May 1967. The club's assistant manager Sean Fallon went to see Dalglish and his parents at their home, which had Rangers-related pictures on the walls. In his first season, Dalglish was loaned out to Cumbernauld United, for whom he scored 37 goals. During this time he also worked as an apprentice joiner. Celtic manager Jock Stein wanted Dalglish to spend a second season at Cumbernauld, but the youngster wanted to turn professional. Dalglish got his wish and became a regular in the reserve team known as the Quality Street Gang, due to it containing a large number of highly rated players, including future Scottish internationals Danny McGrain, George Connelly, Lou Macari and David Hay. Dalglish made his first-team competitive debut for Celtic in a Scottish League Cup quarter-final tie against Hamilton Academical on 25 September 1968, coming on as a second-half substitute in a 4–2 win.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "He spent the 1968–69 season playing for the reserves, though scored just four goals in 17 games. The following season he changed his position, moving into midfield, and enjoyed a good season as he helped the reserve team to the league and cup double, scoring 19 goals in 31 games. Stein put Dalglish in the starting XI for the first team in a league match against Raith Rovers on 4 October 1969. Celtic won 7–1 but Dalglish didn't score, nor did he score in the next three first-team games he played in during the 1969–70 season.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Dalglish continued his goal-scoring form in the reserves into the next season, scoring 23 goals. A highlight of his season came in the Reserve Cup Final against Rangers; Dalglish scored one goal in a 4–1 win in the first leg, then in the second leg scored a hat-trick in a 6–1 win to clinch the cup. Still not a first-team regular, Dalglish was in the stands when the Ibrox disaster occurred at an Old Firm match in January 1971, when 66 Rangers fans died. On 17 May 1971, he played for Celtic against Kilmarnock in a testimonial match for the Rugby Park club's long serving midfielder Frank Beattie, and scored six goals in a 7–2 win for Celtic.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The 1971–72 season saw Dalglish finally establish himself in the Celtic first team,. He scored his first competitive goal for the first team on 14 August 1971, Celtic's second goal with a penalty kick in a 2–0 win over Rangers at Ibrox Stadium. He went on to score 29 goals in 53 games that season, including a hat-trick against Dundee and braces against Kilmarnock and Motherwell and helped Celtic win their seventh consecutive league title. Dalglish also played in Celtic's 6–1 win over Hibernian in the 1972 Scottish Cup Final. In 1972–73 Dalglish was Celtic's leading scorer, with 39 goals in all competitions, and the club won the league championship once again. Celtic won a league and cup double in 1973–74 and reached the semi-finals of the European Cup. The ties against Atlético Madrid were acrimonious, and Dalglish described the first leg in Glasgow where the Spanish side had three players sent off as \"without doubt the worst game I have ever played in as far as violence is concerned.\" Dalglish won a further Scottish Cup winner's medal in 1975, providing the cross for Paul Wilson's opening goal in a 3–1 win over Airdrieonians in what transpired to be captain Billy McNeill's last match before retiring from playing football.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Dalglish was made Celtic captain in the 1975–76 season, during which the club failed to win a trophy for the first time in 12 years. Jock Stein had been badly injured in a car crash and missed most of that season while recovering from his injuries. Celtic won another league and cup double in 1976–77, with Dalglish scoring 27 goals in all competitions. On 10 August 1977, after making 320 appearances and scoring 167 goals for Celtic, Dalglish was signed by Liverpool manager Bob Paisley for a British transfer fee record of £440,000 (£2,908,000 today). The deal was unpopular with the Celtic fans, and Dalglish was booed by the crowd when he returned to Celtic Park in August 1978 to play in a testimonial match for Stein.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Dalglish was signed to replace Kevin Keegan and quickly settled into his new club. He made his debut on 13 August 1977 in the season opener at Wembley, in the 1977 FA Charity Shield against Manchester United. He scored his first goal for Liverpool in his league debut a week later on 20 August, against Middlesbrough. Dalglish also scored three days later on his Anfield debut in a 2–0 victory over Newcastle United, and he scored Liverpool's sixth goal when they beat Keegan's Hamburg 6–0 in the second leg of the 1977 European Super Cup. By the end of his first season with Liverpool, Dalglish had played 62 times and scored 31 goals, including the winning goal in the 1978 European Cup Final at Wembley against Bruges.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In his second season, Dalglish recorded a personal best of 21 league goals for the club and was also named Football Writers' Association Footballer of the Year. He did not miss a league game for Liverpool until the 1980–81 season, when he appeared in 34 out of 42 league games and scored only eight goals as Liverpool finished fifth in the league, but still won the European Cup and Football League Cup. He recovered his goal-scoring form the following season, and was an ever-present player in the league once again, scoring 13 goals as Liverpool became league champions for the 13th time, and the third time since Dalglish's arrival. It was also around this time that he began to form a potent strike partnership with Ian Rush; Dalglish began to play just off Rush, \"running riot in the extra space afforded to him in the hole\". Dalglish was voted PFA Players' Player of the Year for the 1982–83 season, during which he scored 18 league goals as Liverpool retained their title. From 1983 Dalglish became less prolific as a goal-scorer, though he remained a regular player.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "After becoming player-manager on the retirement of Joe Fagan in the 1985 close season and in the aftermath of the Heysel Stadium disaster, Dalglish selected himself for just 21 First Division games in 1985–86 as Liverpool won the double, but he started the FA Cup final win over Everton. On the last day of the league season, his goal in a 1–0 away win over Chelsea gave Liverpool their 16th league title. Dalglish had a personally better campaign in the 1986–87 season, scoring six goals in 18 league appearances, but by then he was committed to giving younger players priority for a first-team place.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "With the sale of Ian Rush to Juventus in 1987, Dalglish formed a new striker partnership of new signings John Aldridge and Peter Beardsley for the 1987–88 season, and he played only twice in a league campaign which saw Liverpool gain their 17th title. Dalglish did not play in Liverpool's 1988–89 campaign, and he made his final league appearance on 5 May 1990 as a substitute against Derby. At 39, he was one of the oldest players ever to play for Liverpool. His final goal had come three years earlier, in a 3–0 home league win over Nottingham Forest on 18 April 1987.",
"title": "Club career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Tommy Docherty gave Dalglish his debut for the Scottish national side as a substitute in the 1–0 Euro 1972 qualifier victory over Belgium on 10 November 1971 at Pittodrie. Dalglish scored his first goal for Scotland a year later on 15 November 1972 in the 2–0 World Cup qualifier win over Denmark at Hampden Park. Scotland would go on to qualify for the final tournament and he was part of Scotland's 1974 World Cup squad in West Germany. He started in all three games as Scotland were eliminated during the group stages despite not losing any of their three games.",
"title": "International career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In 1976, Dalglish scored the winning goal for Scotland at Hampden Park against England, by nutmegging Ray Clemence. A year later Dalglish scored against the same opponents and goalkeeper at Wembley, in another 2–1 win. Dalglish went on to play in both the 1978 World Cup in Argentina where he started in all of Scotland's games – scoring against eventual runners-up the Netherlands in a famous 3–2 win – and the 1982 World Cup in Spain, scoring against New Zealand. On both occasions Scotland failed to get past the group stage. Dalglish was selected for the 22-man squad travelling to Mexico for the 1986 World Cup, but had to withdraw due to injury.",
"title": "International career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In total, Dalglish played 102 times for Scotland (a national record) and he scored 30 goals (also a national record, which matched that set by Denis Law). His final appearance for Scotland, after 15 years as a full international, was on 12 November 1986 at Hampden Park in a Euro 1988 qualifying game against Luxembourg, which Scotland won 3–0. His 30th and final international goal had been two years earlier, on 14 November 1984, in a 3–1 win over Spain in a World Cup qualifier, also at Hampden Park.",
"title": "International career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "After the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 and Joe Fagan's subsequent resignation as manager, Dalglish became player-manager of Liverpool. In his first season in charge in 1985–86, he guided the club to its first \"double\". Liverpool achieved this by winning the League Championship by two points over Everton (Dalglish himself scored the winner in a 1–0 victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge to secure the title on the final day of the season), and the FA Cup by beating Everton in the final.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The 1986–87 season was trophyless for Liverpool. They lost 2–1 to Arsenal in the League Cup final at Wembley. Before the 1987–88 season, Dalglish signed two new players: striker Peter Beardsley from Newcastle and winger John Barnes from Watford. He had already purchased goalscorer John Aldridge from Oxford United (a replacement for Ian Rush, who was moving to Italy) in the spring of 1987 and early into the new campaign, bought Oxford United midfielder Ray Houghton. The new-look Liverpool side shaped by Dalglish topped the league for almost the entire season, and had a run of 37 matches unbeaten in all competitions (including 29 in the league; 22 wins and 7 draws) from the beginning of the season to 21 February 1988, when they lost to Everton in the league. Liverpool were crowned champions with four games left to play, having suffered just two defeats from 40 games. However, Dalglish's side lost the 1988 FA Cup Final to underdogs Wimbledon.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In the summer of 1988, Dalglish re-signed Ian Rush. Liverpool beat Everton 3–2 after extra time in the second all-Merseyside FA Cup final in 1989, but was deprived of a second Double in the final game of the season, when Arsenal secured a last-minute goal to take the title from Liverpool. In the 1989–90 season Liverpool won their third league title under Dalglish. They missed out on the Double and a third successive FA Cup final appearance when they lost 4–3 in extra-time to Crystal Palace in an FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park. At the end of the season Dalglish received his third Manager of the Year award. Dalglish resigned as manager of Liverpool on 22 February 1991, two days after a 4–4 draw with rivals Everton in an FA Cup fifth round tie at Goodison Park, in which Liverpool surrendered the lead four times. At the time of his resignation, the club were three points ahead in the league and still in contention for the FA Cup.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Dalglish was the manager of Liverpool at the time of the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989. The disaster claimed 94 lives on the day, with the final death toll reaching 97. Dalglish attended many funerals of the victims, including four in one day. His presence in the aftermath of the disaster has been described as \"colossal and heroic\". Dalglish broke a twenty-year silence about the disaster in March 2009, expressing regret that the police and the FA did not consider delaying the kick-off of the match. During the Hillsborough Memorial Service on 15 April 2011, Liverpool MP Steve Rotheram announced he would submit an Early Day Motion to have Dalglish knighted, \"not only for his outstanding playing and managerial career, but also the charity work he has done with his wife, Marina, for breast cancer support and what he did after Hillsborough. It is common knowledge it affected him deeply\".",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Dalglish returned to management in October 1991 at Second Division Blackburn Rovers who had recently been purchased by multi-millionaire Jack Walker. By the turn of 1992 they were top of the Second Division, and then suffered a dip in form before recovering to qualify for the playoffs, during which Dalglish led Blackburn into the new Premier League by beating Leicester City 1–0 in the Second Division play-off final at Wembley. The resulting promotion meant that Blackburn were back in the top flight of English football for the first time since 1966. In the 1992 pre-season, Dalglish signed Southampton's Alan Shearer for a British record fee of £3.5 million. Despite a serious injury which ruled Shearer out for half the season, Dalglish achieved fourth position with the team in the first year of the new Premier League. The following year, Dalglish failed in an attempt to sign Roy Keane. Blackburn finished two positions higher the following season, as runners-up to Manchester United. By this time, Dalglish had added England internationals Tim Flowers and David Batty to his squad.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "At the start of the 1994–95 season Dalglish paid a record £5 million for Chris Sutton, with whom Shearer formed an effective strike partnership. By the last game of the season, both Blackburn and Manchester United were in contention for the title. Blackburn had to travel to Liverpool, and Manchester United faced West Ham United in London. Blackburn lost 2–1, but still won the title since United failed to win in London. The title meant that Dalglish was only the fourth football manager in history to lead two different clubs to top-flight league championships in England, after Tom Watson, Herbert Chapman and Brian Clough. Dalglish became Director of Football at Blackburn in June 1995. He left the club at the start of the 1996–97 season after a disappointing campaign under his replacement, Ray Harford.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Following his departure from Blackburn Dalglish was appointed for a brief spell as an \"international talent scout\" at his boyhood club Rangers. He was reported as having played a central role in the signing of Chile international Sebastián Rozental.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In January 1997, Dalglish was appointed manager of Premier League side Newcastle United on a three-and-a-half-year contract, taking over from Kevin Keegan. Dalglish guided the club from fourth position to a runner-up spot in May and a place in the new format of the following season's UEFA Champions League. He then broke up the team which had finished second two years running, selling popular players like Peter Beardsley, Lee Clark, Les Ferdinand and David Ginola and replacing them with ageing stars like John Barnes (34), Ian Rush (36) and Stuart Pearce (35), as well as virtual unknowns like Des Hamilton and Garry Brady. He also made some good long-term signings like Gary Speed and Shay Given. The 1997–98 campaign saw Newcastle finish in only 13th place and, despite Dalglish achieving some notable successes during the season (including a 3–2 UEFA Champions League win over Barcelona and an FA Cup final appearance against Arsenal), he was dismissed by Freddie Shepherd after two draws in the opening two games of the subsequent 1998–99 season, and replaced by former Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit. One commentator from The Independent has since written, \"His 20 months at Newcastle United are the only part of Kenny Dalglish's career that came anywhere near failure\".",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In June 1999 he was appointed director of football operations at Celtic, with his former Liverpool player John Barnes appointed as head coach. Barnes was dismissed in February 2000 and Dalglish took charge of the first team on a temporary basis. He guided them to the Scottish League Cup final, where they beat Aberdeen 2–0 at Hampden Park. Dalglish was dismissed in June 2000, after the appointment of Martin O'Neill as manager. After a brief legal battle, Dalglish accepted a settlement of £600,000 from Celtic.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In April 2009 Liverpool manager Rafael Benítez invited Dalglish to take up a role at the club's youth academy. The appointment was confirmed in July 2009, and Dalglish was also made the club's ambassador. Following Benítez's departure from Liverpool in June 2010, Dalglish was asked to help find a replacement, and in July Fulham's Roy Hodgson was appointed manager.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "A poor run of results at the start of the 2010–11 season led to Liverpool fans calling for Dalglish's return as manager as early as October 2010, and with no subsequent improvement in Liverpool's results up to the end of the year (during which time the club was bought by New England Sports Ventures), Hodgson left Liverpool and Dalglish was appointed caretaker manager on 8 January 2011. Dalglish's first game in charge was on 9 January 2011 at Old Trafford against Manchester United in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, which Liverpool lost 1–0. Dalglish's first league game in charge was against Blackpool on 12 January 2011; Liverpool lost 2–1. After the game, Dalglish admitted that Liverpool faced \"a big challenge\".",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Shortly after his appointment, Dalglish indicated he would like the job on a permanent basis if it was offered to him, and on 19 January the Liverpool chairman Tom Werner stated that the club's owners would favour this option. On 22 January 2011, Dalglish led Liverpool to their first win since his return, against Wolves at Molineux. After signing Andy Carroll from Newcastle for a British record transfer fee of £35 million and Luis Suárez from Ajax for £22.8 million at the end of January (in the wake of Fernando Torres's sale to Chelsea for £50 million), some journalists noted that Dalglish had begun to assert his authority at the club. Following a 1–0 victory against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in February 2011, described by Alan Smith as \"a quite brilliant display in terms of discipline and spirit\" and a \"defensive masterplan\" by David Pleat, Henry Winter wrote, \"it can only be a matter of time before he [Dalglish] is confirmed as long-term manager\".",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "On 12 May 2011, Liverpool announced that Dalglish had been given a three-year contract. His first official match in charge was 2–0 defeat to Harry Redknapp's Spurs at Anfield. Dalglish's second stint in charge at Anfield proved controversial at times. The Scot defended Luis Suárez in the wake of the striker's eight-match ban for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra when the teams met in October 2011. After the Uruguayan's apparent refusal to shake Evra's hand in the return fixture in February 2012, an apology from both player and manager came only after the intervention of the owners.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In February 2012, Dalglish led Liverpool to their first trophy in six years, with victory in the 2011–12 Football League Cup. In the same season he also led Liverpool to the 2012 FA Cup Final where they lost 2–1 to Chelsea. Despite the success in domestic cups, Liverpool finished eighth in the league, their worst showing in the league since 1994, failing to qualify for the Champions League for a third straight season. Following the end of the season, Liverpool dismissed Dalglish on 16 May 2012.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In October 2013, Dalglish returned to Liverpool as a non-executive director.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "On 13 October 2017, Anfield's Centenary Stand was officially renamed the Sir Kenny Dalglish Stand in recognition of his unique contribution to the club.",
"title": "Managerial career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Dalglish has been married to Marina since 26 November 1974. The couple have four children, Kelly, Paul, Lynsey and Lauren. Kelly has worked as a football presenter for BBC Radio 5 Live and Sky Sports. Paul followed in his father's footsteps as a footballer, playing in the Premier League and Scottish Premiership before travelling to the United States to play for the Houston Dynamo in Major League Soccer. He retired in 2008 and became a coach, spending time as head coach of Ottawa Fury FC and Miami FC in the second-division leagues of North America. Dalglish's wife Marina was diagnosed with breast cancer in March 2003, but was treated at Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool and recovered. She later launched a charity to fund new cancer treatment equipment for UK hospitals.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Dalglish was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1985 New Year Honours for services to football. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to football, charity and the City of Liverpool. He dedicated the award to former Celtic and Liverpool coaches Jock Stein, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley stating that he was \"Humbled\" and \"A wee bit embarrassed\".",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In 2002, Celtic supporters voted for what they considered to be the greatest Celtic XI of all time. Dalglish was voted into the team, which was; Simpson, McGrain, Gemmell, Murdoch, McNeill, Auld, Johnstone, P. McStay, Dalglish, Larsson and Lennox. He was an inaugural inductee to the English Football Hall of Fame the same year, and later also an inaugural inductee to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in 2004. He is very highly regarded by Liverpool fans, who still affectionately refer to him as King Kenny, as do supporters of the Scotland National team from the 70’s and 80’s when he was a world-class player. In 2006 Liverpool fans voted him top of the fans' poll \"100 Players Who Shook the Kop\". In 2009, FourFourTwo magazine named Dalglish the greatest striker in post-war British football.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In early April 2020, while in hospital for treatment for an unrelated condition, Dalglish was found to be positive for COVID-19, though asymptomatic.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "On 19 December 2023, Dalglish won the BBC Lifetime Achievement Award, BBC Sports Personality of the Year.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In 2005 when Dalglish and his wife founded the charity The Marina Dalglish Appeal to raise money to help treat cancer. Dalglish has participated in a number of events to raise money for the charity, including a replay of the 1986 FA Cup Final. In June 2007 a Centre for Oncology at Aintree University Hospital was opened, after the charity had raised £1.5 million. In 2012, the foundation made a £2 million donation to The Walton Centre which allowed the purchase of a new MRI scanner. Dalglish often competes in the annual Gary Player Invitational Tournament, a charity golfing event which raises money for children's causes around the world. On 1 July 2011, Dalglish was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Ulster, for services to football and charity.",
"title": "Charitable work"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Celtic",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Liverpool",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Scotland",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Individual",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Liverpool",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Blackburn Rovers",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Celtic",
"title": "Honours"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Individual",
"title": "Honours"
}
] |
Sir Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish is a Scottish former football player and manager. He is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time as well as one of Liverpool's and Britain's greatest ever players. During his career, he made 338 appearances for Celtic and 515 for Liverpool, playing as a forward, and earned a record 102 caps for the Scotland national team, scoring 30 goals, also a joint record. Dalglish won the Ballon d'Or Silver Award in 1983, the PFA Players' Player of the Year in 1983, and the FWA Footballer of the Year in 1979 and 1983. In 2009, FourFourTwo magazine named Dalglish the greatest striker in post-war British football, and he has been inducted into both the Scottish and English Football Halls of Fame. He is very highly regarded by Liverpool fans, who still affectionately refer to him as King Kenny, and in 2006 voted him top of the fans' poll "100 Players Who Shook the Kop". Dalglish began his career with Celtic in 1971, going on to win four Scottish league championships, four Scottish Cups and one Scottish League Cup with the club. In 1977, Liverpool manager Bob Paisley paid a British transfer record of £440,000 to take Dalglish to Liverpool. His years at Liverpool were among the club's most successful periods, as he won six English league championships, the FA Cup, four League Cups, five FA Charity Shields, three European Cups and one European Super Cup. In international football, Dalglish made 102 appearances and scored 30 goals for Scotland between 1971 and 1986, becoming their most capped player and joint-leading goal scorer. He was chosen for Scotland's FIFA World Cup squads in 1974, 1978, 1982 and 1986, playing in all of those tournaments except the latter, due to injury. Dalglish became player-manager of Liverpool in 1985 after the resignation of Joe Fagan, winning a further three First Divisions, two FA Cups and four FA Charity Shields, before resigning in 1991. Eight months later, Dalglish made a return to football management with Blackburn Rovers, whom he led from the Second Division to win the Premier League in 1995. Soon afterwards, he stepped down as manager to become Director of Football at the club, before leaving altogether in 1996. In January 1997, Dalglish took over as manager at Newcastle United. Newcastle finished as runners-up in the Premier League during his first season, but they only finished 13th in 1997–98, which led to his dismissal the following season. Dalglish went on to be appointed Director of Football at Celtic in 1999, and later briefly manager. He won the Scottish League Cup in 2000 before an acrimonious departure that year. Between 2000 and 2010, Dalglish focused on charitable concerns, founding The Marina Dalglish Appeal with his wife to raise money for cancer care. In January 2011, Dalglish returned to Liverpool for a spell as caretaker manager after the dismissal of Roy Hodgson, becoming the permanent manager in May 2011. Despite winning the League Cup, which was the club's first trophy since 2006, earning them a place in the UEFA Europa League, and reaching the FA Cup Final, Liverpool only finished 8th in the Premier League, and Dalglish was dismissed in May 2012. In October 2013, Dalglish returned to Anfield as a non-executive director, and Anfield's Centenary Stand was renamed after him in May 2017.
|
2001-10-08T15:27:07Z
|
2023-12-26T21:30:52Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Dalglish
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Knowledge representation and reasoning
|
Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.
Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, systems architecture, frames, rules, logic programs and ontologies. Examples of automated reasoning engines include inference engines, theorem provers, model generators and classifiers.
The earliest work in computerized knowledge representation was focused on general problem-solvers such as the General Problem Solver (GPS) system developed by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in 1959 and the Advice Taker proposed by John McCarthy also in 1959. GPS featured data structures for planning and decomposition. The system would begin with a goal. It would then decompose that goal into sub-goals and then set out to construct strategies that could accomplish each subgoal. The Advisor Taker, on the other hand, proposed the use of the predicate calculus to represent common sense reasoning.
Many of the early approaches to knowledge represention in AI used graph representations and semantic networks, similar to knowledge graphs today. In such approaches, problem solving was a form of graph traversal or path-finding, as in the A* search algorithm. Typical applications included robot plan-formation and game-playing.
Other researchers focused on developing automated theorem-provers for first-order logic, motivated by the use of mathematical logic to formalise mathematics and to automate the proof of mathematical theorems. A major step in this direction was the development of the resolution method by John Alan Robinson.
In the meanwhile, John McCarthy and Pat Hayes developed the situation calculus as a logical representation of common sense knowledge about the laws of cause and effect. Cordell Green, in turn, showed how to do robot plan-formation by applying resolution to the situation calculus. He also showed how to use resolution for question-answering and automatic programming.
In contrast, researchers at MIT rejected the resolution uniform proof procedure paradigm and advocated the procedural embedding of knowledge instead. The resulting conflict between the use of logical representations and the use of procedural representations was resolved in the early 1970s with the development of logic programming and Prolog, using SLD resolution to treat Horn clauses as goal-reduction procedures.
The early development of logic programming was largely a European phenomenon. In North America, AI researchers such as Ed Feigenbaum and Frederick Hayes-Roth began to advocate the representation of domain-specific knowledge rather than general-purpose reasoning.
These efforts led to the cognitive revolution in psychology and to the phase of AI focused on knowledge representation that resulted in expert systems in the 1970s and 80s, production systems, frame languages, etc. Rather than general problem solvers, AI changed its focus to expert systems that could match human competence on a specific task, such as medical diagnosis.
Expert systems gave us the terminology still in use today where AI systems are divided into a knowledge base, with facts about the world and rules, and an inference engine, which applies the rules to the knowledge base in order to answer questions and solve problems. In these early systems the knowledge base tended to be a fairly flat structure, essentially assertions about the values of variables used by the rules.
Meanwhile, Marvin Minsky developed the concept of frame in the mid-1970s. A frame is similar to an object class: It is an abstract description of a category describing things in the world, problems, and potential solutions. Frames were originally used on systems geared toward human interaction, e.g. understanding natural language and the social settings in which various default expectations such as ordering food in a restaurant narrow the search space and allow the system to choose appropriate responses to dynamic situations.
It was not long before the frame communities and the rule-based researchers realized that there was a synergy between their approaches. Frames were good for representing the real world, described as classes, subclasses, slots (data values) with various constraints on possible values. Rules were good for representing and utilizing complex logic such as the process to make a medical diagnosis. Integrated systems were developed that combined frames and rules. One of the most powerful and well known was the 1983 Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) from Intellicorp. KEE had a complete rule engine with forward and backward chaining. It also had a complete frame-based knowledge base with triggers, slots (data values), inheritance, and message passing. Although message passing originated in the object-oriented community rather than AI it was quickly embraced by AI researchers as well in environments such as KEE and in the operating systems for Lisp machines from Symbolics, Xerox, and Texas Instruments.
The integration of frames, rules, and object-oriented programming was significantly driven by commercial ventures such as KEE and Symbolics spun off from various research projects. At the same time as this was occurring, there was another strain of research that was less commercially focused and was driven by mathematical logic and automated theorem proving. One of the most influential languages in this research was the KL-ONE language of the mid-'80s. KL-ONE was a frame language that had a rigorous semantics, formal definitions for concepts such as an Is-A relation. KL-ONE and languages that were influenced by it such as Loom had an automated reasoning engine that was based on formal logic rather than on IF-THEN rules. This reasoner is called the classifier. A classifier can analyze a set of declarations and infer new assertions, for example, redefine a class to be a subclass or superclass of some other class that wasn't formally specified. In this way the classifier can function as an inference engine, deducing new facts from an existing knowledge base. The classifier can also provide consistency checking on a knowledge base (which in the case of KL-ONE languages is also referred to as an Ontology).
Another area of knowledge representation research was the problem of common-sense reasoning. One of the first realizations learned from trying to make software that can function with human natural language was that humans regularly draw on an extensive foundation of knowledge about the real world that we simply take for granted but that is not at all obvious to an artificial agent. Basic principles of common-sense physics, causality, intentions, etc. An example is the frame problem, that in an event driven logic there need to be axioms that state things maintain position from one moment to the next unless they are moved by some external force. In order to make a true artificial intelligence agent that can converse with humans using natural language and can process basic statements and questions about the world, it is essential to represent this kind of knowledge. One of the most ambitious programs to tackle this problem was Doug Lenat's Cyc project. Cyc established its own Frame language and had large numbers of analysts document various areas of common-sense reasoning in that language. The knowledge recorded in Cyc included common-sense models of time, causality, physics, intentions, and many others.
The starting point for knowledge representation is the knowledge representation hypothesis first formalized by Brian C. Smith in 1985:
Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be comprised of structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantic attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behavior that manifests that knowledge.
Currently, one of the most active areas of knowledge representation research are projects associated with the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web seeks to add a layer of semantics (meaning) on top of the current Internet. Rather than indexing web sites and pages via keywords, the Semantic Web creates large ontologies of concepts. Searching for a concept will be more effective than traditional text only searches. Frame languages and automatic classification play a big part in the vision for the future Semantic Web. The automatic classification gives developers technology to provide order on a constantly evolving network of knowledge. Defining ontologies that are static and incapable of evolving on the fly would be very limiting for Internet-based systems. The classifier technology provides the ability to deal with the dynamic environment of the Internet.
Recent projects funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have integrated frame languages and classifiers with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capability to define classes, subclasses, and properties of objects. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides additional levels of semantics and enables integration with classification engines.
Knowledge-representation is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on designing computer representations that capture information about the world that can be used for solving complex problems.
The justification for knowledge representation is that conventional procedural code is not the best formalism to use to solve complex problems. Knowledge representation makes complex software easier to define and maintain than procedural code and can be used in expert systems.
For example, talking to experts in terms of business rules rather than code lessens the semantic gap between users and developers and makes development of complex systems more practical.
Knowledge representation goes hand in hand with automated reasoning because one of the main purposes of explicitly representing knowledge is to be able to reason about that knowledge, to make inferences, assert new knowledge, etc. Virtually all knowledge representation languages have a reasoning or inference engine as part of the system.
A key trade-off in the design of a knowledge representation formalism is that between expressivity and practicality. The ultimate knowledge representation formalism in terms of expressive power and compactness is First Order Logic (FOL). There is no more powerful formalism than that used by mathematicians to define general propositions about the world. However, FOL has two drawbacks as a knowledge representation formalism: ease of use and practicality of implementation. First order logic can be intimidating even for many software developers. Languages that do not have the complete formal power of FOL can still provide close to the same expressive power with a user interface that is more practical for the average developer to understand. The issue of practicality of implementation is that FOL in some ways is too expressive. With FOL it is possible to create statements (e.g. quantification over infinite sets) that would cause a system to never terminate if it attempted to verify them.
Thus, a subset of FOL can be both easier to use and more practical to implement. This was a driving motivation behind rule-based expert systems. IF-THEN rules provide a subset of FOL but a very useful one that is also very intuitive. The history of most of the early AI knowledge representation formalisms; from databases to semantic nets to theorem provers and production systems can be viewed as various design decisions on whether to emphasize expressive power or computability and efficiency.
In a key 1993 paper on the topic, Randall Davis of MIT outlined five distinct roles to analyze a knowledge representation framework:
Knowledge representation and reasoning are a key enabling technology for the Semantic Web. Languages based on the Frame model with automatic classification provide a layer of semantics on top of the existing Internet. Rather than searching via text strings as is typical today, it will be possible to define logical queries and find pages that map to those queries. The automated reasoning component in these systems is an engine known as the classifier. Classifiers focus on the subsumption relations in a knowledge base rather than rules. A classifier can infer new classes and dynamically change the ontology as new information becomes available. This capability is ideal for the ever-changing and evolving information space of the Internet.
The Semantic Web integrates concepts from knowledge representation and reasoning with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capabilities to define knowledge-based objects on the Internet with basic features such as Is-A relations and object properties. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) adds additional semantics and integrates with automatic classification reasoners.
In 1985, Ron Brachman categorized the core issues for knowledge representation as follows:
In the early years of knowledge-based systems the knowledge-bases were fairly small. The knowledge-bases that were meant to actually solve real problems rather than do proof of concept demonstrations needed to focus on well defined problems. So for example, not just medical diagnosis as a whole topic, but medical diagnosis of certain kinds of diseases.
As knowledge-based technology scaled up, the need for larger knowledge bases and for modular knowledge bases that could communicate and integrate with each other became apparent. This gave rise to the discipline of ontology engineering, designing and building large knowledge bases that could be used by multiple projects. One of the leading research projects in this area was the Cyc project. Cyc was an attempt to build a huge encyclopedic knowledge base that would contain not just expert knowledge but common-sense knowledge. In designing an artificial intelligence agent, it was soon realized that representing common-sense knowledge, knowledge that humans simply take for granted, was essential to make an AI that could interact with humans using natural language. Cyc was meant to address this problem. The language they defined was known as CycL.
After CycL, a number of ontology languages have been developed. Most are declarative languages, and are either frame languages, or are based on first-order logic. Modularity—the ability to define boundaries around specific domains and problem spaces—is essential for these languages because as stated by Tom Gruber, "Every ontology is a treaty- a social agreement among people with common motive in sharing." There are always many competing and differing views that make any general-purpose ontology impossible. A general-purpose ontology would have to be applicable in any domain and different areas of knowledge need to be unified.
There is a long history of work attempting to build ontologies for a variety of task domains, e.g., an ontology for liquids, the lumped element model widely used in representing electronic circuits (e.g.,), as well as ontologies for time, belief, and even programming itself. Each of these offers a way to see some part of the world.
The lumped element model, for instance, suggests that we think of circuits in terms of components with connections between them, with signals flowing instantaneously along the connections. This is a useful view, but not the only possible one. A different ontology arises if we need to attend to the electrodynamics in the device: Here signals propagate at finite speed and an object (like a resistor) that was previously viewed as a single component with an I/O behavior may now have to be thought of as an extended medium through which an electromagnetic wave flows.
Ontologies can of course be written down in a wide variety of languages and notations (e.g., logic, LISP, etc.); the essential information is not the form of that language but the content, i.e., the set of concepts offered as a way of thinking about the world. Simply put, the important part is notions like connections and components, not the choice between writing them as predicates or LISP constructs.
The commitment made selecting one or another ontology can produce a sharply different view of the task at hand. Consider the difference that arises in selecting the lumped element view of a circuit rather than the electrodynamic view of the same device. As a second example, medical diagnosis viewed in terms of rules (e.g., MYCIN) looks substantially different from the same task viewed in terms of frames (e.g., INTERNIST). Where MYCIN sees the medical world as made up of empirical associations connecting symptom to disease, INTERNIST sees a set of prototypes, in particular prototypical diseases, to be matched against the case at hand.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, systems architecture, frames, rules, logic programs and ontologies. Examples of automated reasoning engines include inference engines, theorem provers, model generators and classifiers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The earliest work in computerized knowledge representation was focused on general problem-solvers such as the General Problem Solver (GPS) system developed by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in 1959 and the Advice Taker proposed by John McCarthy also in 1959. GPS featured data structures for planning and decomposition. The system would begin with a goal. It would then decompose that goal into sub-goals and then set out to construct strategies that could accomplish each subgoal. The Advisor Taker, on the other hand, proposed the use of the predicate calculus to represent common sense reasoning.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Many of the early approaches to knowledge represention in AI used graph representations and semantic networks, similar to knowledge graphs today. In such approaches, problem solving was a form of graph traversal or path-finding, as in the A* search algorithm. Typical applications included robot plan-formation and game-playing.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Other researchers focused on developing automated theorem-provers for first-order logic, motivated by the use of mathematical logic to formalise mathematics and to automate the proof of mathematical theorems. A major step in this direction was the development of the resolution method by John Alan Robinson.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the meanwhile, John McCarthy and Pat Hayes developed the situation calculus as a logical representation of common sense knowledge about the laws of cause and effect. Cordell Green, in turn, showed how to do robot plan-formation by applying resolution to the situation calculus. He also showed how to use resolution for question-answering and automatic programming.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In contrast, researchers at MIT rejected the resolution uniform proof procedure paradigm and advocated the procedural embedding of knowledge instead. The resulting conflict between the use of logical representations and the use of procedural representations was resolved in the early 1970s with the development of logic programming and Prolog, using SLD resolution to treat Horn clauses as goal-reduction procedures.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The early development of logic programming was largely a European phenomenon. In North America, AI researchers such as Ed Feigenbaum and Frederick Hayes-Roth began to advocate the representation of domain-specific knowledge rather than general-purpose reasoning.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "These efforts led to the cognitive revolution in psychology and to the phase of AI focused on knowledge representation that resulted in expert systems in the 1970s and 80s, production systems, frame languages, etc. Rather than general problem solvers, AI changed its focus to expert systems that could match human competence on a specific task, such as medical diagnosis.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Expert systems gave us the terminology still in use today where AI systems are divided into a knowledge base, with facts about the world and rules, and an inference engine, which applies the rules to the knowledge base in order to answer questions and solve problems. In these early systems the knowledge base tended to be a fairly flat structure, essentially assertions about the values of variables used by the rules.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Meanwhile, Marvin Minsky developed the concept of frame in the mid-1970s. A frame is similar to an object class: It is an abstract description of a category describing things in the world, problems, and potential solutions. Frames were originally used on systems geared toward human interaction, e.g. understanding natural language and the social settings in which various default expectations such as ordering food in a restaurant narrow the search space and allow the system to choose appropriate responses to dynamic situations.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "It was not long before the frame communities and the rule-based researchers realized that there was a synergy between their approaches. Frames were good for representing the real world, described as classes, subclasses, slots (data values) with various constraints on possible values. Rules were good for representing and utilizing complex logic such as the process to make a medical diagnosis. Integrated systems were developed that combined frames and rules. One of the most powerful and well known was the 1983 Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) from Intellicorp. KEE had a complete rule engine with forward and backward chaining. It also had a complete frame-based knowledge base with triggers, slots (data values), inheritance, and message passing. Although message passing originated in the object-oriented community rather than AI it was quickly embraced by AI researchers as well in environments such as KEE and in the operating systems for Lisp machines from Symbolics, Xerox, and Texas Instruments.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The integration of frames, rules, and object-oriented programming was significantly driven by commercial ventures such as KEE and Symbolics spun off from various research projects. At the same time as this was occurring, there was another strain of research that was less commercially focused and was driven by mathematical logic and automated theorem proving. One of the most influential languages in this research was the KL-ONE language of the mid-'80s. KL-ONE was a frame language that had a rigorous semantics, formal definitions for concepts such as an Is-A relation. KL-ONE and languages that were influenced by it such as Loom had an automated reasoning engine that was based on formal logic rather than on IF-THEN rules. This reasoner is called the classifier. A classifier can analyze a set of declarations and infer new assertions, for example, redefine a class to be a subclass or superclass of some other class that wasn't formally specified. In this way the classifier can function as an inference engine, deducing new facts from an existing knowledge base. The classifier can also provide consistency checking on a knowledge base (which in the case of KL-ONE languages is also referred to as an Ontology).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Another area of knowledge representation research was the problem of common-sense reasoning. One of the first realizations learned from trying to make software that can function with human natural language was that humans regularly draw on an extensive foundation of knowledge about the real world that we simply take for granted but that is not at all obvious to an artificial agent. Basic principles of common-sense physics, causality, intentions, etc. An example is the frame problem, that in an event driven logic there need to be axioms that state things maintain position from one moment to the next unless they are moved by some external force. In order to make a true artificial intelligence agent that can converse with humans using natural language and can process basic statements and questions about the world, it is essential to represent this kind of knowledge. One of the most ambitious programs to tackle this problem was Doug Lenat's Cyc project. Cyc established its own Frame language and had large numbers of analysts document various areas of common-sense reasoning in that language. The knowledge recorded in Cyc included common-sense models of time, causality, physics, intentions, and many others.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The starting point for knowledge representation is the knowledge representation hypothesis first formalized by Brian C. Smith in 1985:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Any mechanically embodied intelligent process will be comprised of structural ingredients that a) we as external observers naturally take to represent a propositional account of the knowledge that the overall process exhibits, and b) independent of such external semantic attribution, play a formal but causal and essential role in engendering the behavior that manifests that knowledge.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Currently, one of the most active areas of knowledge representation research are projects associated with the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web seeks to add a layer of semantics (meaning) on top of the current Internet. Rather than indexing web sites and pages via keywords, the Semantic Web creates large ontologies of concepts. Searching for a concept will be more effective than traditional text only searches. Frame languages and automatic classification play a big part in the vision for the future Semantic Web. The automatic classification gives developers technology to provide order on a constantly evolving network of knowledge. Defining ontologies that are static and incapable of evolving on the fly would be very limiting for Internet-based systems. The classifier technology provides the ability to deal with the dynamic environment of the Internet.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Recent projects funded primarily by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have integrated frame languages and classifiers with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capability to define classes, subclasses, and properties of objects. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides additional levels of semantics and enables integration with classification engines.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Knowledge-representation is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on designing computer representations that capture information about the world that can be used for solving complex problems.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The justification for knowledge representation is that conventional procedural code is not the best formalism to use to solve complex problems. Knowledge representation makes complex software easier to define and maintain than procedural code and can be used in expert systems.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "For example, talking to experts in terms of business rules rather than code lessens the semantic gap between users and developers and makes development of complex systems more practical.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Knowledge representation goes hand in hand with automated reasoning because one of the main purposes of explicitly representing knowledge is to be able to reason about that knowledge, to make inferences, assert new knowledge, etc. Virtually all knowledge representation languages have a reasoning or inference engine as part of the system.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "A key trade-off in the design of a knowledge representation formalism is that between expressivity and practicality. The ultimate knowledge representation formalism in terms of expressive power and compactness is First Order Logic (FOL). There is no more powerful formalism than that used by mathematicians to define general propositions about the world. However, FOL has two drawbacks as a knowledge representation formalism: ease of use and practicality of implementation. First order logic can be intimidating even for many software developers. Languages that do not have the complete formal power of FOL can still provide close to the same expressive power with a user interface that is more practical for the average developer to understand. The issue of practicality of implementation is that FOL in some ways is too expressive. With FOL it is possible to create statements (e.g. quantification over infinite sets) that would cause a system to never terminate if it attempted to verify them.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Thus, a subset of FOL can be both easier to use and more practical to implement. This was a driving motivation behind rule-based expert systems. IF-THEN rules provide a subset of FOL but a very useful one that is also very intuitive. The history of most of the early AI knowledge representation formalisms; from databases to semantic nets to theorem provers and production systems can be viewed as various design decisions on whether to emphasize expressive power or computability and efficiency.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In a key 1993 paper on the topic, Randall Davis of MIT outlined five distinct roles to analyze a knowledge representation framework:",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Knowledge representation and reasoning are a key enabling technology for the Semantic Web. Languages based on the Frame model with automatic classification provide a layer of semantics on top of the existing Internet. Rather than searching via text strings as is typical today, it will be possible to define logical queries and find pages that map to those queries. The automated reasoning component in these systems is an engine known as the classifier. Classifiers focus on the subsumption relations in a knowledge base rather than rules. A classifier can infer new classes and dynamically change the ontology as new information becomes available. This capability is ideal for the ever-changing and evolving information space of the Internet.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The Semantic Web integrates concepts from knowledge representation and reasoning with markup languages based on XML. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides the basic capabilities to define knowledge-based objects on the Internet with basic features such as Is-A relations and object properties. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) adds additional semantics and integrates with automatic classification reasoners.",
"title": "Overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 1985, Ron Brachman categorized the core issues for knowledge representation as follows:",
"title": "Characteristics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "In the early years of knowledge-based systems the knowledge-bases were fairly small. The knowledge-bases that were meant to actually solve real problems rather than do proof of concept demonstrations needed to focus on well defined problems. So for example, not just medical diagnosis as a whole topic, but medical diagnosis of certain kinds of diseases.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "As knowledge-based technology scaled up, the need for larger knowledge bases and for modular knowledge bases that could communicate and integrate with each other became apparent. This gave rise to the discipline of ontology engineering, designing and building large knowledge bases that could be used by multiple projects. One of the leading research projects in this area was the Cyc project. Cyc was an attempt to build a huge encyclopedic knowledge base that would contain not just expert knowledge but common-sense knowledge. In designing an artificial intelligence agent, it was soon realized that representing common-sense knowledge, knowledge that humans simply take for granted, was essential to make an AI that could interact with humans using natural language. Cyc was meant to address this problem. The language they defined was known as CycL.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "After CycL, a number of ontology languages have been developed. Most are declarative languages, and are either frame languages, or are based on first-order logic. Modularity—the ability to define boundaries around specific domains and problem spaces—is essential for these languages because as stated by Tom Gruber, \"Every ontology is a treaty- a social agreement among people with common motive in sharing.\" There are always many competing and differing views that make any general-purpose ontology impossible. A general-purpose ontology would have to be applicable in any domain and different areas of knowledge need to be unified.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "There is a long history of work attempting to build ontologies for a variety of task domains, e.g., an ontology for liquids, the lumped element model widely used in representing electronic circuits (e.g.,), as well as ontologies for time, belief, and even programming itself. Each of these offers a way to see some part of the world.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The lumped element model, for instance, suggests that we think of circuits in terms of components with connections between them, with signals flowing instantaneously along the connections. This is a useful view, but not the only possible one. A different ontology arises if we need to attend to the electrodynamics in the device: Here signals propagate at finite speed and an object (like a resistor) that was previously viewed as a single component with an I/O behavior may now have to be thought of as an extended medium through which an electromagnetic wave flows.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Ontologies can of course be written down in a wide variety of languages and notations (e.g., logic, LISP, etc.); the essential information is not the form of that language but the content, i.e., the set of concepts offered as a way of thinking about the world. Simply put, the important part is notions like connections and components, not the choice between writing them as predicates or LISP constructs.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The commitment made selecting one or another ontology can produce a sharply different view of the task at hand. Consider the difference that arises in selecting the lumped element view of a circuit rather than the electrodynamic view of the same device. As a second example, medical diagnosis viewed in terms of rules (e.g., MYCIN) looks substantially different from the same task viewed in terms of frames (e.g., INTERNIST). Where MYCIN sees the medical world as made up of empirical associations connecting symptom to disease, INTERNIST sees a set of prototypes, in particular prototypical diseases, to be matched against the case at hand.",
"title": "Ontology engineering"
}
] |
Knowledge representation and reasoning is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning, such as the application of rules or the relations of sets and subsets. Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, systems architecture, frames, rules, logic programs and ontologies. Examples of automated reasoning engines include inference engines, theorem provers, model generators and classifiers.
|
2001-10-08T17:07:14Z
|
2023-12-24T16:08:13Z
|
[
"Template:Artificial intelligence",
"Template:Main article",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:Cite conference",
"Template:Authority control",
"Template:Short description",
"Template:Citation needed",
"Template:Sic",
"Template:Cite journal",
"Template:Clear",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:ISBN",
"Template:Commons category",
"Template:Computer science"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_representation_and_reasoning
|
16,921 |
Knowledge Aided Retrieval in Activity Context
|
Knowledge Aided Retrieval in Activity Context (KARNAC) is a system being developed in the United States for use in profiling different categories of terrorist attacks to determine the components of possible future terrorist incidents.
Information for KARNAC is generally to be derived from structured, semi-structured and unstructured databases. This would include information derived from gun registrations, driver's licenses, residential and criminal records, as well as the Internet, newspapers and county records.
For example, the system might raise an alert if someone attempted to buy components for bomb making, hired a car and rented a hotel room near the White House.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Knowledge Aided Retrieval in Activity Context (KARNAC) is a system being developed in the United States for use in profiling different categories of terrorist attacks to determine the components of possible future terrorist incidents.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Information for KARNAC is generally to be derived from structured, semi-structured and unstructured databases. This would include information derived from gun registrations, driver's licenses, residential and criminal records, as well as the Internet, newspapers and county records.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "For example, the system might raise an alert if someone attempted to buy components for bomb making, hired a car and rented a hotel room near the White House.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Knowledge Aided Retrieval in Activity Context (KARNAC) is a system being developed in the United States for use in profiling different categories of terrorist attacks to determine the components of possible future terrorist incidents. Information for KARNAC is generally to be derived from structured, semi-structured and unstructured databases. This would include information derived from gun registrations, driver's licenses, residential and criminal records, as well as the Internet, newspapers and county records. For example, the system might raise an alert if someone attempted to buy components for bomb making, hired a car and rented a hotel room near the White House.
|
2022-11-30T16:55:41Z
|
[
"Template:Short description",
"Template:Unreferenced",
"Template:US-stub",
"Template:Terrorism-stub"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Aided_Retrieval_in_Activity_Context
|
|
16,923 |
Kernow
|
Kernow may refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kernow may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kernow may refer to: Cornwall, a county of the UK
Kernow, a bus company in Cornwall
Mebyon Kernow, a political party in Cornwall
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-11-18T14:46:37Z
|
[
"Template:Intitle",
"Template:Lang-br",
"Template:Disambiguation",
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:Lang-kw",
"Template:Canned search"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernow
|
16,926 |
Kabaddi
|
Kabaddi is a contact team sport played between two teams of seven players, originating in ancient India. The objective of the game is for a single player on offense, referred to as a "raider", to run into the opposing team's half of the court, touch out as many of their players as possible, and return to their own half of the court, all without being tackled by the defenders in 30 seconds. Points are scored for each player tagged by the raider, while the opposing team earns a point for stopping the raider. Players are taken out of the game if they are touched or tackled, but are brought back in for each point scored by their team from a tag or a tackle.
It is popular in the Indian subcontinent and other surrounding Asian countries. Although accounts of kabaddi appear in the histories of ancient India, the game was popularised as a competitive sport in the 20th century. It is the national sport of Bangladesh. It is the second most popular and viewed sport in India after cricket. It is the state game of the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.
There are two major disciplines: "Punjabi kabaddi", also called "circle style", comprises traditional forms of the sport that are played on a circular field outdoors, and the "standard style", on a rectangular court indoors, is played in major professional leagues and international competitions such as the Asian Games.
This game is known by numerous names in different parts of the Indian subcontinent, such as: kabaddi or chedugudu in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana; kabaddi in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala; kabaddi, komonti or ha-du-du in West Bengal and Bangladesh; baibalaa in Maldives, kauddi or kabaddi in the Punjab region; hu-tu-tu in Western India, ha-do-do in Eastern India; chadakudu in South India; kapardi in Nepal; kabadi or sadugudu in Tamil Nadu; and chakgudu in Sri Lanka.
Origins of Kabaddi are not clearly understood. There are various theories regarding its place and time of origin. The sport is said to have existed in the Indian subcontinent since prehistoric times.
Rononjoy Sen speculates in his book Nation At Play, that kabaddi originated during the Vedic period (between 1500 BCE and 500 BCE). There are accounts of Gautama Buddha and Lord Krishna having played an ancient form of the sport.
According to another version of the sport's origins, kabaddi originated in Tamil Nadu. It was reportedly common among the Ayar tribal people who lived in the Mullai geographical region of ancient Tamil Nadu.
There are also accounts of kabaddi having been played in Iran 2,000 years ago.
Modern kabaddi is a synthesis of the game played in various forms under different names in the Indian subcontinent. India has been first credited with having helped to popularise kabaddi as a competitive sport, with the first organized competitions occurring in the 1920s, their introduction to the programme of the Indian Olympic Games in 1938, the establishment of the All-India Kabaddi Federation in 1950, and it being played as a demonstration sport at the inaugural 1951 Asian Games in New Delhi. These developments helped to formalize the sport, which had traditionally been played in villages, for legitimate international competition.
The first framework of rules for the sport was prepared in Maharashtra in the 1920s. One of the earliest modern tournaments of the sport, the All India Kabaddi Tournament in 1923, was played according to these amended rules. After being demonstrated again at the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, Kabaddi was added to the Asian Games programme beginning in 1990.
Source:
In the international team version of kabaddi, two teams of seven members each occupy opposite halves of a court of 10 by 13 metres (33 ft × 43 ft) in case of men and 8 by 12 metres (26 ft × 39 ft) in case of women. Each has five supplementary players held in reserve for substitution. The game is played with 20-minute halves with a 5-minute half time break in which the teams exchange sides. During each play, known as a "raid", a player from the attacking side, known as the "raider", runs into the opposing team's side of the court and attempts to tag as many of the seven defending players as possible. The raider must cross the baulk line into the defending team's territory, and then return to their half of the field without being tackled. (If an attacker touches a defender and hasn't yet reached the baulk line, they do not need to reach the baulk line to score points and may return to their half of the court.) While raiding, the raider must loudly chant kabaddi, confirming to referees that their raid is done on a single breath without inhaling. Each raid has a 30-second time limit.
A point is scored for each defender tagged; tags can be made with any part of the raider's body. If the raider steps beyond the bonus line marked in the defending team's territory when there are five or more players, they earn an additional point known as a bonus point (the bonus point is only scored if the raider's trailing foot is in the air while they step over the line). If the raider is successfully stopped (tackled), the opposite team earns a point instead. All players tagged are taken out of the game, but one is "revived" for each point a team scores from a subsequent tag or tackle. Bonus points do not revive players. Players who step out of the boundary are out. There are two strips on either side of the court known as "lobby areas"; they are part of the out-of-bounds area at the start of each raid, and only become part of the field of play once the raider touches an opponent. A raid where no points are scored by the raider is referred to as an "empty raid". By contrast, a play where the raider scores three or more points is referred to as a "super raid". If a team gets all seven players on the opposing team out ("All Out"), they earn two additional points and the players are placed back in the game.
There are four major forms of Indian kabaddi recognised by the amateur federation. In Sanjeevani kabaddi, one player is revived against one player of the opposite team who is out. The game is played over 40 minutes with a five-minute break between halves. There are seven players on each side and the team that outs all the players on the opponent's side scores four extra points.
In Gaminee style, seven players play on each side and a player put out has to remain out until all his team members are out. The team that is successful in outing all the players of the opponent's side secures a point. The game continues until five or seven such points are secured and has no fixed time duration.
Amar style resembles the Sanjeevani form in the time frame rule, but a player who is declared out stays inside the court while play continues. For every player of the opposition touched "out", a team earns a point.
Punjabi kabaddi is a variation that is played on a circular pitch of a diameter of 22 metres (72 ft).
Source (Page 17-26):
Source (Page 27-36):
The following competitions are played in standard format, for that of circle style kabaddi, see Punjabi kabaddi.
The Kabaddi World Cup is an outdoor international standard style kabaddi competition conducted by the International Kabaddi Federation (IKF), contested by men's and women's national teams. The competition has been previously contested in 2004, 2007 and 2016. All the tournaments have been won by India. India defeated Iran by 38–29 in the final of the championship game to clinch the title of 2016.
After the establishment of a new kabaddi organization named World Kabaddi Federation, a 2019 Kabaddi World Cup was held in April 2019 at Malacca, Malaysia. It was the largest world cup in kabaddi history, consisting of 32 men's teams and 24 women's teams.
Kabaddi was played as a demonstration event at the First Asian Games in 1951, and again in 1982, before becoming a medal event for the first time in 1990.
The Indian national team won every men's and women's kabaddi competition in the Asian Games from 2002 through 2014. At the 2018 Asian Games, Iran became the first country other than India to win gold medals in kabaddi, with India's men's team winning bronze, and India's women's team being beaten by Iran to win silver.
The Pro Kabaddi League was established in 2014. The league modeled its business upon that of the Indian Premier League of Twenty20 cricket, with a large focus on marketing, the backing of local broadcaster Star Sports. The Pro Kabaddi League quickly became a ratings success on Indian television; the 2014 season was watched by at least 435 million viewers over the course of the season, and the inaugural championship match was seen by 98.6 million viewers.
Bengal Warriors, Bengaluru Bulls, Patna Pirates, Tamil Thalaivas, UP Yoddhas, Gujrat Giants, Haryana Steelers, Puneri Paltan, U Mumba, Jaipur Pink Panthers, Dabang Delhi KC, and Telugu Titans are the 12 teams that play in the Pro Kabaddi League.
The organisers of the Pro Kabaddi League change the sport's rules and its presentation to make it more suitable for a television audience. All players in the league must be strictly under 85 kg in weight. When the raider scores 10 or more raid points in a single match, it is called a super 10, and they earn an extra point. If the defender successfully manages to tackle the five raiders in a single game, it is a high 5, and the team will be awarded one extra point.
Additional rules are used in the Pro Kabaddi League to encourage scoring: when a defensive side has three or fewer players remaining, tackles are worth two points instead of one. Furthermore, if a team performs two empty raids in a row, the next raider must score a point ("do-or-die raid"), or else they will be declared out and the opposing team will score a point.
The inaugural edition of the IIPKL was on 13 May at Pune, India. The title for the inaugural season was won by the Bangalore Rhinos.
In May 2018, the Super Kabaddi League was first held in Pakistan, as part of a larger push to promote renewed interest in the sport in Pakistan.
AKC's tenth season was played in Gorgan, Iran, in 2017 in which India won its tenth gold by defeating Pakistan in the finals.
The inaugural edition of the Kabaddi Masters was held in Dubai, 22–30 June 2018. It was the first kabaddi tournament to be held in the UAE. It featured 6 teams. India won the tournament by defeating Iran in the final with a scoreline of 44–26, with the Indian Defense outperforming the Iran Defense.
The inaugural Junior Kabaddi World Championship was held in Kish island, Iran, 11–14 November 2019. It featured 13 teams. Iran won the tournament by defeating Kenya in the final, 42–22. Team India did not participate in this tournament.
Yuva Kabaddi Series (YKS) is a franchise-based junior-category kabaddi tournament in India. It is for players who are under 23 years old and below 80 kg (180 lb). The inaugural Yuva Kabaddi Series was conducted in Jaipur in June 2022, and was broadcast on OTT platform FanCode. It is the second-largest kabaddi tournament in India, and the largest tournament in India in terms of number of matches played per year.
Four seasonal editions are held every year. Three tournaments were conducted in 2022: Summer Edition in Jaipur, Monsoon Edition at Ranchi, and Winter Edition at Pondicherry; and two in 2023: the KMP YKS in Maharashtra (which was won by Ahmednagar) and Summer Edition Mysore. For the first time in the history of Indian kabaddi, players from the North East will be playing in a tournament of this stature.
Each edition is contested over several rounds, with teams eliminated in each round, and the Summit Round acting as the playoffs of the tournament and leading to the final. Several players who started off in YKS have gone on to play at higher levels of kabaddi competition, such as the Pro Kabaddi League (through the New Young Player initiative) and the Junior Kabaddi World Cup.
Yuva Kabaddi Series was founded by uMumba CEO Suhail Chandhok and Vikas Kumar Gautam.
The first edition of European Kabaddi Championship was held in Scotland in 2019. The final match was between Poland and Holland, Poland won the tournament. Final score was Poland 47–27 Holland. The second edition was held in Cyprus in 2021 which was organized by World Kabaddi Federation. Poland retained their title by beating hosts Cyprus in the final, 29-15. Italy is was set to host the third edition in 2022, but it was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, eventually happening in 2023. Poland beat England in the final to retain their title.
Kabaddi is a popular sport in the Indian subcontinent. The governing federation for kabaddi in India is the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India (AKFI), which was founded in 1973 and compiled a standard set of rules. Kabaddi is the second-most popular sport in India, with the Pro Kabaddi League being watched by hundreds of millions of people each year.The governing body for kabaddi in Pakistan is Pakistan Kabaddi Federation.
In Bangladesh, Kabaddi is known with a different name called "Ha-du-du". Ha-du-du has no definite rules and is played with different rules in different areas. Kabaddi is the national sport of Bangladesh, given official status in 1972. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of Bangladesh was formed in 1973.
Kabaddi is among the national sports of Nepal. Kabaddi is played and taught in most primary schools beginning in about the third grade in most Nepali schools. Kabaddi was also played by the British Army for fun, to keep fit and as an enticement to recruit soldiers from the British Asian community. Kabaddi was brought to United Kingdom by Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Nepali and Sri Lankan immigrants.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kabaddi is a contact team sport played between two teams of seven players, originating in ancient India. The objective of the game is for a single player on offense, referred to as a \"raider\", to run into the opposing team's half of the court, touch out as many of their players as possible, and return to their own half of the court, all without being tackled by the defenders in 30 seconds. Points are scored for each player tagged by the raider, while the opposing team earns a point for stopping the raider. Players are taken out of the game if they are touched or tackled, but are brought back in for each point scored by their team from a tag or a tackle.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It is popular in the Indian subcontinent and other surrounding Asian countries. Although accounts of kabaddi appear in the histories of ancient India, the game was popularised as a competitive sport in the 20th century. It is the national sport of Bangladesh. It is the second most popular and viewed sport in India after cricket. It is the state game of the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "There are two major disciplines: \"Punjabi kabaddi\", also called \"circle style\", comprises traditional forms of the sport that are played on a circular field outdoors, and the \"standard style\", on a rectangular court indoors, is played in major professional leagues and international competitions such as the Asian Games.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "This game is known by numerous names in different parts of the Indian subcontinent, such as: kabaddi or chedugudu in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana; kabaddi in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala; kabaddi, komonti or ha-du-du in West Bengal and Bangladesh; baibalaa in Maldives, kauddi or kabaddi in the Punjab region; hu-tu-tu in Western India, ha-do-do in Eastern India; chadakudu in South India; kapardi in Nepal; kabadi or sadugudu in Tamil Nadu; and chakgudu in Sri Lanka.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Origins of Kabaddi are not clearly understood. There are various theories regarding its place and time of origin. The sport is said to have existed in the Indian subcontinent since prehistoric times.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Rononjoy Sen speculates in his book Nation At Play, that kabaddi originated during the Vedic period (between 1500 BCE and 500 BCE). There are accounts of Gautama Buddha and Lord Krishna having played an ancient form of the sport.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "According to another version of the sport's origins, kabaddi originated in Tamil Nadu. It was reportedly common among the Ayar tribal people who lived in the Mullai geographical region of ancient Tamil Nadu.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There are also accounts of kabaddi having been played in Iran 2,000 years ago.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Modern kabaddi is a synthesis of the game played in various forms under different names in the Indian subcontinent. India has been first credited with having helped to popularise kabaddi as a competitive sport, with the first organized competitions occurring in the 1920s, their introduction to the programme of the Indian Olympic Games in 1938, the establishment of the All-India Kabaddi Federation in 1950, and it being played as a demonstration sport at the inaugural 1951 Asian Games in New Delhi. These developments helped to formalize the sport, which had traditionally been played in villages, for legitimate international competition.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The first framework of rules for the sport was prepared in Maharashtra in the 1920s. One of the earliest modern tournaments of the sport, the All India Kabaddi Tournament in 1923, was played according to these amended rules. After being demonstrated again at the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, Kabaddi was added to the Asian Games programme beginning in 1990.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Source:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In the international team version of kabaddi, two teams of seven members each occupy opposite halves of a court of 10 by 13 metres (33 ft × 43 ft) in case of men and 8 by 12 metres (26 ft × 39 ft) in case of women. Each has five supplementary players held in reserve for substitution. The game is played with 20-minute halves with a 5-minute half time break in which the teams exchange sides. During each play, known as a \"raid\", a player from the attacking side, known as the \"raider\", runs into the opposing team's side of the court and attempts to tag as many of the seven defending players as possible. The raider must cross the baulk line into the defending team's territory, and then return to their half of the field without being tackled. (If an attacker touches a defender and hasn't yet reached the baulk line, they do not need to reach the baulk line to score points and may return to their half of the court.) While raiding, the raider must loudly chant kabaddi, confirming to referees that their raid is done on a single breath without inhaling. Each raid has a 30-second time limit.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "A point is scored for each defender tagged; tags can be made with any part of the raider's body. If the raider steps beyond the bonus line marked in the defending team's territory when there are five or more players, they earn an additional point known as a bonus point (the bonus point is only scored if the raider's trailing foot is in the air while they step over the line). If the raider is successfully stopped (tackled), the opposite team earns a point instead. All players tagged are taken out of the game, but one is \"revived\" for each point a team scores from a subsequent tag or tackle. Bonus points do not revive players. Players who step out of the boundary are out. There are two strips on either side of the court known as \"lobby areas\"; they are part of the out-of-bounds area at the start of each raid, and only become part of the field of play once the raider touches an opponent. A raid where no points are scored by the raider is referred to as an \"empty raid\". By contrast, a play where the raider scores three or more points is referred to as a \"super raid\". If a team gets all seven players on the opposing team out (\"All Out\"), they earn two additional points and the players are placed back in the game.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "There are four major forms of Indian kabaddi recognised by the amateur federation. In Sanjeevani kabaddi, one player is revived against one player of the opposite team who is out. The game is played over 40 minutes with a five-minute break between halves. There are seven players on each side and the team that outs all the players on the opponent's side scores four extra points.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In Gaminee style, seven players play on each side and a player put out has to remain out until all his team members are out. The team that is successful in outing all the players of the opponent's side secures a point. The game continues until five or seven such points are secured and has no fixed time duration.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Amar style resembles the Sanjeevani form in the time frame rule, but a player who is declared out stays inside the court while play continues. For every player of the opposition touched \"out\", a team earns a point.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Punjabi kabaddi is a variation that is played on a circular pitch of a diameter of 22 metres (72 ft).",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Source (Page 17-26):",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Source (Page 27-36):",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The following competitions are played in standard format, for that of circle style kabaddi, see Punjabi kabaddi.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Kabaddi World Cup is an outdoor international standard style kabaddi competition conducted by the International Kabaddi Federation (IKF), contested by men's and women's national teams. The competition has been previously contested in 2004, 2007 and 2016. All the tournaments have been won by India. India defeated Iran by 38–29 in the final of the championship game to clinch the title of 2016.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "After the establishment of a new kabaddi organization named World Kabaddi Federation, a 2019 Kabaddi World Cup was held in April 2019 at Malacca, Malaysia. It was the largest world cup in kabaddi history, consisting of 32 men's teams and 24 women's teams.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Kabaddi was played as a demonstration event at the First Asian Games in 1951, and again in 1982, before becoming a medal event for the first time in 1990.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Indian national team won every men's and women's kabaddi competition in the Asian Games from 2002 through 2014. At the 2018 Asian Games, Iran became the first country other than India to win gold medals in kabaddi, with India's men's team winning bronze, and India's women's team being beaten by Iran to win silver.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Pro Kabaddi League was established in 2014. The league modeled its business upon that of the Indian Premier League of Twenty20 cricket, with a large focus on marketing, the backing of local broadcaster Star Sports. The Pro Kabaddi League quickly became a ratings success on Indian television; the 2014 season was watched by at least 435 million viewers over the course of the season, and the inaugural championship match was seen by 98.6 million viewers.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Bengal Warriors, Bengaluru Bulls, Patna Pirates, Tamil Thalaivas, UP Yoddhas, Gujrat Giants, Haryana Steelers, Puneri Paltan, U Mumba, Jaipur Pink Panthers, Dabang Delhi KC, and Telugu Titans are the 12 teams that play in the Pro Kabaddi League.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The organisers of the Pro Kabaddi League change the sport's rules and its presentation to make it more suitable for a television audience. All players in the league must be strictly under 85 kg in weight. When the raider scores 10 or more raid points in a single match, it is called a super 10, and they earn an extra point. If the defender successfully manages to tackle the five raiders in a single game, it is a high 5, and the team will be awarded one extra point.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Additional rules are used in the Pro Kabaddi League to encourage scoring: when a defensive side has three or fewer players remaining, tackles are worth two points instead of one. Furthermore, if a team performs two empty raids in a row, the next raider must score a point (\"do-or-die raid\"), or else they will be declared out and the opposing team will score a point.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The inaugural edition of the IIPKL was on 13 May at Pune, India. The title for the inaugural season was won by the Bangalore Rhinos.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In May 2018, the Super Kabaddi League was first held in Pakistan, as part of a larger push to promote renewed interest in the sport in Pakistan.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "AKC's tenth season was played in Gorgan, Iran, in 2017 in which India won its tenth gold by defeating Pakistan in the finals.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The inaugural edition of the Kabaddi Masters was held in Dubai, 22–30 June 2018. It was the first kabaddi tournament to be held in the UAE. It featured 6 teams. India won the tournament by defeating Iran in the final with a scoreline of 44–26, with the Indian Defense outperforming the Iran Defense.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The inaugural Junior Kabaddi World Championship was held in Kish island, Iran, 11–14 November 2019. It featured 13 teams. Iran won the tournament by defeating Kenya in the final, 42–22. Team India did not participate in this tournament.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Yuva Kabaddi Series (YKS) is a franchise-based junior-category kabaddi tournament in India. It is for players who are under 23 years old and below 80 kg (180 lb). The inaugural Yuva Kabaddi Series was conducted in Jaipur in June 2022, and was broadcast on OTT platform FanCode. It is the second-largest kabaddi tournament in India, and the largest tournament in India in terms of number of matches played per year.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Four seasonal editions are held every year. Three tournaments were conducted in 2022: Summer Edition in Jaipur, Monsoon Edition at Ranchi, and Winter Edition at Pondicherry; and two in 2023: the KMP YKS in Maharashtra (which was won by Ahmednagar) and Summer Edition Mysore. For the first time in the history of Indian kabaddi, players from the North East will be playing in a tournament of this stature.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Each edition is contested over several rounds, with teams eliminated in each round, and the Summit Round acting as the playoffs of the tournament and leading to the final. Several players who started off in YKS have gone on to play at higher levels of kabaddi competition, such as the Pro Kabaddi League (through the New Young Player initiative) and the Junior Kabaddi World Cup.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Yuva Kabaddi Series was founded by uMumba CEO Suhail Chandhok and Vikas Kumar Gautam.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The first edition of European Kabaddi Championship was held in Scotland in 2019. The final match was between Poland and Holland, Poland won the tournament. Final score was Poland 47–27 Holland. The second edition was held in Cyprus in 2021 which was organized by World Kabaddi Federation. Poland retained their title by beating hosts Cyprus in the final, 29-15. Italy is was set to host the third edition in 2022, but it was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, eventually happening in 2023. Poland beat England in the final to retain their title.",
"title": "Major competitions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Kabaddi is a popular sport in the Indian subcontinent. The governing federation for kabaddi in India is the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India (AKFI), which was founded in 1973 and compiled a standard set of rules. Kabaddi is the second-most popular sport in India, with the Pro Kabaddi League being watched by hundreds of millions of people each year.The governing body for kabaddi in Pakistan is Pakistan Kabaddi Federation.",
"title": "Popularity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In Bangladesh, Kabaddi is known with a different name called \"Ha-du-du\". Ha-du-du has no definite rules and is played with different rules in different areas. Kabaddi is the national sport of Bangladesh, given official status in 1972. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of Bangladesh was formed in 1973.",
"title": "Popularity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Kabaddi is among the national sports of Nepal. Kabaddi is played and taught in most primary schools beginning in about the third grade in most Nepali schools. Kabaddi was also played by the British Army for fun, to keep fit and as an enticement to recruit soldiers from the British Asian community. Kabaddi was brought to United Kingdom by Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Nepali and Sri Lankan immigrants.",
"title": "Popularity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Kabaddi is a contact team sport played between two teams of seven players, originating in ancient India. The objective of the game is for a single player on offense, referred to as a "raider", to run into the opposing team's half of the court, touch out as many of their players as possible, and return to their own half of the court, all without being tackled by the defenders in 30 seconds. Points are scored for each player tagged by the raider, while the opposing team earns a point for stopping the raider. Players are taken out of the game if they are touched or tackled, but are brought back in for each point scored by their team from a tag or a tackle. It is popular in the Indian subcontinent and other surrounding Asian countries. Although accounts of kabaddi appear in the histories of ancient India, the game was popularised as a competitive sport in the 20th century. It is the national sport of Bangladesh. It is the second most popular and viewed sport in India after cricket. It is the state game of the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh. There are two major disciplines: "Punjabi kabaddi", also called "circle style", comprises traditional forms of the sport that are played on a circular field outdoors, and the "standard style", on a rectangular court indoors, is played in major professional leagues and international competitions such as the Asian Games. This game is known by numerous names in different parts of the Indian subcontinent, such as: kabaddi or chedugudu in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana; kabaddi in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala; kabaddi, komonti or ha-du-du in West Bengal and Bangladesh; baibalaa in Maldives, kauddi or kabaddi in the Punjab region; hu-tu-tu in Western India, ha-do-do in Eastern India; chadakudu in South India; kapardi in Nepal; kabadi or sadugudu in Tamil Nadu; and chakgudu in Sri Lanka.
|
2001-10-08T21:27:51Z
|
2023-12-31T00:03:39Z
|
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] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabaddi
|
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Kerameikos
|
Kerameikos (Greek: Κεραμεικός, pronounced [ce.ɾa.miˈkos]) also known by its Latinized form Ceramicus, is an area of Athens, Greece, located to the northwest of the Acropolis, which includes an extensive area both within and outside the ancient city walls, on both sides of the Dipylon Gate and by the banks of the Eridanos River. It was the potters' quarter of the city, from which the English word "ceramic" is derived, and was also the site of an important cemetery and numerous funerary sculptures erected along the Sacred Way, a road from Athens to Eleusis.
The area took its name from the city square or dēmos (δῆμος) of the Kerameis (Κεραμεῖς, potters), which in turn derived its name from the word κέραμος (kéramos, "pottery clay", from which the English word "ceramic" is derived). The "Inner Kerameikos" was the former "potters' quarter" within the city and "Outer Kerameikos" covers the cemetery and also the Dēmósion Sēma (δημόσιον σῆμα, public graveyard) just outside the city walls, where Pericles delivered his funeral oration in 431 BC. The cemetery was also where the Ηiera Hodos (the Sacred Way, i.e. the road to Eleusis) began, along which the procession moved for the Eleusinian Mysteries. The quarter was located there because of the abundance of clay mud carried over by the Eridanos River.
The area has undergone a number of archaeological excavations in recent years, though the excavated area covers only a small portion of the ancient dēmos. It was originally an area of marshland along the banks of the Eridanos river which was used as a cemetery as long ago as the 3rd millennium BC. It became the site of an organised cemetery from about 1200 BC; numerous cist graves and burial offerings from the period have been discovered by archaeologists. Houses were constructed on the higher drier ground to the south. During the Archaic period increasingly large and complex grave mounds and monuments were built along the south bank of the Eridanos, lining the Sacred Way.
The building of the new city wall in 478 BC, following the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BC, fundamentally changed the appearance of the area. At the suggestion of Themistocles, all of the funerary sculptures were built into the city wall and two large city gates facing north-west were erected in the Kerameikos. The Sacred Way ran through the Sacred Gate, on the southern side, to Eleusis. On the northern side a wide road, the Dromos, ran through the double-arched Dipylon Gate (also known as the Thriasian Gate) and on to the Platonic Academy a few miles away. State graves were built on either side of the Dipylon Gate, for the interment of prominent personages such as notable warriors and statesmen, including Pericles and Cleisthenes.
After the construction of the city wall, the Sacred Way and a forking street known as the Street of the Tombs again became lined with imposing sepulchral monuments belonging to the families of rich Athenians, dating to before the late 4th century BC. The construction of such lavish mausolea was banned by decree in 317 BC, following which only small columns or inscribed square marble blocks were permitted as grave stones. The Roman occupation of Athens led to a resurgence of monument-building, although little is left of them today.
During the Classical period an important public building, the Pompeion, stood inside the walls in the area between the two gates. This served a key function in the procession (pompē, πομπή) in honour of Athena during the Panathenaic Festival. It consisted of a large courtyard surrounded by columns and banquet rooms, where the nobility of Athens would eat the sacrificial meat for the festival. According to ancient Greek sources, a hecatomb (a sacrifice of 100 cows) was carried out for the festival and the people received the meat in the Kerameikos, possibly in the Dipylon courtyard; excavators have found heaps of bones in front of the city wall.
The Pompeion and many other buildings in the vicinity of the Sacred Gate were razed to the ground by the marauding army of the Roman dictator Sulla, during his sacking of Athens in 86 BC; an episode that Plutarch described as a bloodbath. During the 2nd century AD, a storehouse was constructed on the site of the Pompeion, but it was destroyed during the invasion of the Heruli in 267 AD. The ruins became the site of potters' workshops until about 500 AD, when two parallel colonnades were built behind the city gates, overrunning the old city walls. A new Festival Gate was constructed to the east with three entrances leading into the city. This was in turn destroyed in raids by the invading Avars and Slavs at the end of the 6th century, and the Kerameikos fell into obscurity. It was not rediscovered until a Greek worker dug up a stele in April 1863.
Archaeological excavations in the Kerameikos began in 1870 under the auspices of the Greek Archaeological Society. They have continued from 1913 to the present day under the German Archaeological Institute at Athens.
Latest findings in the Kerameikos include the excavation of a 2.1 m tall Kouros, unearthed by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens under the direction of Professor Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier. This Kouros is the larger twin of the one now kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and both were made by the same anonymous sculptor called the Dipylon Master.
During the construction of Kerameikos metro station for the expanded Athens Metro, a plague pit and approximately 1,000 tombs from the 4th and 5th centuries BC were discovered. In 1992, Greek archaeologist Efi Baziatopoulou-Valavani excavated these sites. The plague pit is located in the northwestern corner of the cemetery and is 6.5 meters long and 1.6 meters deep, containing 89 individuals' remains. The remains found belonged to adult males and females, as well as eight children. Many consider this pit to contain victims from the Plague of Athens, which was prevalent from 430 to 428 BC, followed by a recurrence from 427 to 426 BC.
Pottery found within the grave was used to date the burial to between 430 and 426 BC based on the styles common during that time. The burial is considered to be related to the Athenian plague not only because of the dating of the burial, but also because of the nature of the burial. The chaos caused by the Plague of Athens, as described by Thucydides, matches with the disordered nature of the pit. The pit is further thought to be a state burial, conducted for victims whose families could not afford proper burials.
Bodies were found in five successive layers within the pit, with more care shown on the bottom levels and increasingly little care shown as the burial continued upwards. Bodies were thrown in haphazardly, their positions dictated by the shape of the pit. There was soil placed between the bodies only on the lower levels, and most of the offerings were also found on the lower levels of the burial. The eight children’s bodies were found on the upper-most level, and were covered with large shards of pottery.
Offerings for the dead consisted of roughly 30 small vases. Examples of the ceramics found within the pit include choes, a pelike, and numerous lekythoi. All of these pieces are common in quality and use. The excavator, Baziatopoulou, further remarks that the offerings are surprisingly few considering the number of dead buried within the pit. She then notes that this is especially true when taking into account the probable loss of one or more upper levels from prior intrusions into the burial, which would have brought the total persons buried up to approximately 150. The offerings found were scattered on the lower levels of the pit, suggesting diminishing care as the burial continued upwards.
The eight children found buried within the pit are an exception to the pattern of diminishing care as the burial progressed. Found on the upper levels, these children were not thrown in the pit haphazardly but were instead placed with care and covered with shards of pottery. These are the only ceramics found in the pit that are outside of the lower levels, and this caused Biazatopoulou to comment that the children “seem to have been treated with special care.” Notably, one of the children’s faces was reconstructed by professor Manolis Papagrigorakis and the child is now known as Myrtis.
The skeletal remains found within the pit were submitted to Greek orthodontics professor Manolis Papagrigorakis for examination. Upon analyzing dental pulp from the remains, he concluded that three subjects contained the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar typhi, which results in typhoid fever. The pathogen responsible for the Athenian plague is much disputed, and this DNA evidence has caused scholars to view typhoid fever as a likely culprit. These are the only remains in connection with the Athenian plague to be analyzed.
Large areas adjacent to those already excavated remain in to be explored, as they lie under the fabric of modern-day Athens. Expropriation of these areas has been delayed until funding is secured.
The area is enclosed and visitable through an entrance on the last block of Ermou Street, close to the intersection with Peiraios Street. The Kerameikos Museum is housed there, in a small neoclassical building that houses the most extensive collection of burial-related artifacts in Greece, varying from large-scale marble sculpture to funerary urns, stelae, jewelry, toys etc. The original burial monument sculptures are displayed within the museum, having been replaced by plaster replicas in situ.
The museum incorporates inner and outer courtyards, where the larger sculptures are kept. Down the hill from the museum, visitors can wander among the Outer Kerameikos ruins, the Demosion Sema, the banks of the Eridanos where some water still flows, the remains of the Pompeion and the Dipylon Gate, and walk the first blocks of the Sacred Way towards Eleusis and of the Panathenaic Way towards the Acropolis. The bulk of the area lies about 7–10 meters below modern street level, having in the past been inundated by centuries' worth of sediment accumulation from the floods of the Eridanos.
As of spring 2007, Kerameikos is the name given to the metro station which belongs to Line 3 of the Athens Metro, adjacent to the Technopolis of Gazi.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kerameikos (Greek: Κεραμεικός, pronounced [ce.ɾa.miˈkos]) also known by its Latinized form Ceramicus, is an area of Athens, Greece, located to the northwest of the Acropolis, which includes an extensive area both within and outside the ancient city walls, on both sides of the Dipylon Gate and by the banks of the Eridanos River. It was the potters' quarter of the city, from which the English word \"ceramic\" is derived, and was also the site of an important cemetery and numerous funerary sculptures erected along the Sacred Way, a road from Athens to Eleusis.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The area took its name from the city square or dēmos (δῆμος) of the Kerameis (Κεραμεῖς, potters), which in turn derived its name from the word κέραμος (kéramos, \"pottery clay\", from which the English word \"ceramic\" is derived). The \"Inner Kerameikos\" was the former \"potters' quarter\" within the city and \"Outer Kerameikos\" covers the cemetery and also the Dēmósion Sēma (δημόσιον σῆμα, public graveyard) just outside the city walls, where Pericles delivered his funeral oration in 431 BC. The cemetery was also where the Ηiera Hodos (the Sacred Way, i.e. the road to Eleusis) began, along which the procession moved for the Eleusinian Mysteries. The quarter was located there because of the abundance of clay mud carried over by the Eridanos River.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The area has undergone a number of archaeological excavations in recent years, though the excavated area covers only a small portion of the ancient dēmos. It was originally an area of marshland along the banks of the Eridanos river which was used as a cemetery as long ago as the 3rd millennium BC. It became the site of an organised cemetery from about 1200 BC; numerous cist graves and burial offerings from the period have been discovered by archaeologists. Houses were constructed on the higher drier ground to the south. During the Archaic period increasingly large and complex grave mounds and monuments were built along the south bank of the Eridanos, lining the Sacred Way.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The building of the new city wall in 478 BC, following the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BC, fundamentally changed the appearance of the area. At the suggestion of Themistocles, all of the funerary sculptures were built into the city wall and two large city gates facing north-west were erected in the Kerameikos. The Sacred Way ran through the Sacred Gate, on the southern side, to Eleusis. On the northern side a wide road, the Dromos, ran through the double-arched Dipylon Gate (also known as the Thriasian Gate) and on to the Platonic Academy a few miles away. State graves were built on either side of the Dipylon Gate, for the interment of prominent personages such as notable warriors and statesmen, including Pericles and Cleisthenes.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "After the construction of the city wall, the Sacred Way and a forking street known as the Street of the Tombs again became lined with imposing sepulchral monuments belonging to the families of rich Athenians, dating to before the late 4th century BC. The construction of such lavish mausolea was banned by decree in 317 BC, following which only small columns or inscribed square marble blocks were permitted as grave stones. The Roman occupation of Athens led to a resurgence of monument-building, although little is left of them today.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "During the Classical period an important public building, the Pompeion, stood inside the walls in the area between the two gates. This served a key function in the procession (pompē, πομπή) in honour of Athena during the Panathenaic Festival. It consisted of a large courtyard surrounded by columns and banquet rooms, where the nobility of Athens would eat the sacrificial meat for the festival. According to ancient Greek sources, a hecatomb (a sacrifice of 100 cows) was carried out for the festival and the people received the meat in the Kerameikos, possibly in the Dipylon courtyard; excavators have found heaps of bones in front of the city wall.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The Pompeion and many other buildings in the vicinity of the Sacred Gate were razed to the ground by the marauding army of the Roman dictator Sulla, during his sacking of Athens in 86 BC; an episode that Plutarch described as a bloodbath. During the 2nd century AD, a storehouse was constructed on the site of the Pompeion, but it was destroyed during the invasion of the Heruli in 267 AD. The ruins became the site of potters' workshops until about 500 AD, when two parallel colonnades were built behind the city gates, overrunning the old city walls. A new Festival Gate was constructed to the east with three entrances leading into the city. This was in turn destroyed in raids by the invading Avars and Slavs at the end of the 6th century, and the Kerameikos fell into obscurity. It was not rediscovered until a Greek worker dug up a stele in April 1863.",
"title": "History and description"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Archaeological excavations in the Kerameikos began in 1870 under the auspices of the Greek Archaeological Society. They have continued from 1913 to the present day under the German Archaeological Institute at Athens.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Latest findings in the Kerameikos include the excavation of a 2.1 m tall Kouros, unearthed by the German Archaeological Institute at Athens under the direction of Professor Wolf-Dietrich Niemeier. This Kouros is the larger twin of the one now kept in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and both were made by the same anonymous sculptor called the Dipylon Master.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "During the construction of Kerameikos metro station for the expanded Athens Metro, a plague pit and approximately 1,000 tombs from the 4th and 5th centuries BC were discovered. In 1992, Greek archaeologist Efi Baziatopoulou-Valavani excavated these sites. The plague pit is located in the northwestern corner of the cemetery and is 6.5 meters long and 1.6 meters deep, containing 89 individuals' remains. The remains found belonged to adult males and females, as well as eight children. Many consider this pit to contain victims from the Plague of Athens, which was prevalent from 430 to 428 BC, followed by a recurrence from 427 to 426 BC.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Pottery found within the grave was used to date the burial to between 430 and 426 BC based on the styles common during that time. The burial is considered to be related to the Athenian plague not only because of the dating of the burial, but also because of the nature of the burial. The chaos caused by the Plague of Athens, as described by Thucydides, matches with the disordered nature of the pit. The pit is further thought to be a state burial, conducted for victims whose families could not afford proper burials.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Bodies were found in five successive layers within the pit, with more care shown on the bottom levels and increasingly little care shown as the burial continued upwards. Bodies were thrown in haphazardly, their positions dictated by the shape of the pit. There was soil placed between the bodies only on the lower levels, and most of the offerings were also found on the lower levels of the burial. The eight children’s bodies were found on the upper-most level, and were covered with large shards of pottery.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Offerings for the dead consisted of roughly 30 small vases. Examples of the ceramics found within the pit include choes, a pelike, and numerous lekythoi. All of these pieces are common in quality and use. The excavator, Baziatopoulou, further remarks that the offerings are surprisingly few considering the number of dead buried within the pit. She then notes that this is especially true when taking into account the probable loss of one or more upper levels from prior intrusions into the burial, which would have brought the total persons buried up to approximately 150. The offerings found were scattered on the lower levels of the pit, suggesting diminishing care as the burial continued upwards.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The eight children found buried within the pit are an exception to the pattern of diminishing care as the burial progressed. Found on the upper levels, these children were not thrown in the pit haphazardly but were instead placed with care and covered with shards of pottery. These are the only ceramics found in the pit that are outside of the lower levels, and this caused Biazatopoulou to comment that the children “seem to have been treated with special care.” Notably, one of the children’s faces was reconstructed by professor Manolis Papagrigorakis and the child is now known as Myrtis.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The skeletal remains found within the pit were submitted to Greek orthodontics professor Manolis Papagrigorakis for examination. Upon analyzing dental pulp from the remains, he concluded that three subjects contained the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar typhi, which results in typhoid fever. The pathogen responsible for the Athenian plague is much disputed, and this DNA evidence has caused scholars to view typhoid fever as a likely culprit. These are the only remains in connection with the Athenian plague to be analyzed.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Large areas adjacent to those already excavated remain in to be explored, as they lie under the fabric of modern-day Athens. Expropriation of these areas has been delayed until funding is secured.",
"title": "Archaeology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The area is enclosed and visitable through an entrance on the last block of Ermou Street, close to the intersection with Peiraios Street. The Kerameikos Museum is housed there, in a small neoclassical building that houses the most extensive collection of burial-related artifacts in Greece, varying from large-scale marble sculpture to funerary urns, stelae, jewelry, toys etc. The original burial monument sculptures are displayed within the museum, having been replaced by plaster replicas in situ.",
"title": "Museum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The museum incorporates inner and outer courtyards, where the larger sculptures are kept. Down the hill from the museum, visitors can wander among the Outer Kerameikos ruins, the Demosion Sema, the banks of the Eridanos where some water still flows, the remains of the Pompeion and the Dipylon Gate, and walk the first blocks of the Sacred Way towards Eleusis and of the Panathenaic Way towards the Acropolis. The bulk of the area lies about 7–10 meters below modern street level, having in the past been inundated by centuries' worth of sediment accumulation from the floods of the Eridanos.",
"title": "Museum"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "As of spring 2007, Kerameikos is the name given to the metro station which belongs to Line 3 of the Athens Metro, adjacent to the Technopolis of Gazi.",
"title": "Metro station"
}
] |
Kerameikos also known by its Latinized form Ceramicus, is an area of Athens, Greece, located to the northwest of the Acropolis, which includes an extensive area both within and outside the ancient city walls, on both sides of the Dipylon Gate and by the banks of the Eridanos River. It was the potters' quarter of the city, from which the English word "ceramic" is derived, and was also the site of an important cemetery and numerous funerary sculptures erected along the Sacred Way, a road from Athens to Eleusis.
|
2001-09-28T07:31:53Z
|
2023-12-18T12:46:31Z
|
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"Template:Reflist",
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"Template:Landmarks in Athens",
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"Template:Greek Vases",
"Template:Museums in Athens",
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"Template:Athens"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerameikos
|
16,930 |
Kabir Bedi
|
Kabir Bedi OMRI (born 16 January 1946) is an Indian actor. His career has spanned three continents covering India, the United States and especially Italy among other European countries in three media: film, television and theatre. He is noted for his role as Emperor Shah Jahan in Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story and the villainous Sanjay Verma in the 1980s blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang. He is best known in Italy and Europe for playing the pirate Sandokan in the popular Italian TV miniseries and for his role as the villainous Gobinda in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy. Bedi is based in India and lives in Mumbai.
Kabir Bedi was born in Lahore in the Punjab Province of British India (now in Punjab, Pakistan) on 16 January 1946 into a Punjabi Khatri Sikh family that had devoted itself to India's fight for independence from British colonial rule. He was one of three children. His father, Baba Pyare Lal Singh Bedi, was an author and philosopher. His mother, Freda Bedi, was a British woman born in Derby, England, who became famous as the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. He was educated at Sherwood College, Nainital, Uttarakhand, and St. Stephen's College, Delhi.
Bedi began his career in Indian theatre and then moved on to Hindi films. He remains one of the first international actors from India who started out in Hindi films, worked in Hollywood films and became a star in Europe.
As a stage actor, Bedi has performed Shakespeare's Othello as well as portrayed a historical Indian king in Tughlaq, and a self-destructive alcoholic in The Vultures. In London he starred in The Far Pavilions, the West End musical adaptation of M. M. Kaye's novel, at the Shaftesbury Theatre. In 2011 Bedi played Emperor Shah Jahan in Taj, a play written by John Murrell, a Canadian playwright for the Luminato Festival in Toronto. In 2013, this play was recommissioned and went on an eight-week multi-city tour of Canada.
In the James Bond film Octopussy, Bedi played the villain's aide Gobinda.
He has acted in over 60 Indian films. In the historical epic Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story, he starred as the Emperor Shah Jahan. Other starring Hindi film roles include Raj Khosla's Kacche Dhaage, Rakesh Roshan's Khoon Bhari Maang and Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na.
Bedi shot a movie with Hrithik Roshan (Kites), Govinda (Showman), and Akshay Kumar (Blue). He also starred in Deepa Mehta's film, Kamagata Maru with Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham. He acted in the Tamil film Aravaan, directed by Vasanthabalan.
Bedi played roles in Columbia Pictures' The Beast of War, a film on the Russian war in Afghanistan, directed by Kevin Reynolds, as well as the acclaimed Italian film Andata Ritorno, by Marco Ponti, winner of the David di Donatello Award. In 2017, he acted in the Telugu historical movie Gautamiputra Satakarni, as Nahapana, an important ruler of the Western Kshatrapas.
Bedi has appeared on American television, in Hallmark's African epic Forbidden Territory, and Ken Follett's On Wings of Eagles and Red Eagle. He played Friar Sands in The Lost Empire, for NBC. He also acted in Dynasty, Murder, She Wrote, Magnum, P.I., Hunter, Knight Rider and Highlander: The Series.
In Europe, his greatest success was Sandokan, the saga of a romantic Southeast Asian pirate during British colonial times, an Italian-German-French TV series which broke viewership records across Europe. He recently starred in a prime-time Italian television series, Un Medico in Famiglia, on RAI TV.
For over a year, Bedi starred in The Bold and the Beautiful, the second most-watched television show in the world, seen by over a billion people in 149 countries.
He had his own cinematic talk show on Indian TV, Director's Cut, a 13-part special series interviewing the country's leading directors. His success on television continued in 2013 with award-winning prime-time shows Guns and Glory: The Indian Soldier and Vandemataram, for India's news channels Headlines Today and Aaj Tak.
In the Indian Biblical television series 'Bible Ki Kahaniya', Bedi played both the young and aged Abraham.
In 2007 he starred in Chat, a radio show aired by RAI Radio2, in the role of Sandokan. In 2012, he did a series of Radio One programmes titled Women of Gold and Men of Steel in honour of industry champions in India. In 2017 he did another series in English for Radio One, Ten on Ten, celebrating the top ten innovations out of India. He also did the year-end special series, Best of 2017.
Bedi is a regular contributor to Indian publications including the Times of India and Tehelka on political and social issues affecting the country. He is also seen debating such topics on Indian national television.
In February 2017, Bedi was announced as the new 'brand ambassador' for international development organisation, Sightsavers, saying on his appointment, "Today there is immense awareness and attempt towards eye health and care in India and Sightsavers have shown way to people at large in the country with their achievements in the area of eye care." Bedi is the honorary brand ambassador for Italian Charity Care and Share Italia, which educates and looks after street children, from school to university, in Andhra Pradesh and Telegana.
Since 1982 Bedi has been a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (who are responsible for presenting the Oscar awards). He is also a voting member of the Screen Actors Guild.
He has won numerous film, advertising and popularity awards across Europe and India.
By decree of the President of the Italian Republic of 2 June 2010, Bedi was officially knighted. He received the highest ranking civilian honour of the Italian Republic and was bestowed the title of "Cavaliere" (Knight) of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He has recently received Honorary Degree from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.
Bedi married four times and had three children, Pooja, Siddharth (deceased) and Adam. He was married to Protima Bedi, an Odissi dancer. Their daughter Pooja Bedi is a magazine / newspaper columnist and former actress. Siddharth, who attended Carnegie Mellon University, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide in 1997 at the age of 26.
As his marriage to Protima began to break down, he started a relationship with Parveen Babi. They never married. He later married British-born fashion designer Susan Humphreys. Their son, Adam Bedi, is an international model who made his Hindi film debut with the thriller Hello? Kaun Hai!. This marriage ended in divorce.
In the early 1990s, Bedi married TV and radio presenter Nikki Bedi. They had no children and divorced in 2005. After that, Bedi started a relationship with British-born Parveen Dusanj, whom he married a day before his 70th birthday.
Bedi supports the anti-government struggle in Myanmar, and he is an official ambassador of the Burma Campaign UK. He is the brand ambassador for Rotary International South Asia for its Teach Programme and the Total Literacy Mission in India and South Asia.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kabir Bedi OMRI (born 16 January 1946) is an Indian actor. His career has spanned three continents covering India, the United States and especially Italy among other European countries in three media: film, television and theatre. He is noted for his role as Emperor Shah Jahan in Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story and the villainous Sanjay Verma in the 1980s blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang. He is best known in Italy and Europe for playing the pirate Sandokan in the popular Italian TV miniseries and for his role as the villainous Gobinda in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy. Bedi is based in India and lives in Mumbai.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kabir Bedi was born in Lahore in the Punjab Province of British India (now in Punjab, Pakistan) on 16 January 1946 into a Punjabi Khatri Sikh family that had devoted itself to India's fight for independence from British colonial rule. He was one of three children. His father, Baba Pyare Lal Singh Bedi, was an author and philosopher. His mother, Freda Bedi, was a British woman born in Derby, England, who became famous as the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. He was educated at Sherwood College, Nainital, Uttarakhand, and St. Stephen's College, Delhi.",
"title": "Early life and education"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Bedi began his career in Indian theatre and then moved on to Hindi films. He remains one of the first international actors from India who started out in Hindi films, worked in Hollywood films and became a star in Europe.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "As a stage actor, Bedi has performed Shakespeare's Othello as well as portrayed a historical Indian king in Tughlaq, and a self-destructive alcoholic in The Vultures. In London he starred in The Far Pavilions, the West End musical adaptation of M. M. Kaye's novel, at the Shaftesbury Theatre. In 2011 Bedi played Emperor Shah Jahan in Taj, a play written by John Murrell, a Canadian playwright for the Luminato Festival in Toronto. In 2013, this play was recommissioned and went on an eight-week multi-city tour of Canada.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the James Bond film Octopussy, Bedi played the villain's aide Gobinda.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "He has acted in over 60 Indian films. In the historical epic Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story, he starred as the Emperor Shah Jahan. Other starring Hindi film roles include Raj Khosla's Kacche Dhaage, Rakesh Roshan's Khoon Bhari Maang and Farah Khan's Main Hoon Na.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Bedi shot a movie with Hrithik Roshan (Kites), Govinda (Showman), and Akshay Kumar (Blue). He also starred in Deepa Mehta's film, Kamagata Maru with Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham. He acted in the Tamil film Aravaan, directed by Vasanthabalan.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Bedi played roles in Columbia Pictures' The Beast of War, a film on the Russian war in Afghanistan, directed by Kevin Reynolds, as well as the acclaimed Italian film Andata Ritorno, by Marco Ponti, winner of the David di Donatello Award. In 2017, he acted in the Telugu historical movie Gautamiputra Satakarni, as Nahapana, an important ruler of the Western Kshatrapas.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Bedi has appeared on American television, in Hallmark's African epic Forbidden Territory, and Ken Follett's On Wings of Eagles and Red Eagle. He played Friar Sands in The Lost Empire, for NBC. He also acted in Dynasty, Murder, She Wrote, Magnum, P.I., Hunter, Knight Rider and Highlander: The Series.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In Europe, his greatest success was Sandokan, the saga of a romantic Southeast Asian pirate during British colonial times, an Italian-German-French TV series which broke viewership records across Europe. He recently starred in a prime-time Italian television series, Un Medico in Famiglia, on RAI TV.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "For over a year, Bedi starred in The Bold and the Beautiful, the second most-watched television show in the world, seen by over a billion people in 149 countries.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "He had his own cinematic talk show on Indian TV, Director's Cut, a 13-part special series interviewing the country's leading directors. His success on television continued in 2013 with award-winning prime-time shows Guns and Glory: The Indian Soldier and Vandemataram, for India's news channels Headlines Today and Aaj Tak.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "In the Indian Biblical television series 'Bible Ki Kahaniya', Bedi played both the young and aged Abraham.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 2007 he starred in Chat, a radio show aired by RAI Radio2, in the role of Sandokan. In 2012, he did a series of Radio One programmes titled Women of Gold and Men of Steel in honour of industry champions in India. In 2017 he did another series in English for Radio One, Ten on Ten, celebrating the top ten innovations out of India. He also did the year-end special series, Best of 2017.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Bedi is a regular contributor to Indian publications including the Times of India and Tehelka on political and social issues affecting the country. He is also seen debating such topics on Indian national television.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In February 2017, Bedi was announced as the new 'brand ambassador' for international development organisation, Sightsavers, saying on his appointment, \"Today there is immense awareness and attempt towards eye health and care in India and Sightsavers have shown way to people at large in the country with their achievements in the area of eye care.\" Bedi is the honorary brand ambassador for Italian Charity Care and Share Italia, which educates and looks after street children, from school to university, in Andhra Pradesh and Telegana.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Since 1982 Bedi has been a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (who are responsible for presenting the Oscar awards). He is also a voting member of the Screen Actors Guild.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "He has won numerous film, advertising and popularity awards across Europe and India.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "By decree of the President of the Italian Republic of 2 June 2010, Bedi was officially knighted. He received the highest ranking civilian honour of the Italian Republic and was bestowed the title of \"Cavaliere\" (Knight) of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He has recently received Honorary Degree from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Bedi married four times and had three children, Pooja, Siddharth (deceased) and Adam. He was married to Protima Bedi, an Odissi dancer. Their daughter Pooja Bedi is a magazine / newspaper columnist and former actress. Siddharth, who attended Carnegie Mellon University, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died by suicide in 1997 at the age of 26.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "As his marriage to Protima began to break down, he started a relationship with Parveen Babi. They never married. He later married British-born fashion designer Susan Humphreys. Their son, Adam Bedi, is an international model who made his Hindi film debut with the thriller Hello? Kaun Hai!. This marriage ended in divorce.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the early 1990s, Bedi married TV and radio presenter Nikki Bedi. They had no children and divorced in 2005. After that, Bedi started a relationship with British-born Parveen Dusanj, whom he married a day before his 70th birthday.",
"title": "Personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Bedi supports the anti-government struggle in Myanmar, and he is an official ambassador of the Burma Campaign UK. He is the brand ambassador for Rotary International South Asia for its Teach Programme and the Total Literacy Mission in India and South Asia.",
"title": "Personal life"
}
] |
Kabir Bedi OMRI is an Indian actor. His career has spanned three continents covering India, the United States and especially Italy among other European countries in three media: film, television and theatre. He is noted for his role as Emperor Shah Jahan in Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story and the villainous Sanjay Verma in the 1980s blockbuster Khoon Bhari Maang. He is best known in Italy and Europe for playing the pirate Sandokan in the popular Italian TV miniseries and for his role as the villainous Gobinda in the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy. Bedi is based in India and lives in Mumbai.
|
2001-10-09T10:15:24Z
|
2023-10-20T08:15:53Z
|
[
"Template:EngvarB",
"Template:Official website",
"Template:Webarchive",
"Template:Authority control",
"Template:Small",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:Infobox person",
"Template:Eliminated",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite news",
"Template:Dead link",
"Template:IMDb name",
"Template:Short description",
"Template:Use dmy dates",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:Bollywood Hungama person"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabir_Bedi
|
16,931 |
Kaber
|
Kaber may refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kaber may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kaber may refer to: a variant spelling for caber
|
2022-05-27T01:11:23Z
|
[
"Template:Disambiguation"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaber
|
|
16,932 |
Kamov Ka-25
|
The Kamov Ka-25 (NATO reporting name "Hormone") is a naval helicopter, developed for the Soviet Navy in the USSR from 1958.
In the late 1950s there was an urgent demand for anti-submarine helicopters for deployment on new ships equipped with helicopter platforms entering service with the Soviet Navy. Kamov's compact design was chosen for production in 1958. To speed the development of the new anti-submarine helicopter Kamov designed and built a prototype to prove the cabin and dynamic components layout; designated Ka-20, this demonstrator was not equipped with mission equipment, corrosion protection or shipboard operational equipment. The Ka-20 was displayed at the 1961 Tushino Aviation Day display.
Definitive prototypes of the Ka-25 incorporated mission equipment and corrosion protection for the structure. The rotor system introduced aluminium alloy blades pressurised with nitrogen for crack detection, lubricated hinges, hydraulic powered controls, alcohol de-icing and automatic blade folding. Power was supplied by two free-turbine engines sat atop the cabin, with electrically de-iced inlets, plain lateral exhausts with no infrared countermeasures, driving the main gearbox directly and a cooling fan for the gearbox and hydraulic oil coolers aft of the main gearbox. Construction was of stressed skin duralumin throughout with flush-riveting, as well as some bonding and honeycomb sandwich panels. The 1.5m × 1,25m × 3.94m cabin had a sliding door to port flight deck forward of the cabin and fuel tanks underfloor filled using a pressure refueling nozzle on the port side. A short boom at the rear of the cabin had a central fin and twin toed-in fins at the ends of the tailplane mainly for use during auto-rotation. The undercarriage consisted of two noncastoring mainwheels with sprag brakes attached to the fuselage by parallel 'V' struts with a single angled shock absorber to dissipate landing loads, and two castoring nosewheels on straight shock absorbing legs attached directly to the fuselage either side of the cockpit which folded rearwards to reduce interference with the RADAR, all wheels were fitted with emergency rapid inflation flotation collars. Flying controls all act on the co-axial rotors with pitch, roll and collective similar to a conventional single rotor helicopter. Yaw was through differential collective which has a secondary effect of torque, an automatic mixer box ensured that total lift on the rotors remained constant during yaw maneuvers, to improve handling during deck landings. Optional extras included fold up seats for 12 passengers, rescue hoist, external auxiliary fuel tanks or containers for cameras, flares, smoke floats or beacons.
Former operators
Data from
General characteristics
Performance
Armament
Related development
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era
Related lists
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kamov Ka-25 (NATO reporting name \"Hormone\") is a naval helicopter, developed for the Soviet Navy in the USSR from 1958.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In the late 1950s there was an urgent demand for anti-submarine helicopters for deployment on new ships equipped with helicopter platforms entering service with the Soviet Navy. Kamov's compact design was chosen for production in 1958. To speed the development of the new anti-submarine helicopter Kamov designed and built a prototype to prove the cabin and dynamic components layout; designated Ka-20, this demonstrator was not equipped with mission equipment, corrosion protection or shipboard operational equipment. The Ka-20 was displayed at the 1961 Tushino Aviation Day display.",
"title": "Design and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Definitive prototypes of the Ka-25 incorporated mission equipment and corrosion protection for the structure. The rotor system introduced aluminium alloy blades pressurised with nitrogen for crack detection, lubricated hinges, hydraulic powered controls, alcohol de-icing and automatic blade folding. Power was supplied by two free-turbine engines sat atop the cabin, with electrically de-iced inlets, plain lateral exhausts with no infrared countermeasures, driving the main gearbox directly and a cooling fan for the gearbox and hydraulic oil coolers aft of the main gearbox. Construction was of stressed skin duralumin throughout with flush-riveting, as well as some bonding and honeycomb sandwich panels. The 1.5m × 1,25m × 3.94m cabin had a sliding door to port flight deck forward of the cabin and fuel tanks underfloor filled using a pressure refueling nozzle on the port side. A short boom at the rear of the cabin had a central fin and twin toed-in fins at the ends of the tailplane mainly for use during auto-rotation. The undercarriage consisted of two noncastoring mainwheels with sprag brakes attached to the fuselage by parallel 'V' struts with a single angled shock absorber to dissipate landing loads, and two castoring nosewheels on straight shock absorbing legs attached directly to the fuselage either side of the cockpit which folded rearwards to reduce interference with the RADAR, all wheels were fitted with emergency rapid inflation flotation collars. Flying controls all act on the co-axial rotors with pitch, roll and collective similar to a conventional single rotor helicopter. Yaw was through differential collective which has a secondary effect of torque, an automatic mixer box ensured that total lift on the rotors remained constant during yaw maneuvers, to improve handling during deck landings. Optional extras included fold up seats for 12 passengers, rescue hoist, external auxiliary fuel tanks or containers for cameras, flares, smoke floats or beacons.",
"title": "Design and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Former operators",
"title": "Operators"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Data from",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-25BSh)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "General characteristics",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-25BSh)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Performance",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-25BSh)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Armament",
"title": "Specifications (Ka-25BSh)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Related development",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Related lists",
"title": "See also"
}
] |
The Kamov Ka-25 is a naval helicopter, developed for the Soviet Navy in the USSR from 1958.
|
2001-10-09T10:31:10Z
|
2023-12-31T17:09:58Z
|
[
"Template:Commons",
"Template:YAF aircraft",
"Template:Infobox aircraft begin",
"Template:BUL",
"Template:SYR",
"Template:Aircraft specs",
"Template:ISBN",
"Template:Infobox aircraft type",
"Template:USSR",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Refbegin",
"Template:Refend",
"Template:Kamov aircraft",
"Template:Convert",
"Template:VNM",
"Template:YUG",
"Template:Aircontent",
"Template:Cite book",
"Template:IND",
"Template:RUS",
"Template:UKR",
"Template:Cite web"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-25
|
16,933 |
Kainite
|
Kainite (/ˈkaɪnaɪt/ or /ˈkeɪnaɪt/) (KMg(SO4)Cl·3H2O) is an evaporite mineral in the class of "Sulfates (selenates, etc.) with additional anions, with H2O" according to the Nickel–Strunz classification. It is a hydrated potassium-magnesium sulfate-chloride, naturally occurring in irregular granular masses or as crystalline coatings in cavities or fissures. This mineral is dull and soft, and is colored white, yellowish, grey, reddish, or blue to violet. Its name is derived from Greek καινος [kainos] ("(hitherto) unknown"), as it was the first mineral discovered that contained both sulfate and chloride as anions. Kainite forms monoclinic crystals.
Kainite is of bitter taste and soluble in water. On recrystallization picromerite is deposited from the solution.
Kainite was discovered in the Stassfurt salt mines in today's Saxony-Anhalt, Germany in 1865 by the mine official Schöne and was first described by Carl Friedrich Jacob Zincken.
Kainite is a typical secondary mineral that forms through metamorphosis in marine deposits of potassium carbonate, and is also occasionally formed through resublimation from volcanic vapours. It is often accompanied by anhydrite, carnallite, halite, and kieserite.
Kainite is only found in comparatively few places, among them in salt mines in central and northern Germany, Bad Ischl (Austria), on Pasquasia in Sicily, in Whitby (UK), and in the Carlsbad Potash District in New Mexico, in volcanic deposits in Kamchatka and in Iceland, and in salt lakes in western China. It has also been identified in Gusev Crater on Mars.
Kainite is used as a source of potassium and magnesium compounds, as a fertilizer, and as gritting salt.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kainite (/ˈkaɪnaɪt/ or /ˈkeɪnaɪt/) (KMg(SO4)Cl·3H2O) is an evaporite mineral in the class of \"Sulfates (selenates, etc.) with additional anions, with H2O\" according to the Nickel–Strunz classification. It is a hydrated potassium-magnesium sulfate-chloride, naturally occurring in irregular granular masses or as crystalline coatings in cavities or fissures. This mineral is dull and soft, and is colored white, yellowish, grey, reddish, or blue to violet. Its name is derived from Greek καινος [kainos] (\"(hitherto) unknown\"), as it was the first mineral discovered that contained both sulfate and chloride as anions. Kainite forms monoclinic crystals.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kainite is of bitter taste and soluble in water. On recrystallization picromerite is deposited from the solution.",
"title": "Properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kainite was discovered in the Stassfurt salt mines in today's Saxony-Anhalt, Germany in 1865 by the mine official Schöne and was first described by Carl Friedrich Jacob Zincken.",
"title": "Genesis and occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kainite is a typical secondary mineral that forms through metamorphosis in marine deposits of potassium carbonate, and is also occasionally formed through resublimation from volcanic vapours. It is often accompanied by anhydrite, carnallite, halite, and kieserite.",
"title": "Genesis and occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kainite is only found in comparatively few places, among them in salt mines in central and northern Germany, Bad Ischl (Austria), on Pasquasia in Sicily, in Whitby (UK), and in the Carlsbad Potash District in New Mexico, in volcanic deposits in Kamchatka and in Iceland, and in salt lakes in western China. It has also been identified in Gusev Crater on Mars.",
"title": "Genesis and occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kainite is used as a source of potassium and magnesium compounds, as a fertilizer, and as gritting salt.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
] |
Kainite ( or ) (KMg(SO4)Cl·3H2O) is an evaporite mineral in the class of "Sulfates (selenates, etc.) with additional anions, with H2O" according to the Nickel–Strunz classification. It is a hydrated potassium-magnesium sulfate-chloride, naturally occurring in irregular granular masses or as crystalline coatings in cavities or fissures. This mineral is dull and soft, and is colored white, yellowish, grey, reddish, or blue to violet. Its name is derived from Greek καινος [kainos] ("(hitherto) unknown"), as it was the first mineral discovered that contained both sulfate and chloride as anions. Kainite forms monoclinic crystals.
|
2022-01-15T18:17:43Z
|
[
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:Sulfate-mineral-stub",
"Template:Distinguish",
"Template:Infobox mineral",
"Template:IPAc-en",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite OED"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kainite
|
|
16,934 |
KAIST
|
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a national research university located in Daedeok Innopolis, Daejeon, South Korea. KAIST was established by the Korean government in 1971 as the nation's first public, research-oriented science and engineering institution. KAIST is considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. KAIST has been internationally accredited in business education, and hosts the Secretariat of the Association of Asia-Pacific Business Schools (AAPBS). KAIST has 10,504 full-time students and 1,342 faculty researchers (as of the Fall 2019 Semester) and had a total budget of US$765 million in 2013, of which US$459 million was from research contracts.
In 2007, KAIST partnered with international institutions and adopted dual degree programs for its students. Its partner institutions include the Technical University of Denmark, Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Technical University of Munich.
The institute was founded in 1971 as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS) by a loan of US$6 million (US$38 million 2019) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and supported by President Park Chung-Hee. The institute's academic scheme was mainly designed by Frederick E. Terman, then vice president of Stanford University, and Dr. KunMo Chung, a professor at the Polytechnic Institution of Brooklyn. The institute's two main functions were to train advanced scientists and engineers and develop a structure of graduate education in the country. Research studies had begun by 1973 and undergraduates studied for bachelor's degrees by 1984.
In 1981 the government merged the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to form the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, under the leadership of physics professor Choochon Lee. Due to differing research philosophies, KIST and KAIST split in 1989. In the same year KAIST and the Korea Institute of Technology (KIT) combined and moved from Seoul to the Daedeok Science Town in Daejeon. The first act of President Suh upon his inauguration in July 2006 was to lay out the KAIST Development Plan. The ‘KAIST Development Five-Year Plan’ was finalized on February 5, 2007, by KAIST Steering Committee. The goals of KAIST set by Suh were to become one of the best science and technology universities in the world, and to become one of the top-10 universities by 2011. In January 2008, the university dropped its full name, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and changed its official name to only KAIST.
Admission to KAIST is based on overall grades, grades on math and science courses, recommendation letters from teachers, study plan, personal statements, and other data, and does not rely on a standardized test conducted by the university. In 2014, the acceptance rate for local students was 14.9%, and for international students at 13.2%.
Full scholarships are given to all students including international students in the bachelor, master and doctorate courses. Doctoral students are given military-exemption benefits from South Korea's compulsory military service. Up to 80% of courses taught in KAIST are conducted in English.
Undergraduate students can join the school through an “open major system” that allows students to take classes for three terms and then choose a discipline that suits their aptitude, and undergraduates are allowed to change their major anytime. KAIST has also produced many doctorates through the integrated master's and doctoral program and early-completion system. Students must publish papers in internationally renowned academic journals for graduation.
KAIST produced 69,388 alumni from 1975 to 2021, with 19,457 bachelor's, 35,513 master's, and 14,418 doctorate degree holders. As of Spring 2021, 10,793 students were enrolled in KAIST with 3,605 bachelor's, 3,069 master's, 1,354 joint M.S.-Ph.D.'s, and 2,765 doctoral students. More than 70 percent of KAIST undergraduates come from specialized science high schools. 817 international students from 81 countries are studying at KAIST (as of spring semester 2021), making it one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the country.
KAIST is organized into 6 colleges, 2 schools and 33 departments/divisions.
KAIST also has three affiliated institutes including the Korea Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS), National NanoFab Center (NNFC), and Korea Science Academy (KSA).
KAIST has two campuses in Daejeon and one campus in Seoul. The university is mainly located in the Daedeok Science Town in the city of Daejeon, 150 kilometers south of the capital Seoul. Daedeok is also home to some 50 public and private research institutes, universities such as CNU and high-tech venture capital companies.
Most lectures, research activities, and housing services are located in the Daejeon main campus. It has a total of 29 dormitories. Twenty-three dormitories for male students and four dormitories for female students are located on the outskirts of the campus, and two apartments for married students are located outside the campus.
The Seoul campus is the home of the Business Faculty of the university. The graduate schools of finance, management and information & media management are located there. The total area of the Seoul campus is 413,346 m (4,449,220 sq ft).
The Munji campus, the former campus of Information and Communications University until its merger with KAIST, is located ca. 4 km (2.5 mi) away from the main campus. It has two dormitories, one for undergraduate students and the other for graduate students. The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research is located here doing particle and nuclear physics related to dark matter and the Rare Isotope Science Project has the Superconducting Radio Frequency test facility.
The KAIST main library was established in 1971 as KAIS library, and it went through a merge and separation process with KIST library. It merged with KIT in March 1990. A contemporary 5 story building was constructed as the main library, and it is being operated with an annex library. The library uses the American LC Classification Schedule.
The library underwent expansion and remodeling, which finished in 2018, to include conference rooms, collaboration rooms, and media rooms.
KAIST's Seokrim Taeulje is a festival held by KAIST for three days every spring semester. The festival preparation committee under the undergraduate student council will be in charge of planning and execution, various food booths and experience booths will be opened, and stage events such as club performances and a song festival will be held. Also called the Cherry Blossom Festival, students eat strawberries on the lawn.
Seven KAIST Institutes (KIs) have been set up: the KI for the BioCentury, the KI for Information Technology Convergence, the KI for the Design of Complex Systems, the KI for Entertainment Engineering, the KI for the NanoCentury, the KI for Eco-Energy, and the KI for Urban Space and Systems. Each KI is operated as an independent research center at the level of a college, receiving support in terms of finance and facilities. In terms of ownership of intellectual property rights, KAIST holds 2,694 domestic patents and 723 international patents so far.
Researchers at KAIST have developed the Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), a technique of powering vehicles through cables underneath the surface of the road via non-contact magnetic charging (a power source is placed underneath the road surface and power is wirelessly picked up on the vehicle itself). In July 2009 the researchers successfully supplied up to 60% power to a bus over a gap of 12 cm (4.7 in) from a power line embedded in the ground using power supply and pick up technology developed in-house.
In February 2018, the Korea Times published an article which stated that KAIST was starting an AI weapons research project together with the Korean arms manufacturer Hanwa. The allegations were of developing lethal autonomous weapons with Hanwa. This has led to researchers from 30 countries boycotting KAIST, which has denied existence of the program.
KAIST was ranked 56th worldwide in the QS WUR 2024, 91st worldwide in the THE WUR 2023, 282nd in the USNWR Rankings 2022-2023, and 201-300th in ARWU 2022.
KAIST was the 111th best-ranked university worldwide in 2022 in terms of aggregate performance across THE, QS, and ARWU, as reported by ARTU.
Before THE and QS started publishing separate rankings in 2010, the jointly published THE–QS World University Rankings ranked KAIST globally at 160th (2004), 143rd (2005), 198th (2006), 132nd (2007), 95th (2008), and 69th (2009).
KAIST was ranked as the best university in Republic of Korea and the 7th university in Asia in the Top 100 Asian Universities list, the first regional ranking issued by THE-QS World Rankings. KAIST was again recognized as a number one University in Korea by JoongAng Ilbo Review.
In 2019 Thomson Reuters named KAIST the 34th most innovative university in the world and the 2nd most innovative university in the Asia-Pacific region.
KAIST was ranked 61-70th worldwide in the THE World Reputation Rankings 2022.
In the 2009 THE-QS World University Rankings (in 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and QS World University Rankings parted ways to produce separate rankings) for Engineering & IT, the university was placed 21st in the world and 1st in Korea.
In 2009, KAIST's department of industrial design has also been listed in the top 30 Design Schools by Business Week.
Times Higher Education ranked KAIST the 3rd best university in the world under the age of 50 years in its 2015 league table.
KAIST graduates ranked 67th worldwide in the Times Higher Education's Global University Employability Ranking 2022, and 77th worldwide in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2022.
Kanghyeon Kim, computer scientist
36°22′19″N 127°21′47″E / 36.372°N 127.363°E / 36.372; 127.363
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a national research university located in Daedeok Innopolis, Daejeon, South Korea. KAIST was established by the Korean government in 1971 as the nation's first public, research-oriented science and engineering institution. KAIST is considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. KAIST has been internationally accredited in business education, and hosts the Secretariat of the Association of Asia-Pacific Business Schools (AAPBS). KAIST has 10,504 full-time students and 1,342 faculty researchers (as of the Fall 2019 Semester) and had a total budget of US$765 million in 2013, of which US$459 million was from research contracts.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "In 2007, KAIST partnered with international institutions and adopted dual degree programs for its students. Its partner institutions include the Technical University of Denmark, Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Technical University of Munich.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The institute was founded in 1971 as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS) by a loan of US$6 million (US$38 million 2019) from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and supported by President Park Chung-Hee. The institute's academic scheme was mainly designed by Frederick E. Terman, then vice president of Stanford University, and Dr. KunMo Chung, a professor at the Polytechnic Institution of Brooklyn. The institute's two main functions were to train advanced scientists and engineers and develop a structure of graduate education in the country. Research studies had begun by 1973 and undergraduates studied for bachelor's degrees by 1984.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In 1981 the government merged the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) to form the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST, under the leadership of physics professor Choochon Lee. Due to differing research philosophies, KIST and KAIST split in 1989. In the same year KAIST and the Korea Institute of Technology (KIT) combined and moved from Seoul to the Daedeok Science Town in Daejeon. The first act of President Suh upon his inauguration in July 2006 was to lay out the KAIST Development Plan. The ‘KAIST Development Five-Year Plan’ was finalized on February 5, 2007, by KAIST Steering Committee. The goals of KAIST set by Suh were to become one of the best science and technology universities in the world, and to become one of the top-10 universities by 2011. In January 2008, the university dropped its full name, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and changed its official name to only KAIST.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Admission to KAIST is based on overall grades, grades on math and science courses, recommendation letters from teachers, study plan, personal statements, and other data, and does not rely on a standardized test conducted by the university. In 2014, the acceptance rate for local students was 14.9%, and for international students at 13.2%.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Full scholarships are given to all students including international students in the bachelor, master and doctorate courses. Doctoral students are given military-exemption benefits from South Korea's compulsory military service. Up to 80% of courses taught in KAIST are conducted in English.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Undergraduate students can join the school through an “open major system” that allows students to take classes for three terms and then choose a discipline that suits their aptitude, and undergraduates are allowed to change their major anytime. KAIST has also produced many doctorates through the integrated master's and doctoral program and early-completion system. Students must publish papers in internationally renowned academic journals for graduation.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "KAIST produced 69,388 alumni from 1975 to 2021, with 19,457 bachelor's, 35,513 master's, and 14,418 doctorate degree holders. As of Spring 2021, 10,793 students were enrolled in KAIST with 3,605 bachelor's, 3,069 master's, 1,354 joint M.S.-Ph.D.'s, and 2,765 doctoral students. More than 70 percent of KAIST undergraduates come from specialized science high schools. 817 international students from 81 countries are studying at KAIST (as of spring semester 2021), making it one of the most ethnically diverse universities in the country.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "KAIST is organized into 6 colleges, 2 schools and 33 departments/divisions.",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "KAIST also has three affiliated institutes including the Korea Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS), National NanoFab Center (NNFC), and Korea Science Academy (KSA).",
"title": "Organization"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "KAIST has two campuses in Daejeon and one campus in Seoul. The university is mainly located in the Daedeok Science Town in the city of Daejeon, 150 kilometers south of the capital Seoul. Daedeok is also home to some 50 public and private research institutes, universities such as CNU and high-tech venture capital companies.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Most lectures, research activities, and housing services are located in the Daejeon main campus. It has a total of 29 dormitories. Twenty-three dormitories for male students and four dormitories for female students are located on the outskirts of the campus, and two apartments for married students are located outside the campus.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The Seoul campus is the home of the Business Faculty of the university. The graduate schools of finance, management and information & media management are located there. The total area of the Seoul campus is 413,346 m (4,449,220 sq ft).",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The Munji campus, the former campus of Information and Communications University until its merger with KAIST, is located ca. 4 km (2.5 mi) away from the main campus. It has two dormitories, one for undergraduate students and the other for graduate students. The Institute for Basic Science (IBS) Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research is located here doing particle and nuclear physics related to dark matter and the Rare Isotope Science Project has the Superconducting Radio Frequency test facility.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The KAIST main library was established in 1971 as KAIS library, and it went through a merge and separation process with KIST library. It merged with KIT in March 1990. A contemporary 5 story building was constructed as the main library, and it is being operated with an annex library. The library uses the American LC Classification Schedule.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The library underwent expansion and remodeling, which finished in 2018, to include conference rooms, collaboration rooms, and media rooms.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "KAIST's Seokrim Taeulje is a festival held by KAIST for three days every spring semester. The festival preparation committee under the undergraduate student council will be in charge of planning and execution, various food booths and experience booths will be opened, and stage events such as club performances and a song festival will be held. Also called the Cherry Blossom Festival, students eat strawberries on the lawn.",
"title": "Campus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Seven KAIST Institutes (KIs) have been set up: the KI for the BioCentury, the KI for Information Technology Convergence, the KI for the Design of Complex Systems, the KI for Entertainment Engineering, the KI for the NanoCentury, the KI for Eco-Energy, and the KI for Urban Space and Systems. Each KI is operated as an independent research center at the level of a college, receiving support in terms of finance and facilities. In terms of ownership of intellectual property rights, KAIST holds 2,694 domestic patents and 723 international patents so far.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Researchers at KAIST have developed the Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV), a technique of powering vehicles through cables underneath the surface of the road via non-contact magnetic charging (a power source is placed underneath the road surface and power is wirelessly picked up on the vehicle itself). In July 2009 the researchers successfully supplied up to 60% power to a bus over a gap of 12 cm (4.7 in) from a power line embedded in the ground using power supply and pick up technology developed in-house.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In February 2018, the Korea Times published an article which stated that KAIST was starting an AI weapons research project together with the Korean arms manufacturer Hanwa. The allegations were of developing lethal autonomous weapons with Hanwa. This has led to researchers from 30 countries boycotting KAIST, which has denied existence of the program.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "KAIST was ranked 56th worldwide in the QS WUR 2024, 91st worldwide in the THE WUR 2023, 282nd in the USNWR Rankings 2022-2023, and 201-300th in ARWU 2022.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "KAIST was the 111th best-ranked university worldwide in 2022 in terms of aggregate performance across THE, QS, and ARWU, as reported by ARTU.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Before THE and QS started publishing separate rankings in 2010, the jointly published THE–QS World University Rankings ranked KAIST globally at 160th (2004), 143rd (2005), 198th (2006), 132nd (2007), 95th (2008), and 69th (2009).",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "KAIST was ranked as the best university in Republic of Korea and the 7th university in Asia in the Top 100 Asian Universities list, the first regional ranking issued by THE-QS World Rankings. KAIST was again recognized as a number one University in Korea by JoongAng Ilbo Review.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 2019 Thomson Reuters named KAIST the 34th most innovative university in the world and the 2nd most innovative university in the Asia-Pacific region.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "KAIST was ranked 61-70th worldwide in the THE World Reputation Rankings 2022.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In the 2009 THE-QS World University Rankings (in 2010 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and QS World University Rankings parted ways to produce separate rankings) for Engineering & IT, the university was placed 21st in the world and 1st in Korea.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In 2009, KAIST's department of industrial design has also been listed in the top 30 Design Schools by Business Week.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Times Higher Education ranked KAIST the 3rd best university in the world under the age of 50 years in its 2015 league table.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "KAIST graduates ranked 67th worldwide in the Times Higher Education's Global University Employability Ranking 2022, and 77th worldwide in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings 2022.",
"title": "Rankings & Reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Kanghyeon Kim, computer scientist",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "36°22′19″N 127°21′47″E / 36.372°N 127.363°E / 36.372; 127.363",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) is a national research university located in Daedeok Innopolis, Daejeon, South Korea. KAIST was established by the Korean government in 1971 as the nation's first public, research-oriented science and engineering institution. KAIST is considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in the nation. KAIST has been internationally accredited in business education, and hosts the Secretariat of the Association of Asia-Pacific Business Schools (AAPBS). KAIST has 10,504 full-time students and 1,342 faculty researchers and had a total budget of US$765 million in 2013, of which US$459 million was from research contracts. In 2007, KAIST partnered with international institutions and adopted dual degree programs for its students. Its partner institutions include the Technical University of Denmark, Carnegie Mellon University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Technical University of Munich.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-09-26T17:33:00Z
|
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"Template:Infobox university",
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"Template:Div col",
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"Template:In lang",
"Template:AEARU",
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"Template:Infobox South Korean university ranking",
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"Template:Dynamic list",
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"Template:Coord",
"Template:Convert",
"Template:Reflist",
"Template:Cite web",
"Template:APRU"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAIST
|
16,936 |
Kabyle
|
[] |
Kabyle people, an ethnic group in Algeria
Kabyle language
Kabyle alphabet, also known as Berber Latin alphabet
Kabyle grammar
Kabylie, the Kabyle ethnic homeland
Kabyles du Pacifique, a group of Algerians deported to New Caledonia after an uprising in 1871
Kabyle, an ancient Thracian city in southeastern Bulgaria
Kabile, Bulgaria, a modern village near the Thracian city
Kabyle musket
|
2019-05-03T00:00:29Z
|
[
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:Disambiguation"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabyle
|
||
16,938 |
Kaolinite
|
Kaolinite (/ˈkeɪ.ələˌnaɪt, -lɪ-/ KAY-ə-lə-nete, -lih-; also called kaolin) is a clay mineral, with the chemical composition Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet of silica (SiO4) linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedral sheet of alumina (AlO6) octahedra.
Kaolinite is a soft, earthy, usually white, mineral (dioctahedral phyllosilicate clay), produced by the chemical weathering of aluminium silicate minerals like feldspar. It has a low shrink–swell capacity and a low cation-exchange capacity (1–15 meq/100 g).
Rocks that are rich in kaolinite, and halloysite, are known as kaolin (/ˈkeɪ.əlɪn/) or china clay. In many parts of the world kaolin is colored pink-orange-red by iron oxide, giving it a distinct rust hue. Lower concentrations yield white, yellow, or light orange colors. Alternating layers are sometimes found, as at Providence Canyon State Park in Georgia, United States.
Kaolin is an important raw material in many industries and applications. Commercial grades of kaolin are supplied and transported as powder, lumps, semi-dried noodle or slurry. Global production of kaolin in 2021 was estimated to be 45 million tonnes, with a total market value of $US4.24 billion.
The name kaolin is derived from Gaoling (Chinese: 高嶺; pinyin: Gāolǐng; Wade–Giles: Kao-ling; lit. 'high ridge'), a Chinese village near Jingdezhen in southeastern China's Jiangxi Province. The name entered English in 1727 from the French version of the word: kaolin, following François Xavier d'Entrecolles's reports on the making of Jingdezhen porcelain.
Kaolin is occasionally referred to by the antiquated term lithomarge, from the Ancient Greek litho- and Latin marga, meaning 'stone of marl'; presently the name lithomarge can refer to a compacted, massive form of kaolin.
The chemical formula for kaolinite as used in mineralogy is Al2Si2O5(OH)4, however, in ceramics applications the formula is typically written in terms of oxides, thus the formula for kaolinite is Al2O3·2SiO2·2H2O.
Compared with other clay minerals, kaolinite is chemically and structurally simple. It is described as a 1:1 or TO clay mineral because its crystals consist of stacked TO layers. Each TO layer consists of a tetrahedral (T) sheet composed of silicon and oxygen ions bonded to an octahedral (O) sheet composed of oxygen, aluminium, and hydroxyl ions. The T sheet is so called because each silicon ion is surrounded by four oxygen ions forming a tetrahedron. The O sheet is so called because each aluminium ion is surrounded by six oxygen or hydroxyl ions arranged at the corners of an octahedron. The two sheets in each layer are strongly bonded together via shared oxygen ions, while layers are bonded via hydrogen bonding between oxygen on the outer face of the T sheet of one layer and hydroxyl on the outer face of the O sheet of the next layer.
A kaolinite layer has no net electrical charge and so there are no large cations (such as calcium, sodium, or potassium) between layers as with most other clay minerals. This accounts for kaolinite's relatively low ion exchange capacity. The close hydrogen bonding between layers also hinders water molecules from infiltrating between layers, accounting for kaolinite's nonswelling character.
When moistened, the tiny platelike crystals of kaolinite acquire a layer of water molecules that cause crystals to adhere to each other and give kaolin clay its cohesiveness. The bonds are weak enough to allow the plates to slip past each other when the clay is being molded, but strong enough to hold the plates in place and allow the molded clay to retain its shape. When the clay is dried, most of the water molecules are removed, and the plates hydrogen bond directly to each other, so that the dried clay is rigid but still fragile. If the clay is moistened again, it will once more become plastic.
Kaolinite group clays undergo a series of phase transformations upon thermal treatment in air at atmospheric pressure.
High-energy milling of kaolin results in the formation of a mechanochemically amorphized phase similar to metakaolin, although the properties of this solid are quite different. The high-energy milling process is highly inefficient and consumes a large amount of energy.
Below 100°C, exposure to low humidity air will result in the slow evaporation of any liquid water in the kaolin. At low moisture content the mass can be described leather dry, and at near 0% moisture it is referred to as bone dry.
Above 100°C any remaining free water is lost. Above around 400°C hydroxyl ions (OH) are lost from the kaolinite crystal structure in the form of water: the material cannot now be plasticised by absorbing water. This is irreversible, as are subsequent transformations; this is referred to as calcination.
Endothermic dehydration of kaolinite begins at 550–600 °C producing disordered metakaolin, but continuous hydroxyl loss is observed up to 900 °C (1,650 °F). Although historically there was much disagreement concerning the nature of the metakaolin phase, extensive research has led to a general consensus that metakaolin is not a simple mixture of amorphous silica (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3), but rather a complex amorphous structure that retains some longer-range order (but not strictly crystalline) due to stacking of its hexagonal layers.
Further heating to 925–950 °C converts metakaolin to an aluminium-silicon spinel which is sometimes also referred to as a gamma-alumina type structure:
Upon calcination above 1050 °C, the spinel phase nucleates and transforms to platelet mullite and highly crystalline cristobalite:
Finally, at 1400 °C the "needle" form of mullite appears, offering substantial increases in structural strength and heat resistance. This is a structural but not chemical transformation. See stoneware for more information on this form.
Kaolinite is one of the most common minerals; it is mined, as kaolin, in Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Iran, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tanzania, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.
Mantles of kaolinite are common in Western and Northern Europe. The ages of these mantles are Mesozoic to Early Cenozoic.
Kaolinite clay occurs in abundance in soils that have formed from the chemical weathering of rocks in hot, moist climates; for example in tropical rainforest areas. Comparing soils along a gradient towards progressively cooler or drier climates, the proportion of kaolinite decreases, while the proportion of other clay minerals such as illite (in cooler climates) or smectite (in drier climates) increases. Such climatically related differences in clay mineral content are often used to infer changes in climates in the geological past, where ancient soils have been buried and preserved.
In the Institut National pour l'Étude Agronomique au Congo Belge (INEAC) classification system, soils in which the clay fraction is predominantly kaolinite are called kaolisol (from kaolin and soil).
In the US, the main kaolin deposits are found in central Georgia, on a stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard fall line between Augusta and Macon. This area of thirteen counties is called the "white gold" belt; Sandersville is known as the "Kaolin Capital of the World" due to its abundance of kaolin. In the late 1800s, an active kaolin surface-mining industry existed in the extreme southeast corner of Pennsylvania, near the towns of Landenberg and Kaolin, and in what is present-day White Clay Creek Preserve. The product was brought by train to Newark, Delaware, on the Newark-Pomeroy line, along which can still be seen many open-pit clay mines. The deposits were formed between the late Cretaceous and early Paleogene, about 100 to 45 million years ago, in sediments derived from weathered igneous and metakaolin rocks. Kaolin production in the US during 2011 was 5.5 million tons.
During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum sediments deposited in the Esplugafreda area of Spain were enriched with kaolinite from a detrital source due to denudation.
Difficulties are encountered when trying to explain kaolinite formation under atmospheric conditions by extrapolation of thermodynamic data from the more successful high-temperature syntheses. La Iglesia and Van Oosterwijk-Gastuche (1978) thought that the conditions under which kaolinite will nucleate can be deduced from stability diagrams, based as they are on dissolution data. Because of a lack of convincing results in their own experiments, La Iglesia and Van Oosterwijk-Gastuche (1978) had to conclude, however, that there were other, still unknown, factors involved in the low-temperature nucleation of kaolinite. Because of the observed very slow crystallization rates of kaolinite from solution at room temperature Fripiat and Herbillon (1971) postulated the existence of high activation energies in the low-temperature nucleation of kaolinite.
At high temperatures, equilibrium thermodynamic models appear to be satisfactory for the description of kaolinite dissolution and nucleation, because the thermal energy suffices to overcome the energy barriers involved in the nucleation process. The importance of syntheses at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure towards the understanding of the mechanism involved in the nucleation of clay minerals lies in overcoming these energy barriers. As indicated by Caillère and Hénin (1960) the processes involved will have to be studied in well-defined experiments, because it is virtually impossible to isolate the factors involved by mere deduction from complex natural physico-chemical systems such as the soil environment. Fripiat and Herbillon (1971), in a review on the formation of kaolinite, raised the fundamental question how a disordered material (i.e., the amorphous fraction of tropical soils) could ever be transformed into a corresponding ordered structure. This transformation seems to take place in soils without major changes in the environment, in a relatively short period of time, and at ambient temperature (and pressure).
Low-temperature synthesis of clay minerals (with kaolinite as an example) has several aspects. In the first place the silicic acid to be supplied to the growing crystal must be in a monomeric form, i.e., silica should be present in very dilute solution (Caillère et al., 1957; Caillère and Hénin, 1960; Wey and Siffert, 1962; Millot, 1970). In order to prevent the formation of amorphous silica gels precipitating from supersaturated solutions without reacting with the aluminium or magnesium cations to form crystalline silicates, the silicic acid must be present in concentrations below the maximum solubility of amorphous silica. The principle behind this prerequisite can be found in structural chemistry: "Since the polysilicate ions are not of uniform size, they cannot arrange themselves along with the metal ions into a regular crystal lattice." (Iler, 1955, p. 182)
The second aspect of the low-temperature synthesis of kaolinite is that the aluminium cations must be hexacoordinated with respect to oxygen (Caillère and Hénin, 1947; Caillère et al., 1953; Hénin and Robichet, 1955). Gastuche et al. (1962) and Caillère and Hénin (1962) have concluded that kaolinite can only ever be formed when the aluminium hydroxide is in the form of gibbsite. Otherwise, the precipitate formed will be a "mixed alumino-silicic gel" (as Millot, 1970, p. 343 put it). If it were the only requirement, large amounts of kaolinite could be harvested simply by adding gibbsite powder to a silica solution. Undoubtedly a marked degree of adsorption of the silica in solution by the gibbsite surfaces will take place, but, as stated before, mere adsorption does not create the layer lattice typical of kaolinite crystals.
The third aspect is that these two initial components must be incorporated into one mixed crystal with a layer structure. From the following equation (as given by Gastuche and DeKimpe, 1962) for kaolinite formation
it can be seen that five molecules of water must be removed from the reaction for every molecule of kaolinite formed. Field evidence illustrating the importance of the removal of water from the kaolinite reaction has been supplied by Gastuche and DeKimpe (1962). While studying soil formation on a basaltic rock in Kivu (Zaïre), they noted how the occurrence of kaolinite depended on the "degrée de drainage" of the area involved. A clear distinction was found between areas with good drainage (i.e., areas with a marked difference between wet and dry seasons) and those areas with poor drainage (i.e., perennially swampy areas). Kaolinite was only found in the areas with distinct seasonal alternations between wet and dry. The possible significance of alternating wet and dry conditions on the transition of allophane into kaolinite has been stressed by Tamura and Jackson (1953). The role of alternations between wetting and drying on the formation of kaolinite has also been noted by Moore (1964).
Syntheses of kaolinite at high temperatures (more than 100 °C [212 °F]) are relatively well known. There are for example the syntheses of Van Nieuwenberg and Pieters (1929); Noll (1934); Noll (1936); Norton (1939); Roy and Osborn (1954); Roy (1961); Hawkins and Roy (1962); Tomura et al. (1985); Satokawa et al. (1994) and Huertas et al. (1999). Relatively few low-temperature syntheses have become known (cf. Brindley and DeKimpe (1961); DeKimpe (1969); Bogatyrev et al. (1997)).
Laboratory syntheses of kaolinite at room temperature and atmospheric pressure have been described by DeKimpe et al. (1961). From those tests the role of periodicity becomes convincingly clear. DeKimpe et al. (1961) had used daily additions of alumina (as AlCl3·6 H2O) and silica (in the form of ethyl silicate) during at least two months. In addition, adjustments of the pH took place every day by way of adding either hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide. Such daily additions of Si and Al to the solution in combination with the daily titrations with hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide during at least 60 days will have introduced the necessary element of periodicity. Only now the actual role of what has been described as the "aging" (Alterung) of amorphous alumino-silicates (as for example Harder, 1978 had noted) can be fully understood. As such, time is not bringing about any change in a closed system at equilibrium; but a series of alternations of periodically changing conditions (by definition, taking place in an open system) will bring about the low-temperature formation of more and more of the stable phase kaolinite instead of (ill-defined) amorphous alumino-silicates.
As of 2009, up to 70% of kaolin was used in the production of paper. Following reduced demand from the paper industry, resulting from both competing minerals and the effect of digital media, in 2016 the market share was reported to be: paper, 36%; ceramics, 31%; paint, 7% and other, 26%. According to the USGS, in 2021 the global production of kaolin was estimated to be around 45 million tonnes.
Global production of kaolin by country in 2012 was estimated to be:
Some selected typical properties of various ceramic grade kaolins are:
Kaolin is generally recognized as safe, but may cause mild irritation of the skin or mucous membranes. Kaolin products may also contain traces of crystalline silica, a known carcinogen if inhaled.
In the US, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for kaolin exposure in the workplace as 15 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 10 mg/m total exposure TWA 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kaolinite (/ˈkeɪ.ələˌnaɪt, -lɪ-/ KAY-ə-lə-nete, -lih-; also called kaolin) is a clay mineral, with the chemical composition Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet of silica (SiO4) linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedral sheet of alumina (AlO6) octahedra.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kaolinite is a soft, earthy, usually white, mineral (dioctahedral phyllosilicate clay), produced by the chemical weathering of aluminium silicate minerals like feldspar. It has a low shrink–swell capacity and a low cation-exchange capacity (1–15 meq/100 g).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Rocks that are rich in kaolinite, and halloysite, are known as kaolin (/ˈkeɪ.əlɪn/) or china clay. In many parts of the world kaolin is colored pink-orange-red by iron oxide, giving it a distinct rust hue. Lower concentrations yield white, yellow, or light orange colors. Alternating layers are sometimes found, as at Providence Canyon State Park in Georgia, United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kaolin is an important raw material in many industries and applications. Commercial grades of kaolin are supplied and transported as powder, lumps, semi-dried noodle or slurry. Global production of kaolin in 2021 was estimated to be 45 million tonnes, with a total market value of $US4.24 billion.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The name kaolin is derived from Gaoling (Chinese: 高嶺; pinyin: Gāolǐng; Wade–Giles: Kao-ling; lit. 'high ridge'), a Chinese village near Jingdezhen in southeastern China's Jiangxi Province. The name entered English in 1727 from the French version of the word: kaolin, following François Xavier d'Entrecolles's reports on the making of Jingdezhen porcelain.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Kaolin is occasionally referred to by the antiquated term lithomarge, from the Ancient Greek litho- and Latin marga, meaning 'stone of marl'; presently the name lithomarge can refer to a compacted, massive form of kaolin.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The chemical formula for kaolinite as used in mineralogy is Al2Si2O5(OH)4, however, in ceramics applications the formula is typically written in terms of oxides, thus the formula for kaolinite is Al2O3·2SiO2·2H2O.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Compared with other clay minerals, kaolinite is chemically and structurally simple. It is described as a 1:1 or TO clay mineral because its crystals consist of stacked TO layers. Each TO layer consists of a tetrahedral (T) sheet composed of silicon and oxygen ions bonded to an octahedral (O) sheet composed of oxygen, aluminium, and hydroxyl ions. The T sheet is so called because each silicon ion is surrounded by four oxygen ions forming a tetrahedron. The O sheet is so called because each aluminium ion is surrounded by six oxygen or hydroxyl ions arranged at the corners of an octahedron. The two sheets in each layer are strongly bonded together via shared oxygen ions, while layers are bonded via hydrogen bonding between oxygen on the outer face of the T sheet of one layer and hydroxyl on the outer face of the O sheet of the next layer.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A kaolinite layer has no net electrical charge and so there are no large cations (such as calcium, sodium, or potassium) between layers as with most other clay minerals. This accounts for kaolinite's relatively low ion exchange capacity. The close hydrogen bonding between layers also hinders water molecules from infiltrating between layers, accounting for kaolinite's nonswelling character.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "When moistened, the tiny platelike crystals of kaolinite acquire a layer of water molecules that cause crystals to adhere to each other and give kaolin clay its cohesiveness. The bonds are weak enough to allow the plates to slip past each other when the clay is being molded, but strong enough to hold the plates in place and allow the molded clay to retain its shape. When the clay is dried, most of the water molecules are removed, and the plates hydrogen bond directly to each other, so that the dried clay is rigid but still fragile. If the clay is moistened again, it will once more become plastic.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Kaolinite group clays undergo a series of phase transformations upon thermal treatment in air at atmospheric pressure.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "High-energy milling of kaolin results in the formation of a mechanochemically amorphized phase similar to metakaolin, although the properties of this solid are quite different. The high-energy milling process is highly inefficient and consumes a large amount of energy.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Below 100°C, exposure to low humidity air will result in the slow evaporation of any liquid water in the kaolin. At low moisture content the mass can be described leather dry, and at near 0% moisture it is referred to as bone dry.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Above 100°C any remaining free water is lost. Above around 400°C hydroxyl ions (OH) are lost from the kaolinite crystal structure in the form of water: the material cannot now be plasticised by absorbing water. This is irreversible, as are subsequent transformations; this is referred to as calcination.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Endothermic dehydration of kaolinite begins at 550–600 °C producing disordered metakaolin, but continuous hydroxyl loss is observed up to 900 °C (1,650 °F). Although historically there was much disagreement concerning the nature of the metakaolin phase, extensive research has led to a general consensus that metakaolin is not a simple mixture of amorphous silica (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3), but rather a complex amorphous structure that retains some longer-range order (but not strictly crystalline) due to stacking of its hexagonal layers.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Further heating to 925–950 °C converts metakaolin to an aluminium-silicon spinel which is sometimes also referred to as a gamma-alumina type structure:",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Upon calcination above 1050 °C, the spinel phase nucleates and transforms to platelet mullite and highly crystalline cristobalite:",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Finally, at 1400 °C the \"needle\" form of mullite appears, offering substantial increases in structural strength and heat resistance. This is a structural but not chemical transformation. See stoneware for more information on this form.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Kaolinite is one of the most common minerals; it is mined, as kaolin, in Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Iran, Malaysia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tanzania, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Mantles of kaolinite are common in Western and Northern Europe. The ages of these mantles are Mesozoic to Early Cenozoic.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Kaolinite clay occurs in abundance in soils that have formed from the chemical weathering of rocks in hot, moist climates; for example in tropical rainforest areas. Comparing soils along a gradient towards progressively cooler or drier climates, the proportion of kaolinite decreases, while the proportion of other clay minerals such as illite (in cooler climates) or smectite (in drier climates) increases. Such climatically related differences in clay mineral content are often used to infer changes in climates in the geological past, where ancient soils have been buried and preserved.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In the Institut National pour l'Étude Agronomique au Congo Belge (INEAC) classification system, soils in which the clay fraction is predominantly kaolinite are called kaolisol (from kaolin and soil).",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In the US, the main kaolin deposits are found in central Georgia, on a stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard fall line between Augusta and Macon. This area of thirteen counties is called the \"white gold\" belt; Sandersville is known as the \"Kaolin Capital of the World\" due to its abundance of kaolin. In the late 1800s, an active kaolin surface-mining industry existed in the extreme southeast corner of Pennsylvania, near the towns of Landenberg and Kaolin, and in what is present-day White Clay Creek Preserve. The product was brought by train to Newark, Delaware, on the Newark-Pomeroy line, along which can still be seen many open-pit clay mines. The deposits were formed between the late Cretaceous and early Paleogene, about 100 to 45 million years ago, in sediments derived from weathered igneous and metakaolin rocks. Kaolin production in the US during 2011 was 5.5 million tons.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum sediments deposited in the Esplugafreda area of Spain were enriched with kaolinite from a detrital source due to denudation.",
"title": "Occurrence"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Difficulties are encountered when trying to explain kaolinite formation under atmospheric conditions by extrapolation of thermodynamic data from the more successful high-temperature syntheses. La Iglesia and Van Oosterwijk-Gastuche (1978) thought that the conditions under which kaolinite will nucleate can be deduced from stability diagrams, based as they are on dissolution data. Because of a lack of convincing results in their own experiments, La Iglesia and Van Oosterwijk-Gastuche (1978) had to conclude, however, that there were other, still unknown, factors involved in the low-temperature nucleation of kaolinite. Because of the observed very slow crystallization rates of kaolinite from solution at room temperature Fripiat and Herbillon (1971) postulated the existence of high activation energies in the low-temperature nucleation of kaolinite.",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "At high temperatures, equilibrium thermodynamic models appear to be satisfactory for the description of kaolinite dissolution and nucleation, because the thermal energy suffices to overcome the energy barriers involved in the nucleation process. The importance of syntheses at ambient temperature and atmospheric pressure towards the understanding of the mechanism involved in the nucleation of clay minerals lies in overcoming these energy barriers. As indicated by Caillère and Hénin (1960) the processes involved will have to be studied in well-defined experiments, because it is virtually impossible to isolate the factors involved by mere deduction from complex natural physico-chemical systems such as the soil environment. Fripiat and Herbillon (1971), in a review on the formation of kaolinite, raised the fundamental question how a disordered material (i.e., the amorphous fraction of tropical soils) could ever be transformed into a corresponding ordered structure. This transformation seems to take place in soils without major changes in the environment, in a relatively short period of time, and at ambient temperature (and pressure).",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Low-temperature synthesis of clay minerals (with kaolinite as an example) has several aspects. In the first place the silicic acid to be supplied to the growing crystal must be in a monomeric form, i.e., silica should be present in very dilute solution (Caillère et al., 1957; Caillère and Hénin, 1960; Wey and Siffert, 1962; Millot, 1970). In order to prevent the formation of amorphous silica gels precipitating from supersaturated solutions without reacting with the aluminium or magnesium cations to form crystalline silicates, the silicic acid must be present in concentrations below the maximum solubility of amorphous silica. The principle behind this prerequisite can be found in structural chemistry: \"Since the polysilicate ions are not of uniform size, they cannot arrange themselves along with the metal ions into a regular crystal lattice.\" (Iler, 1955, p. 182)",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The second aspect of the low-temperature synthesis of kaolinite is that the aluminium cations must be hexacoordinated with respect to oxygen (Caillère and Hénin, 1947; Caillère et al., 1953; Hénin and Robichet, 1955). Gastuche et al. (1962) and Caillère and Hénin (1962) have concluded that kaolinite can only ever be formed when the aluminium hydroxide is in the form of gibbsite. Otherwise, the precipitate formed will be a \"mixed alumino-silicic gel\" (as Millot, 1970, p. 343 put it). If it were the only requirement, large amounts of kaolinite could be harvested simply by adding gibbsite powder to a silica solution. Undoubtedly a marked degree of adsorption of the silica in solution by the gibbsite surfaces will take place, but, as stated before, mere adsorption does not create the layer lattice typical of kaolinite crystals.",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The third aspect is that these two initial components must be incorporated into one mixed crystal with a layer structure. From the following equation (as given by Gastuche and DeKimpe, 1962) for kaolinite formation",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "it can be seen that five molecules of water must be removed from the reaction for every molecule of kaolinite formed. Field evidence illustrating the importance of the removal of water from the kaolinite reaction has been supplied by Gastuche and DeKimpe (1962). While studying soil formation on a basaltic rock in Kivu (Zaïre), they noted how the occurrence of kaolinite depended on the \"degrée de drainage\" of the area involved. A clear distinction was found between areas with good drainage (i.e., areas with a marked difference between wet and dry seasons) and those areas with poor drainage (i.e., perennially swampy areas). Kaolinite was only found in the areas with distinct seasonal alternations between wet and dry. The possible significance of alternating wet and dry conditions on the transition of allophane into kaolinite has been stressed by Tamura and Jackson (1953). The role of alternations between wetting and drying on the formation of kaolinite has also been noted by Moore (1964).",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Syntheses of kaolinite at high temperatures (more than 100 °C [212 °F]) are relatively well known. There are for example the syntheses of Van Nieuwenberg and Pieters (1929); Noll (1934); Noll (1936); Norton (1939); Roy and Osborn (1954); Roy (1961); Hawkins and Roy (1962); Tomura et al. (1985); Satokawa et al. (1994) and Huertas et al. (1999). Relatively few low-temperature syntheses have become known (cf. Brindley and DeKimpe (1961); DeKimpe (1969); Bogatyrev et al. (1997)).",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Laboratory syntheses of kaolinite at room temperature and atmospheric pressure have been described by DeKimpe et al. (1961). From those tests the role of periodicity becomes convincingly clear. DeKimpe et al. (1961) had used daily additions of alumina (as AlCl3·6 H2O) and silica (in the form of ethyl silicate) during at least two months. In addition, adjustments of the pH took place every day by way of adding either hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide. Such daily additions of Si and Al to the solution in combination with the daily titrations with hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide during at least 60 days will have introduced the necessary element of periodicity. Only now the actual role of what has been described as the \"aging\" (Alterung) of amorphous alumino-silicates (as for example Harder, 1978 had noted) can be fully understood. As such, time is not bringing about any change in a closed system at equilibrium; but a series of alternations of periodically changing conditions (by definition, taking place in an open system) will bring about the low-temperature formation of more and more of the stable phase kaolinite instead of (ill-defined) amorphous alumino-silicates.",
"title": "Synthesis and genesis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "As of 2009, up to 70% of kaolin was used in the production of paper. Following reduced demand from the paper industry, resulting from both competing minerals and the effect of digital media, in 2016 the market share was reported to be: paper, 36%; ceramics, 31%; paint, 7% and other, 26%. According to the USGS, in 2021 the global production of kaolin was estimated to be around 45 million tonnes.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Global production of kaolin by country in 2012 was estimated to be:",
"title": "Production output"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Some selected typical properties of various ceramic grade kaolins are:",
"title": "Typical properties"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kaolin is generally recognized as safe, but may cause mild irritation of the skin or mucous membranes. Kaolin products may also contain traces of crystalline silica, a known carcinogen if inhaled.",
"title": "Safety"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the US, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for kaolin exposure in the workplace as 15 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 10 mg/m total exposure TWA 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday.",
"title": "Safety"
}
] |
Kaolinite ( ; also called kaolin) is a clay mineral, with the chemical composition Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet of silica (SiO4) linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedral sheet of alumina (AlO6) octahedra. Kaolinite is a soft, earthy, usually white, mineral (dioctahedral phyllosilicate clay), produced by the chemical weathering of aluminium silicate minerals like feldspar. It has a low shrink–swell capacity and a low cation-exchange capacity (1–15 meq/100 g). Rocks that are rich in kaolinite, and halloysite, are known as kaolin or china clay. In many parts of the world kaolin is colored pink-orange-red by iron oxide, giving it a distinct rust hue. Lower concentrations yield white, yellow, or light orange colors. Alternating layers are sometimes found, as at Providence Canyon State Park in Georgia, United States. Kaolin is an important raw material in many industries and applications. Commercial grades of kaolin are supplied and transported as powder, lumps, semi-dried noodle or slurry. Global production of kaolin in 2021 was estimated to be 45 million tonnes, with a total market value of $US4.24 billion.
|
2001-10-09T20:56:50Z
|
2023-12-02T00:29:43Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolinite
|
16,941 |
Kawasaki Ki-56
|
The Kawasaki Ki-56 (Japanese: 一式貨物輸送機, Type 1 Freight Transport) was a Japanese two-engine light transport aircraft used during World War II. It was known to the Allies by the reporting name "Thalia". 121 were built between 1940 and 1943.
The Kawasaki Ki-56 was derived from the Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra aircraft that the Kawasaki Kokuki Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (The Kawasaki Aircraft Engineering Company Limited) had built under licence. In September 1939 Kawasaki was asked by the Koku Hombu to design an improved version as Ki-56. A number was also built by Tachikawa Hikoki K.K.
The Japanese invasion of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies campaign began with a paratroop drop from Ki-56 transports on Airfield P1 and the oil refineries near Palembang. Royal Air Force Hawker Hurricane fighters flying from P1 to locate the Japanese invasion fleet passed the incoming Ki-56s, but thought them to be friendly Lockheed Hudsons (also developed from the Lockheed Model 14) returning from a raid. The defending anti-aircraft gunners at P1 were equally fooled, until the parachutes began to open. Once the AA guns opened fire one transport was shot down, another force-landed, and others veered off course, but the paratroop drop was effective and the airfield and oil installations were overrun.
Data from Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft; Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War
General characteristics
Performance
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era
Related lists
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kawasaki Ki-56 (Japanese: 一式貨物輸送機, Type 1 Freight Transport) was a Japanese two-engine light transport aircraft used during World War II. It was known to the Allies by the reporting name \"Thalia\". 121 were built between 1940 and 1943.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The Kawasaki Ki-56 was derived from the Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra aircraft that the Kawasaki Kokuki Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha (The Kawasaki Aircraft Engineering Company Limited) had built under licence. In September 1939 Kawasaki was asked by the Koku Hombu to design an improved version as Ki-56. A number was also built by Tachikawa Hikoki K.K.",
"title": "Design and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The Japanese invasion of Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies campaign began with a paratroop drop from Ki-56 transports on Airfield P1 and the oil refineries near Palembang. Royal Air Force Hawker Hurricane fighters flying from P1 to locate the Japanese invasion fleet passed the incoming Ki-56s, but thought them to be friendly Lockheed Hudsons (also developed from the Lockheed Model 14) returning from a raid. The defending anti-aircraft gunners at P1 were equally fooled, until the parachutes began to open. Once the AA guns opened fire one transport was shot down, another force-landed, and others veered off course, but the paratroop drop was effective and the airfield and oil installations were overrun.",
"title": "Operational history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Data from Encyclopedia of Military Aircraft; Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War",
"title": "Specifications (Ki-56)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "General characteristics",
"title": "Specifications (Ki-56)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Performance",
"title": "Specifications (Ki-56)"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Aircraft of comparable role, configuration, and era",
"title": "See also"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Related lists",
"title": "See also"
}
] |
The Kawasaki Ki-56 was a Japanese two-engine light transport aircraft used during World War II. It was known to the Allies by the reporting name "Thalia". 121 were built between 1940 and 1943.
|
2023-04-10T07:32:02Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawasaki_Ki-56
|
|
16,942 |
MV Wilhelm Gustloff
|
MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states, and German military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.
Originally constructed as a cruise ship for the Nazi Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) organization in 1937, Wilhelm Gustloff had been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German navy) in 1939. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. She was then assigned as a floating barracks for naval personnel in Gotenhafen before being fitted with anti-aircraft guns and put into service to transport evacuees in 1945.
Wilhelm Gustloff was constructed by the Blohm & Voss shipyards. Measuring 208.5 m (684 ft 1 in) long by 23.59 m (77 ft 5 in) wide, with a capacity of 25,484 gross register tons (GRT), she was launched on 5 May 1937.
The ship was originally intended to be named Adolf Hitler but instead was christened after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch, who had been assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936. Adolf Hitler decided on the name change after sitting next to Gustloff's widow during his memorial service. After completing sea trials in the North Sea from 15 to 16 March 1938 she was handed over to her owners.
Wilhelm Gustloff was the first purpose-built cruise ship for the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and used by subsidiary organisation Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). Her purposes were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and to serve as a public relations tool that would present "a more acceptable image of the Third Reich". She was the flagship of the KdF cruise fleet, her last civilian role, until the spring of 1939.
The ship made her unofficial maiden voyage between 24 and 27 March 1938 carrying Austrians in an attempt to convince them to vote for the annexation of Austria by Germany. On 29 March she departed on her second voyage carrying workers and their families from the Blohm & Voss shipyard on a three-day cruise.
For her third voyage Wilhelm Gustloff left Hamburg on 1 April 1938 under the command of Carl Lübbe to join the KdF ships Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise of the North Sea. A storm developed on 3 April with winds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) that forced the four ships apart. Meanwhile, the 1,836 gross ton coal freighter Pegaway, which had departed the Tyne on 2 April for Hamburg, was also caught up in the storm. Cargo and machinery were washed from Pegaway's decks and the ship lost maneuverability as the storm increased in intensity. By 4 April, it was taking on water and slowly sinking.
At 4 am, Captain G. W. Ward of Pegaway issued an SOS when the ship was 20 nautical miles (37 km) northwest of the island of Terschelling, off the coast of the Netherlands. The closest of the ships that answered the distress call was Wilhelm Gustloff, which reached Pegaway at 6 am. She launched her Lifeboat No. 1, with a crew of twelve under the command of Second Officer Meyer. The oar-powered lifeboat was unable to come aside Pegaway in the heavy seas and looked in danger of needing rescuing. Lifeboat No. 6, with a crew of ten under the command of Second Officer Schürmann, was then lowered. As it had a motor, it was better able to handle the waves.
After first assisting their shipmates in Lifeboat No. 1 to head back towards Wilhelm Gustloff, Schürmann was able to reach Pegaway. One by one the 19 men on Pegaway jumped into the sea and were hauled onto Lifeboat No. 6, with both them and the crew of the lifeboat back at Wilhelm Gustloff by 7:45 am. By now a Dutch tugboat had arrived but was unable to save Pegaway, which soon rolled to port and sank. Lifeboat No. 1 had been so badly damaged by the waves that after its crew had climbed up via ladders to the safety of their ship it was set adrift, to later be washed up on the shores of Terschelling on 2 May.
On 8 April 1938 Wilhelm Gustloff, under the command of Captain Lübbe, departed Hamburg for England, where she anchored over 5.6 kilometres (3 nmi) offshore from Tilbury so as to remain in international waters. This allowed her to act as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in England who wished to vote on the approaching plebiscite on Germany's unification with Austria. During 10 April, 1,172 Germans and 806 Austrian eligible voters were ferried between the docks at Tilbury to the ship where 1,968 votes were cast in favour of the union and ten voted against. Once the voting was complete, Wilhelm Gustloff departed, reaching Hamburg on 12 April.
After undertaking a further voyage on 14 to 19 April 1938, the ship went on an Osterfahrt (Easter Voyage) before her actual official maiden voyage, which was undertaken from 21 April to 6 May 1938, when she joined Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise to the Madeira Islands. On the second day of her voyage, the 58-year-old Captain Lübbe died on the bridge from a heart attack. He was replaced by Friedrich Petersen, who commanded Wilhelm Gustloff for the remainder of the cruise. Petersen left the ship until he returned as captain on her fatal voyage.
Between 20 May and 2 June 1939, Wilhelm Gustloff was diverted from her pleasure cruises. With seven other ships in the KdF fleet, she transported the Condor Legion back to Germany from Spain following the victory of the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
From 14 March 1938 until 26 August 1939, the ship took over 80,000 passengers on a total of 60 voyages, all around Europe.
From September 1939 to November 1940, Wilhelm Gustloff served as a hospital ship, officially designated Lazarettschiff D. Beginning on 20 November 1940, medical equipment was removed from the ship and she was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey. As a consequence of the Allied blockade of the German coastline, she was used as a barracks ship for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision) in the port of Gdynia, which had been occupied by Germany and renamed Gotenhafen, located near Danzig (Gdańsk). Wilhelm Gustloff sat in dock there for over four years. In 1942, SS Cap Arcona was used as a stand-in for RMS Titanic in the German film version of the disaster. Filmed in Gotenhafen, the 2nd Submarine Training Division acted as extras in the movie. Eventually, Wilhelm Gustloff was put back into service transporting civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal.
Operation Hannibal was the naval evacuation of German troops and civilians from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states as the Red Army advanced from the east. Wilhelm Gustloff's final voyage was to evacuate civilians, German military personnel, and technicians from Courland, East Prussia, and Danzig-West Prussia. Many had worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic from Gotenhafen to Kiel.
The ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but these did not include the many individuals who boarded the ship without being listed in the official embarkation records. Heinz Schön, a German archivist and Gustloff survivor, researched the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s. He concluded that the ship was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces auxiliaries); 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2 Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision; 373 female naval auxiliary helpers; 162 wounded soldiers; and 8,956 civilians, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew. The passengers, besides civilians, included Gestapo personnel, members of the Organisation Todt, and Nazi officials with their families. The ship was overcrowded, and due to the high temperature and humidity inside, many passengers defied orders not to remove their life jackets. Besides ethnic Germans, the people on board included Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Estonians, and Croatians, some of whom had been victims of Nazi aggression.
The ship left Gotenhafen at 12:30 pm on 30 January 1945, accompanied by two torpedo boats and the passenger liner Hansa, which was carrying civilians and military personnel. Hansa and one torpedo boat developed mechanical problems and could not continue, leaving Wilhelm Gustloff with one torpedo boat escort, Löwe (ex-Gyller). The ship had four captains on board (the Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, two merchant marine captains, and the captain of the U-boat complement housed on the vessel), and they disagreed on the best course of action to guard against submarine attacks. Against the advice of the military commander, Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn (a submariner who argued for a course in shallow waters close to shore and without lights), Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, Friedrich Petersen, decided to head for deep water, which was known to have been cleared of mines. When he was informed by a mysterious radio message of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, Petersen decided to activate his ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark, making Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the dark.
As Wilhelm Gustloff had been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and the Germans did not mark her as a hospital ship, no notification of her operating in a hospital capacity had been given. Since she was transporting military personnel, she did not have any protection as a hospital ship under international accords.
Wilhelm Gustloff was soon sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. The submarine sensor on board the escorting torpedo boat had frozen, rendering it inoperable, as had her anti-aircraft guns, leaving the vessels defenseless. Marinesko followed the ships to their starboard (seaward) side for two hours before making a daring move, surfacing his submarine and steering it around Wilhelm Gustloff's stern, to attack it from the port side closer to shore, from where the attack would be less expected. At around 9 pm (CET), Marinesko ordered his crew to launch four torpedoes at Wilhelm Gustloff's port side, about 30 km (16 nmi; 19 mi) offshore, between Großendorf and Leba.
The three torpedoes that were fired successfully all struck Wilhelm Gustloff on her port side. The first struck the ship's bow, causing watertight doors to seal off the area where off-duty crew members were sleeping. The second hit the accommodations for the women's naval auxiliary, located in the ship's drained swimming pool. It dislodged the pool tiles at high velocity, which caused high casualties; only three of the 373 women quartered there survived. The third torpedo scored a direct hit on the engine room located amidships, disabling all power and communications.
Reportedly, only nine lifeboats could be lowered; the rest had frozen in their davits and had to be broken free. About twenty minutes after the torpedoes' impact, Wilhelm Gustloff suddenly listed so dramatically to port that the lifeboats lowered on the high starboard side crashed into the ship's tilting side, destroying many lifeboats and spilling their occupants.
Many deaths were caused either directly by the torpedoes or drowning in the onrushing water. Some fatalities were due to the initial stampede caused by panicked passengers on the stairs and decks. Many passengers jumped into the icy Baltic. The water temperature in the Baltic Sea in late January is usually around 4 °C (39 °F); however, this was a particularly cold night, with an air temperature of −18 to −10 °C (0 to 14 °F) and ice floes covering the surface. The majority of those who died succumbed to exposure in the freezing water.
Less than 40 minutes after being struck, Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side. She sank bow-first ten minutes later, in 44 m (144 ft) of water.
German forces were able to rescue 1,252 people: the torpedo boat T36 rescued 564; the torpedo boat Löwe, 472; the minesweeper M387, 98; the minesweeper M375, 43; the minesweeper M341, 37; the steamer Göttingen, 28; the torpedo recovery boat (Torpedofangboot) TF19, 7; the freighter Gotenland, two; and the patrol boat (Vorpostenboot) V1703, one baby. Thirteen of the survivors died later. All four captains on Wilhelm Gustloff survived her sinking; an official naval inquiry was initiated only against Lieutenant Commander Zahn. His degree of responsibility was never resolved, however, because of Nazi Germany's collapse in 1945.
The figures from Heinz Schön's research make the loss in the Wilhelm Gustloff sinking to be "9,343 men, women and children". His more recent research is backed up by estimates arrived at by a different method. An Unsolved History episode that aired in March 2003, on the Discovery Channel, undertook a computer analysis of the sinking. Using Maritime Exodus software, it estimated that 9,600 people died of the more than 10,600 on board, by taking into account passenger density based on witness reports, and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking.
Many ships were sunk during the war by the Allies and by the Axis Powers. However, based on the latest estimates of passenger numbers and those known to be saved, the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff remains by far the largest loss of life in maritime history resulting from the sinking of a single vessel.
About 1,000 German naval officers and men were aboard and died in the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff. Women aboard the ship at the time of the sinking were inaccurately described by Soviet propaganda as "SS personnel from the German concentration camps". There were, however, 373 female naval auxiliaries amongst the passengers, only three of whom survived.
On the night of 9–10 February, just eleven days after the sinking, S-13 sank another German ship, General von Steuben, killing about 4,500 people.
Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Captain Marinesko had been facing a court martial due to his alcohol problems and for being caught in a brothel while he and his crew were off duty. Marinesko was deemed by the Soviet government as "not suitable to be a hero". Instead of being awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for the sinking, he was awarded the lesser Order of the Red Banner. He was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the Soviet Navy in October 1945.
In 1960, Marinesko was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension; in 1963 he was given the traditional ceremony due a captain upon the successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later at the age of 50 from cancer. In 1990 Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Author Günter Grass said in an interview published by The New York Times in April 2003: "One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right... They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war."
Noted as "Obstacle No. 73" on Polish navigation charts, and classified as a war grave, Wilhelm Gustloff rests at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E / 55.0729°N 17.4213°E / 55.0729; 17.4213, about 19 nmi (35 km; 22 mi) offshore, east of Łeba and west of Władysławowo (the former Leba and Großendorf, respectively). It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic Sea floor and has attracted much interest from treasure hunters searching for the lost Amber Room. In order to protect the property on board the war grave, as well as the wreck itself and the surrounding environment, the Polish Maritime Office in Gdynia has forbidden diving within a 500 m (1,600 ft) radius of the wreck.
In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and subsequently used as a decoration in a Polish seafood restaurant was lent to the privately funded "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin.
55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E / 55.0729°N 17.4213°E / 55.0729; 17.4213
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states, and German military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Originally constructed as a cruise ship for the Nazi Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) organization in 1937, Wilhelm Gustloff had been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German navy) in 1939. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. She was then assigned as a floating barracks for naval personnel in Gotenhafen before being fitted with anti-aircraft guns and put into service to transport evacuees in 1945.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Wilhelm Gustloff was constructed by the Blohm & Voss shipyards. Measuring 208.5 m (684 ft 1 in) long by 23.59 m (77 ft 5 in) wide, with a capacity of 25,484 gross register tons (GRT), she was launched on 5 May 1937.",
"title": "Construction and naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The ship was originally intended to be named Adolf Hitler but instead was christened after Wilhelm Gustloff, leader of the Nazi Party's Swiss branch, who had been assassinated by a Jewish medical student in 1936. Adolf Hitler decided on the name change after sitting next to Gustloff's widow during his memorial service. After completing sea trials in the North Sea from 15 to 16 March 1938 she was handed over to her owners.",
"title": "Construction and naming"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Wilhelm Gustloff was the first purpose-built cruise ship for the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) and used by subsidiary organisation Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, KdF). Her purposes were to provide recreational and cultural activities for German functionaries and workers, including concerts, cruises, and other holiday trips, and to serve as a public relations tool that would present \"a more acceptable image of the Third Reich\". She was the flagship of the KdF cruise fleet, her last civilian role, until the spring of 1939.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The ship made her unofficial maiden voyage between 24 and 27 March 1938 carrying Austrians in an attempt to convince them to vote for the annexation of Austria by Germany. On 29 March she departed on her second voyage carrying workers and their families from the Blohm & Voss shipyard on a three-day cruise.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "For her third voyage Wilhelm Gustloff left Hamburg on 1 April 1938 under the command of Carl Lübbe to join the KdF ships Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise of the North Sea. A storm developed on 3 April with winds up to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) that forced the four ships apart. Meanwhile, the 1,836 gross ton coal freighter Pegaway, which had departed the Tyne on 2 April for Hamburg, was also caught up in the storm. Cargo and machinery were washed from Pegaway's decks and the ship lost maneuverability as the storm increased in intensity. By 4 April, it was taking on water and slowly sinking.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "At 4 am, Captain G. W. Ward of Pegaway issued an SOS when the ship was 20 nautical miles (37 km) northwest of the island of Terschelling, off the coast of the Netherlands. The closest of the ships that answered the distress call was Wilhelm Gustloff, which reached Pegaway at 6 am. She launched her Lifeboat No. 1, with a crew of twelve under the command of Second Officer Meyer. The oar-powered lifeboat was unable to come aside Pegaway in the heavy seas and looked in danger of needing rescuing. Lifeboat No. 6, with a crew of ten under the command of Second Officer Schürmann, was then lowered. As it had a motor, it was better able to handle the waves.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "After first assisting their shipmates in Lifeboat No. 1 to head back towards Wilhelm Gustloff, Schürmann was able to reach Pegaway. One by one the 19 men on Pegaway jumped into the sea and were hauled onto Lifeboat No. 6, with both them and the crew of the lifeboat back at Wilhelm Gustloff by 7:45 am. By now a Dutch tugboat had arrived but was unable to save Pegaway, which soon rolled to port and sank. Lifeboat No. 1 had been so badly damaged by the waves that after its crew had climbed up via ladders to the safety of their ship it was set adrift, to later be washed up on the shores of Terschelling on 2 May.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "On 8 April 1938 Wilhelm Gustloff, under the command of Captain Lübbe, departed Hamburg for England, where she anchored over 5.6 kilometres (3 nmi) offshore from Tilbury so as to remain in international waters. This allowed her to act as a floating polling station for German and Austrian citizens living in England who wished to vote on the approaching plebiscite on Germany's unification with Austria. During 10 April, 1,172 Germans and 806 Austrian eligible voters were ferried between the docks at Tilbury to the ship where 1,968 votes were cast in favour of the union and ten voted against. Once the voting was complete, Wilhelm Gustloff departed, reaching Hamburg on 12 April.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After undertaking a further voyage on 14 to 19 April 1938, the ship went on an Osterfahrt (Easter Voyage) before her actual official maiden voyage, which was undertaken from 21 April to 6 May 1938, when she joined Der Deutsche, Oceania and Sierra Cordoba on a group cruise to the Madeira Islands. On the second day of her voyage, the 58-year-old Captain Lübbe died on the bridge from a heart attack. He was replaced by Friedrich Petersen, who commanded Wilhelm Gustloff for the remainder of the cruise. Petersen left the ship until he returned as captain on her fatal voyage.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Between 20 May and 2 June 1939, Wilhelm Gustloff was diverted from her pleasure cruises. With seven other ships in the KdF fleet, she transported the Condor Legion back to Germany from Spain following the victory of the Nationalist forces under General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "From 14 March 1938 until 26 August 1939, the ship took over 80,000 passengers on a total of 60 voyages, all around Europe.",
"title": "Cruise ship"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "From September 1939 to November 1940, Wilhelm Gustloff served as a hospital ship, officially designated Lazarettschiff D. Beginning on 20 November 1940, medical equipment was removed from the ship and she was repainted from the hospital ship colors of white with a green stripe to standard naval grey. As a consequence of the Allied blockade of the German coastline, she was used as a barracks ship for approximately 1,000 U-boat trainees of the 2nd Submarine Training Division (2. Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision) in the port of Gdynia, which had been occupied by Germany and renamed Gotenhafen, located near Danzig (Gdańsk). Wilhelm Gustloff sat in dock there for over four years. In 1942, SS Cap Arcona was used as a stand-in for RMS Titanic in the German film version of the disaster. Filmed in Gotenhafen, the 2nd Submarine Training Division acted as extras in the movie. Eventually, Wilhelm Gustloff was put back into service transporting civilians and military personnel as part of Operation Hannibal.",
"title": "Military career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Operation Hannibal was the naval evacuation of German troops and civilians from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states as the Red Army advanced from the east. Wilhelm Gustloff's final voyage was to evacuate civilians, German military personnel, and technicians from Courland, East Prussia, and Danzig-West Prussia. Many had worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic from Gotenhafen to Kiel.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but these did not include the many individuals who boarded the ship without being listed in the official embarkation records. Heinz Schön, a German archivist and Gustloff survivor, researched the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s. He concluded that the ship was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces auxiliaries); 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2 Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision; 373 female naval auxiliary helpers; 162 wounded soldiers; and 8,956 civilians, for a total of 10,582 passengers and crew. The passengers, besides civilians, included Gestapo personnel, members of the Organisation Todt, and Nazi officials with their families. The ship was overcrowded, and due to the high temperature and humidity inside, many passengers defied orders not to remove their life jackets. Besides ethnic Germans, the people on board included Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, Estonians, and Croatians, some of whom had been victims of Nazi aggression.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "The ship left Gotenhafen at 12:30 pm on 30 January 1945, accompanied by two torpedo boats and the passenger liner Hansa, which was carrying civilians and military personnel. Hansa and one torpedo boat developed mechanical problems and could not continue, leaving Wilhelm Gustloff with one torpedo boat escort, Löwe (ex-Gyller). The ship had four captains on board (the Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, two merchant marine captains, and the captain of the U-boat complement housed on the vessel), and they disagreed on the best course of action to guard against submarine attacks. Against the advice of the military commander, Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn (a submariner who argued for a course in shallow waters close to shore and without lights), Wilhelm Gustloff's captain, Friedrich Petersen, decided to head for deep water, which was known to have been cleared of mines. When he was informed by a mysterious radio message of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, Petersen decided to activate his ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark, making Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the dark.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "As Wilhelm Gustloff had been fitted with anti-aircraft guns, and the Germans did not mark her as a hospital ship, no notification of her operating in a hospital capacity had been given. Since she was transporting military personnel, she did not have any protection as a hospital ship under international accords.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Wilhelm Gustloff was soon sighted by the Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. The submarine sensor on board the escorting torpedo boat had frozen, rendering it inoperable, as had her anti-aircraft guns, leaving the vessels defenseless. Marinesko followed the ships to their starboard (seaward) side for two hours before making a daring move, surfacing his submarine and steering it around Wilhelm Gustloff's stern, to attack it from the port side closer to shore, from where the attack would be less expected. At around 9 pm (CET), Marinesko ordered his crew to launch four torpedoes at Wilhelm Gustloff's port side, about 30 km (16 nmi; 19 mi) offshore, between Großendorf and Leba.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The three torpedoes that were fired successfully all struck Wilhelm Gustloff on her port side. The first struck the ship's bow, causing watertight doors to seal off the area where off-duty crew members were sleeping. The second hit the accommodations for the women's naval auxiliary, located in the ship's drained swimming pool. It dislodged the pool tiles at high velocity, which caused high casualties; only three of the 373 women quartered there survived. The third torpedo scored a direct hit on the engine room located amidships, disabling all power and communications.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Reportedly, only nine lifeboats could be lowered; the rest had frozen in their davits and had to be broken free. About twenty minutes after the torpedoes' impact, Wilhelm Gustloff suddenly listed so dramatically to port that the lifeboats lowered on the high starboard side crashed into the ship's tilting side, destroying many lifeboats and spilling their occupants.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Many deaths were caused either directly by the torpedoes or drowning in the onrushing water. Some fatalities were due to the initial stampede caused by panicked passengers on the stairs and decks. Many passengers jumped into the icy Baltic. The water temperature in the Baltic Sea in late January is usually around 4 °C (39 °F); however, this was a particularly cold night, with an air temperature of −18 to −10 °C (0 to 14 °F) and ice floes covering the surface. The majority of those who died succumbed to exposure in the freezing water.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Less than 40 minutes after being struck, Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side. She sank bow-first ten minutes later, in 44 m (144 ft) of water.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "German forces were able to rescue 1,252 people: the torpedo boat T36 rescued 564; the torpedo boat Löwe, 472; the minesweeper M387, 98; the minesweeper M375, 43; the minesweeper M341, 37; the steamer Göttingen, 28; the torpedo recovery boat (Torpedofangboot) TF19, 7; the freighter Gotenland, two; and the patrol boat (Vorpostenboot) V1703, one baby. Thirteen of the survivors died later. All four captains on Wilhelm Gustloff survived her sinking; an official naval inquiry was initiated only against Lieutenant Commander Zahn. His degree of responsibility was never resolved, however, because of Nazi Germany's collapse in 1945.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The figures from Heinz Schön's research make the loss in the Wilhelm Gustloff sinking to be \"9,343 men, women and children\". His more recent research is backed up by estimates arrived at by a different method. An Unsolved History episode that aired in March 2003, on the Discovery Channel, undertook a computer analysis of the sinking. Using Maritime Exodus software, it estimated that 9,600 people died of the more than 10,600 on board, by taking into account passenger density based on witness reports, and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the sinking.",
"title": "Operation Hannibal – evacuation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Many ships were sunk during the war by the Allies and by the Axis Powers. However, based on the latest estimates of passenger numbers and those known to be saved, the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff remains by far the largest loss of life in maritime history resulting from the sinking of a single vessel.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "About 1,000 German naval officers and men were aboard and died in the sinking of Wilhelm Gustloff. Women aboard the ship at the time of the sinking were inaccurately described by Soviet propaganda as \"SS personnel from the German concentration camps\". There were, however, 373 female naval auxiliaries amongst the passengers, only three of whom survived.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "On the night of 9–10 February, just eleven days after the sinking, S-13 sank another German ship, General von Steuben, killing about 4,500 people.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Captain Marinesko had been facing a court martial due to his alcohol problems and for being caught in a brothel while he and his crew were off duty. Marinesko was deemed by the Soviet government as \"not suitable to be a hero\". Instead of being awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union for the sinking, he was awarded the lesser Order of the Red Banner. He was downgraded in rank to lieutenant and dishonorably discharged from the Soviet Navy in October 1945.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "In 1960, Marinesko was reinstated as captain third class and granted a full pension; in 1963 he was given the traditional ceremony due a captain upon the successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later at the age of 50 from cancer. In 1990 Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Author Günter Grass said in an interview published by The New York Times in April 2003: \"One of the many reasons I wrote Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right... They said the tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it was a result of war, a terrible result of war.\"",
"title": "Aftermath"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Noted as \"Obstacle No. 73\" on Polish navigation charts, and classified as a war grave, Wilhelm Gustloff rests at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E / 55.0729°N 17.4213°E / 55.0729; 17.4213, about 19 nmi (35 km; 22 mi) offshore, east of Łeba and west of Władysławowo (the former Leba and Großendorf, respectively). It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic Sea floor and has attracted much interest from treasure hunters searching for the lost Amber Room. In order to protect the property on board the war grave, as well as the wreck itself and the surrounding environment, the Polish Maritime Office in Gdynia has forbidden diving within a 500 m (1,600 ft) radius of the wreck.",
"title": "Wreckage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and subsequently used as a decoration in a Polish seafood restaurant was lent to the privately funded \"Forced Paths\" exhibition in Berlin.",
"title": "Wreckage"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E / 55.0729°N 17.4213°E / 55.0729; 17.4213",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating civilians and military personnel from East Prussia and the German-occupied Baltic states, and German military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) as the Red Army advanced. By one estimate, 9,400 people died, making it the largest loss of life in a single ship sinking in history. Originally constructed as a cruise ship for the Nazi Strength Through Joy organization in 1937, Wilhelm Gustloff had been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine in 1939. She served as a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. She was then assigned as a floating barracks for naval personnel in Gotenhafen before being fitted with anti-aircraft guns and put into service to transport evacuees in 1945.
|
2001-10-19T02:56:16Z
|
2023-12-23T06:00:22Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff
|
16,947 |
Kerberos (protocol)
|
Kerberos (/ˈkɜːrbərɒs/) is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily at a client–server model, and it provides mutual authentication—both the user and the server verify each other's identity. Kerberos protocol messages are protected against eavesdropping and replay attacks.
Kerberos builds on symmetric-key cryptography and requires a trusted third party, and optionally may use public-key cryptography during certain phases of authentication. Kerberos uses UDP port 88 by default.
The protocol was named after the character Kerberos (or Cerberus) from Greek mythology, the ferocious three-headed guard dog of Hades.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed Kerberos in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Its first version was primarily designed by Steve Miller and Clifford Neuman based on the earlier Needham–Schroeder symmetric-key protocol. Kerberos versions 1 through 3 were experimental and not released outside of MIT.
Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989. Since Kerberos 4 was developed in the United States, and since it used the Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption algorithm, U.S. export control restrictions prevented it from being exported to other countries. MIT created an exportable version of Kerberos 4 with all encryption code removed, called "Bones". Eric Young of Australia's Bond University reimplemented DES into Bones, in a version called "eBones", which could be freely used in any country. Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology released another reimplementation called KTH-KRB.
Neuman and John Kohl published version 5 in 1993 with the intention of overcoming existing limitations and security problems. Version 5 appeared as RFC 1510, which was then made obsolete by RFC 4120 in 2005.
In 2005, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Kerberos working group updated specifications. Updates included:
MIT makes an implementation of Kerberos freely available, under copyright permissions similar to those used for BSD. In 2007, MIT formed the Kerberos Consortium to foster continued development. Founding sponsors include vendors such as Oracle, Apple Inc., Google, Microsoft, Centrify Corporation and TeamF1 Inc., and academic institutions such as the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Stanford University, MIT, and vendors such as CyberSafe offering commercially supported versions.
The client authenticates itself to the Authentication Server (AS) which forwards the username to a key distribution center (KDC). The KDC issues a ticket-granting ticket (TGT), which is time stamped and encrypts it using the ticket-granting service's (TGS) secret key and returns the encrypted result to the user's workstation. This is done infrequently, typically at user logon; the TGT expires at some point although it may be transparently renewed by the user's session manager while they are logged in.
When the client needs to communicate with a service on another node (a "principal", in Kerberos parlance), the client sends the TGT to the TGS, which usually shares the same host as the KDC. The service must have already been registered with the TGS with a Service Principal Name (SPN). The client uses the SPN to request access to this service. After verifying that the TGT is valid and that the user is permitted to access the requested service, the TGS issues ticket and session keys to the client. The client then sends the ticket to the service server (SS) along with its service request.
The protocol is described in detail below.
Windows 2000 and later versions use Kerberos as their default authentication method. Some Microsoft additions to the Kerberos suite of protocols are documented in RFC 3244 "Microsoft Windows 2000 Kerberos Change Password and Set Password Protocols". RFC 4757 documents Microsoft's use of the RC4 cipher. While Microsoft uses and extends the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.
Kerberos is used as the preferred authentication method: in general, joining a client to a Windows domain means enabling Kerberos as the default protocol for authentications from that client to services in the Windows domain and all domains with trust relationships to that domain.
In contrast, when either client or server or both are not joined to a domain (or not part of the same trusted domain environment), Windows will instead use NTLM for authentication between client and server.
Internet web applications can enforce Kerberos as an authentication method for domain-joined clients by using APIs provided under SSPI.
Microsoft Windows and Windows Server include setspn, a command-line utility that can be used to read, modify, or delete the Service Principal Names (SPN) for an Active Directory service account.
Many Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, Apple's macOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle's Solaris, IBM's AIX, HP-UX and others, include software for Kerberos authentication of users or services. A variety of non-Unix like operating systems such as z/OS, IBM i and OpenVMS also feature Kerberos support. Embedded implementation of the Kerberos V authentication protocol for client agents and network services running on embedded platforms is also available from companies .
The Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher can be used in combination with Kerberos, but is no longer an Internet standard because it is weak. Security vulnerabilities exist in products that implement legacy versions of Kerberos which lack support for newer encryption ciphers like AES.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kerberos (/ˈkɜːrbərɒs/) is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily at a client–server model, and it provides mutual authentication—both the user and the server verify each other's identity. Kerberos protocol messages are protected against eavesdropping and replay attacks.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kerberos builds on symmetric-key cryptography and requires a trusted third party, and optionally may use public-key cryptography during certain phases of authentication. Kerberos uses UDP port 88 by default.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The protocol was named after the character Kerberos (or Cerberus) from Greek mythology, the ferocious three-headed guard dog of Hades.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed Kerberos in 1988 to protect network services provided by Project Athena. Its first version was primarily designed by Steve Miller and Clifford Neuman based on the earlier Needham–Schroeder symmetric-key protocol. Kerberos versions 1 through 3 were experimental and not released outside of MIT.",
"title": "History and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Kerberos version 4, the first public version, was released on January 24, 1989. Since Kerberos 4 was developed in the United States, and since it used the Data Encryption Standard (DES) encryption algorithm, U.S. export control restrictions prevented it from being exported to other countries. MIT created an exportable version of Kerberos 4 with all encryption code removed, called \"Bones\". Eric Young of Australia's Bond University reimplemented DES into Bones, in a version called \"eBones\", which could be freely used in any country. Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology released another reimplementation called KTH-KRB.",
"title": "History and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Neuman and John Kohl published version 5 in 1993 with the intention of overcoming existing limitations and security problems. Version 5 appeared as RFC 1510, which was then made obsolete by RFC 4120 in 2005.",
"title": "History and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 2005, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Kerberos working group updated specifications. Updates included:",
"title": "History and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "MIT makes an implementation of Kerberos freely available, under copyright permissions similar to those used for BSD. In 2007, MIT formed the Kerberos Consortium to foster continued development. Founding sponsors include vendors such as Oracle, Apple Inc., Google, Microsoft, Centrify Corporation and TeamF1 Inc., and academic institutions such as the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Stanford University, MIT, and vendors such as CyberSafe offering commercially supported versions.",
"title": "History and development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The client authenticates itself to the Authentication Server (AS) which forwards the username to a key distribution center (KDC). The KDC issues a ticket-granting ticket (TGT), which is time stamped and encrypts it using the ticket-granting service's (TGS) secret key and returns the encrypted result to the user's workstation. This is done infrequently, typically at user logon; the TGT expires at some point although it may be transparently renewed by the user's session manager while they are logged in.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "When the client needs to communicate with a service on another node (a \"principal\", in Kerberos parlance), the client sends the TGT to the TGS, which usually shares the same host as the KDC. The service must have already been registered with the TGS with a Service Principal Name (SPN). The client uses the SPN to request access to this service. After verifying that the TGT is valid and that the user is permitted to access the requested service, the TGS issues ticket and session keys to the client. The client then sends the ticket to the service server (SS) along with its service request.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The protocol is described in detail below.",
"title": "Protocol"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Windows 2000 and later versions use Kerberos as their default authentication method. Some Microsoft additions to the Kerberos suite of protocols are documented in RFC 3244 \"Microsoft Windows 2000 Kerberos Change Password and Set Password Protocols\". RFC 4757 documents Microsoft's use of the RC4 cipher. While Microsoft uses and extends the Kerberos protocol, it does not use the MIT software.",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kerberos is used as the preferred authentication method: in general, joining a client to a Windows domain means enabling Kerberos as the default protocol for authentications from that client to services in the Windows domain and all domains with trust relationships to that domain.",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In contrast, when either client or server or both are not joined to a domain (or not part of the same trusted domain environment), Windows will instead use NTLM for authentication between client and server.",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Internet web applications can enforce Kerberos as an authentication method for domain-joined clients by using APIs provided under SSPI.",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Microsoft Windows and Windows Server include setspn, a command-line utility that can be used to read, modify, or delete the Service Principal Names (SPN) for an Active Directory service account.",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Many Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, Apple's macOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle's Solaris, IBM's AIX, HP-UX and others, include software for Kerberos authentication of users or services. A variety of non-Unix like operating systems such as z/OS, IBM i and OpenVMS also feature Kerberos support. Embedded implementation of the Kerberos V authentication protocol for client agents and network services running on embedded platforms is also available from companies .",
"title": "Support by operating systems"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher can be used in combination with Kerberos, but is no longer an Internet standard because it is weak. Security vulnerabilities exist in products that implement legacy versions of Kerberos which lack support for newer encryption ciphers like AES.",
"title": "Security"
}
] |
Kerberos is a computer-network authentication protocol that works on the basis of tickets to allow nodes communicating over a non-secure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure manner. Its designers aimed it primarily at a client–server model, and it provides mutual authentication—both the user and the server verify each other's identity. Kerberos protocol messages are protected against eavesdropping and replay attacks. Kerberos builds on symmetric-key cryptography and requires a trusted third party, and optionally may use public-key cryptography during certain phases of authentication. Kerberos uses UDP port 88 by default. The protocol was named after the character Kerberos from Greek mythology, the ferocious three-headed guard dog of Hades.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-12T21:15:56Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_(protocol)
|
16,948 |
Ketamine
|
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a treatment for depression, and as a pain management tool. Ketamine is a novel compound that was derived from phencyclidine in 1962 in pursuit of a safer anesthetic with fewer hallucinogenic effects.
At anesthetic doses, ketamine induces a state of dissociative anesthesia, a trance-like state providing pain relief, sedation, and amnesia. The distinguishing features of ketamine as anesthesia are preserved breathing and airway reflexes, stimulated heart function with increased blood pressure, and moderate bronchodilation. At lower, sub-anesthetic doses, ketamine is a promising agent for pain and treatment-resistant depression. As with many antidepressants, the results of a single administration of ketamine wane with time. The long-term effects of repeated use are largely unknown, and are an area of active investigation.
Liver and urinary toxicity have been reported among regular users of high doses of ketamine for recreational purposes. Ketamine is an NMDA receptor antagonist, accounting for most of its psychoactive effects.
Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 and approved for use in the United States in 1970. It has been regularly used in veterinary medicine and was extensively used for surgical anesthesia in the Vietnam War. Along with other psychotropic drugs, it is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. It is available as a generic medication. When used as a recreational drug, it is found both in crystalline powder and liquid form, and is often referred to by recreational users as "Special K" or simply "K". It is used as a recreational drug for its hallucinogenic and dissociative effects.
The use of ketamine in anesthesia reflects its characteristics. It is a drug of choice for short-term procedures when muscle relaxation is not required. The effect of ketamine on the respiratory and circulatory systems is different from that of other anesthetics. It suppresses breathing much less than most other available anesthetics. When used at anesthetic doses, ketamine usually stimulates rather than depresses the circulatory system. Protective airway reflexes are preserved and it is sometimes possible to administer ketamine anesthesia without protective measures to the airways. Psychotomimetic effects limit the acceptance of ketamine; however, lamotrigine and nimodipine decrease psychotomimetic effects and can be counteracted also by benzodiazepines administered or propofol. Ketofol is a combination of ketamine and propofol.
Ketamine is frequently used in severely injured people and appears to be safe in this group. It has been widely used for emergency surgery in field conditions in war zones, for example, during the Vietnam War. A 2011 clinical practice guideline supports the use of ketamine as a sedative in emergency medicine, including during physically painful procedures. It is the drug of choice for people in traumatic shock who are at risk of hypotension. Ketamine is unlikely to lower blood pressure, which is dangerous for people with severe head injury; in fact, it can raise blood pressure, often making it useful in treating such injuries.
Ketamine is an option in children as the sole anesthetic for minor procedures or as an induction agent followed by neuromuscular blocker and tracheal intubation In particular, children with cyanotic heart disease and neuromuscular disorders are good candidates for ketamine anesthesia.
Due to the bronchodilating properties of ketamine it can be used for anesthesia in people with asthma, chronic obstructive airway disease, and with severe reactive airway disease including active bronchospasm.
Ketamine infusions are used for acute pain treatment in emergency departments and in the perioperative period for individuals with refractory pain. The doses are lower than those used for anesthesia; they are usually referred to as sub-anesthetic doses. Adjunctive to morphine or on its own, ketamine reduces morphine use, pain level, nausea, and vomiting after surgery. Ketamine is likely to be most beneficial for surgical patients when severe post-operative pain is expected, and for opioid-tolerant patients.
Ketamine is especially useful in the prehospital setting, due to its effectiveness and low risk of respiratory depression. Ketamine has similar efficacy to opioids in a hospital emergency department setting for management of acute pain and for control of procedural pain. It may also prevent opioid-induced hyperalgesia and postanesthetic shivering.
For chronic pain, ketamine is used as an intravenous analgesic, particularly if the pain is neuropathic. It has the added benefit of counteracting spinal sensitization or wind-up phenomena experienced with chronic pain. In multiple clinical trials, ketamine infusions delivered short-term pain relief in neuropathic pain diagnoses, pain after traumatic spine injury, fibromyalgia, and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). However, the 2018 consensus guidelines on chronic pain concluded that, overall, there is only weak evidence in favor of ketamine use in spinal injury pain, moderate evidence in favor of ketamine for CRPS, and weak or no evidence for ketamine in mixed neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, and cancer pain. In particular, only for CRPS there is evidence of medium to longer term pain relief.
Ketamine is a rapid-acting antidepressant, although its effect is transient. Intravenous ketamine infusion in treatment-resistant depression may result in improved mood within 4 hours reaching the peak at 24 hours. A single dose of intravenous ketamine has been shown to result in a response rate greater than 60% as early as 4.5 hours after the dose (with a sustained effect after 24 hours) and greater than 40% after 7 days. Although there are only a few pilot studies studying the optimal dose, increasing evidence suggests that 0.5 mg/kg dose injected over 40 minutes gives an optimal outcome. The antidepressant effect of ketamine is diminished at 7 days, and most people relapse within 10 days, although for a significant minority the improvement may last 30 days or more. One of the main challenges with ketamine treatment can be the length of time that the antidepressant effects lasts after finishing a course of treatment. A possible option may be maintenance therapy with ketamine which usually runs twice a week to once in two weeks. Ketamine may decrease suicidal thoughts for up to three days after the injection.
An enantiomer of ketamine – esketamine commercially sold as Spravato – was approved as an antidepressant by the European Medicines Agency in 2019. Esketamine was approved as a nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression in the United States and elsewhere in 2019 (see Esketamine and Depression). The Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) recommends esketamine as a third-line treatment for depression.
A Cochrane review of randomized controlled trials in adults with unipolar major depressive disorder, found that when compared with placebo, people treated with either ketamine or esketamine experienced reduction or remission of symptoms lasting 1 to 7 days. There were 18.7% (4.1 to 40.4%) more people reporting some benefit and 9.6% (0.2 to 39.4%) more who achieved remission within 24 hours of ketamine treatment. Among people receiving esketamine, 2.1% (2.5 to 24.4%) more encountered some relief at 24 hours and 10.3% (4.5 to 18.2%) more had few or no symptoms. These effects did not persist beyond one week, although higher dropout rate in some studies mean that the duration of benefit remains unclear.
Ketamine may partially improve depressive symptoms among people with bipolar depression, at 24 hours after treatment, but not 3 or more days. Potentially, 10 more people with bipolar depression per 1000 may experience brief improvement, but not cessation of symptoms, one day following treatment. These estimates are based on limited available research.
In February 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert to health care professionals concerning compounded nasal spray products containing ketamine intended to treat depression: "There is no FDA-approved ketamine nasal spray product. Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved, which means FDA has not evaluated their safety, effectiveness, or quality prior to marketing."
Most people who were able to remember their dreams during ketamine anesthesia report near-death experiences (NDE) when the widest possible definition of an NDE is used. Ketamine can reproduce features that commonly have been associated with NDEs. A 2019 large-scale study found that written reports of ketamine experiences had a high degree of similarity to written reports of NDE in comparison to other written reports of drug experiences.
Ketamine is used to treat status epilepticus that has not responded to standard treatments, but only case studies and no randomized controlled trials support its use.
Ketamine has been suggested as a possible therapy for children with severe acute asthma who do not respond to standard treatment. This is due to its bronchodilator effects. A 2012 Cochrane review found there were minimal adverse effects reported, but the limited studies showed no significant benefit.
Some major contraindications for ketamine are:
At anesthetic doses, 10–20% of adults and 1–2% of children experience adverse psychiatric reactions that occur during emergence from anesthesia, ranging from dreams and dysphoria to hallucinations and emergence delirium. Psychotomimetic effects decrease adding lamotrigine and nimodipine and can be counteracted by pretreatment with a benzodiazepine or propofol. Ketamine anesthesia commonly causes tonic-clonic movements (greater than 10% of people) and rarely hypertonia. Vomiting can be expected in 5–15% of the patients; pretreatment with propofol mitigates it as well. Laryngospasm occurs only rarely with ketamine. Ketamine, generally, stimulates breathing; however, in the first 2–3 minutes of a high-dose rapid intravenous injection it may cause a transient respiratory depression.
At lower sub-anesthetic doses, psychiatric side effects are prominent. Most people feel strange, spacey, woozy, or a sense of floating, or have visual distortions or numbness. Also very frequent (20–50%) are difficulty speaking, confusion, euphoria, drowsiness, and difficulty concentrating. The symptoms of psychosis such as going into a hole, disappearing, feeling as if melting, experiencing colors, and hallucinations are described by 6–10% of people. Dizziness, blurred vision, dry mouth, hypertension, nausea, increased or decreased body temperature, or feeling flushed are the common (>10%) non-psychiatric side effects. All these adverse effects are most pronounced by the end of the injection, dramatically reduced 40 minutes afterward, and completely disappear within 4 hours after the injection.
Urinary toxicity occurs primarily in people who use large amounts of ketamine routinely, with 20–30% of frequent users having bladder complaints. It includes a range of disorders from cystitis to hydronephrosis to kidney failure. The typical symptoms of ketamine-induced cystitis are frequent urination, dysuria, and urinary urgency sometimes accompanied by pain during urination and blood in urine. The damage to the bladder wall has similarities to both interstitial and eosinophilic cystitis. The wall is thickened and the functional bladder capacity is as low as 10–150 mL. Studies indicate that ketamine-induced cystitis is caused by ketamine and its metabolites directly interacting with urothelium, resulting in damage of the epithelial cells of the bladder lining and increased permeability of the urothelial barrier which results in clinical symptoms.
Management of ketamine-induced cystitis involves ketamine cessation as the first step. This is followed by NSAIDs and anticholinergics and, if the response is insufficient, by tramadol. The second line treatments are epithelium-protective agents such as oral pentosan polysulfate or intravesical (intra-bladder) instillation of hyaluronic acid. Intravesical botulinum toxin is also useful.
Liver toxicity of ketamine involves higher doses and repeated administration. In a group of chronic high dose ketamine users, the frequency of liver injury was reported to be about 10%. There are case reports of increased liver enzymes involving ketamine treatment of chronic pain. Chronic ketamine abuse has also been associated with biliary colic, cachexia, gastrointestinal diseases, hepatobiliary disorder, and acute kidney injury.
Although the incidence of ketamine dependence is unknown, some people who regularly use ketamine develop ketamine dependence. Animal experiments also confirm the risk of misuse. Additionally, the rapid onset of effects following insufflation may increase potential use as a recreational drug. The short duration of effects promotes bingeing. Ketamine tolerance rapidly develops, even with repeated medical use, prompting the use of higher doses. Some daily users reported withdrawal symptoms, primarily anxiety, shaking, sweating, and palpitations, following the attempts to stop. Cognitive deficits as well as increased dissociation and delusion symptoms were observed in frequent recreational users of ketamine.
Ketamine potentiates the sedative effects of propofol and midazolam. Naltrexone potentiates psychotomimetic effects of a low dose of ketamine, while lamotrigine and nimodipine decrease them. Clonidine reduces the increase of salivation, heart-rate and blood-pressure during ketamine anesthesia and decreases the incidence of nightmares.
Clinical observations suggest that benzodiazepines may diminish the antidepressant effects of ketamine. It appears most conventional antidepressants can be safely combined with ketamine.
Pore blocking of the NMDA receptor is responsible for the anesthetic, analgesic, and psychotomimetic effects of ketamine. Blocking of the NMDA receptor results in analgesia by preventing central sensitization in dorsal horn neurons; in other words, ketamine's actions interfere with pain transmission in the spinal cord.
The mechanism of action of ketamine in alleviating depression is not well understood, and is an area of active investigation. Possible mechanisms include direct action on the NMDA receptor, downstream effects on regulators such as BDNF and mTOR, and effects of ketamine's metabolites such as hydroxynorketamine. It is not clear whether NMDA receptor is solely responsible for this action or interactions with other receptors are also necessary. It is also not clear whether ketamine alone is sufficient for the antidepressive action or its metabolites also are important. In any case, it has been elucidated that acute blockade of NMDA receptors in the brain results in an increase in the release of glutamate, which leads to an activation of α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptors (AMPA receptors), which in turn modulate a variety of downstream signaling pathways to influence neurotransmission in the limbic system and mediate antidepressant effects of NMDA receptor antagonists like ketamine. Such downstream actions of this activation of AMPA receptors include upregulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and activation of its signaling receptor tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB), activation of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, deactivation of glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3), and inhibition of the phosphorylation of the eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF2) kinase. In addition to blockade of the NMDA receptor, the active metabolite of ketamine hydroxynorketamine, which does not interact importantly with the NMDA receptor, but nonetheless indirectly activates AMPA receptors similarly, may also or alternatively be involved in the rapid-onset antidepressant effects of ketamine. Recent research has elucidated that an acute inhibition of the lateral habenula, a part of the brain in the limbic system that has been referred to as the "anti-reward center" (projecting to and inhibiting the mesolimbic reward pathway and modulating other limbic areas), may be involved in the antidepressant effects of ketamine.
Ketamine is a mixture of equal amounts of two enantiomers: esketamine and arketamine. Esketamine is a more potent NMDA receptor pore blocker and dissociative hallucinogen than arketamine. Because of the hypothesis that NMDA receptor antagonism underlies the antidepressant effects of ketamine, esketamine was developed as an antidepressant. However, multiple other NMDA receptor antagonists, including memantine, lanicemine, rislenemdaz, rapastinel, and 4-chlorokynurenine, thus far have failed to demonstrate sufficient effectiveness for depression. Furthermore, animal research indicates that arketamine, the enantiomer with a weaker NMDA receptor antagonism, as well as (2R,6R)-hydroxynorketamine, the metabolite with negligible affinity for the NMDA receptor, but a potent alpha-7 nicotinic receptor antagonist may have antidepressive action. It is now argued that NMDA receptor antagonism may not be primarily responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine.
Ketamine principally acts as a pore blocker of the NMDA receptor, an ionotropic glutamate receptor. The S-(+) and R-(–) stereoisomers of ketamine bind to the dizocilpine site of the NMDA receptor with different affinities, the former showing approximately 3- to 4-fold greater affinity for the receptor than the latter. As a result, the S isomer is a more potent anesthetic and analgesic than its R counterpart.
Ketamine may interact with and inhibit the NMDAR via another allosteric site on the receptor.
With a couple of exceptions, ketamine actions at other receptors are far weaker than ketamine's antagonism of the NMDA receptor (see the activity table to the right).
Although ketamine is a very weak ligand of the monoamine transporters (Ki > 60 μM), it has been suggested that it may interact with allosteric sites on the monoamine transporters to produce monoamine reuptake inhibition. However, no functional inhibition (IC50) of the human monoamine transporters has been observed with ketamine or its metabolites at concentrations of up to 10,000 nM. Moreover, animal studies and at least three human case reports have found no interaction between ketamine and the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) tranylcypromine, which is of importance as the combination of a monoamine reuptake inhibitor with an MAOI can produce severe toxicity such as serotonin syndrome or hypertensive crisis. Collectively, these findings shed doubt on the involvement of monoamine reuptake inhibition in the effects of ketamine in humans. Ketamine has been found to increase dopaminergic neurotransmission in the brain, but instead of being due to dopamine reuptake inhibition, this may be via indirect/downstream mechanisms, namely through antagonism of the NMDA receptor.
Whether ketamine is an agonist of D2 receptors is controversial. Early research by the Philip Seeman group found ketamine to be a D2 partial agonist with the potency similar to that of its NMDA receptor antagonism. However, later studies by different researchers found the affinity of ketamine of >10 μM for the regular human and rat D2 receptors, Moreover, whereas D2 receptor agonists such as bromocriptine are able to rapidly and powerfully suppress prolactin secretion, subanesthetic doses of ketamine have not been found to do this in humans and in fact, have been found to dose-dependently increase prolactin levels. Imaging studies have shown mixed results on inhibition of striatal [C] raclopride binding by ketamine in humans, with some studies finding a significant decrease and others finding no such effect. However, changes in [C] raclopride binding may be due to changes in dopamine concentrations induced by ketamine rather than binding of ketamine to the D2 receptor.
Dissociation and psychotomimetic effects are reported in people treated with ketamine at plasma concentrations of approximately 100 to 250 ng/mL (0.42–1.1 μM). The typical intravenous antidepressant dosage of ketamine used to treat depression is low and results in maximal plasma concentrations of 70 to 200 ng/mL (0.29–0.84 μM). At similar plasma concentrations (70 to 160 ng/mL; 0.29–0.67 μM) it also shows analgesic effects. In 1–5 minutes after inducing anesthesia by a rapid intravenous injection of ketamine, its plasma concentration reaches as high as 60–110 μM. When the anesthesia was maintained using nitrous oxide together with continuous injection of ketamine, the ketamine concentration stabilized at approximately 9.3 μM. In an experiment with purely ketamine anesthesia, people began to awaken once the plasma level of ketamine decreased to about 2,600 ng/mL (11 μM) and became oriented in place and time when the level was down to 1,000 ng/mL (4 μM). In a single-case study, the concentration of ketamine in cerebrospinal fluid, a proxy for the brain concentration, during anesthesia varied between 2.8 and 6.5 μM and was approximately 40% lower than in plasma.
Ketamine can be absorbed by many different routes due to both its water and lipid solubility. Intravenous ketamine bioavailability is 100% by definition, intramuscular injection bioavailability is slightly lower at 93%, and epidural bioavailability is 77%. Subcutaneous bioavailability has never been measured, but is presumed to be high. Among the less invasive routes, the intranasal route has the highest bioavailability (45–50%) and oral – the lowest (16–20%). Sublingual and rectal bioavailabilities are intermediate at approximately 25–50%.
After absorption ketamine is rapidly distributed into the brain and other tissues. The plasma protein binding of ketamine is variable at 23–47%.
In the body ketamine undergoes extensive metabolism. It is biotransformed by CYP3A4 and CYP2B6 isoenzymes into norketamine, which, in turn, is converted by CYP2A6 and CYP2B6 into hydroxynorketamine and dehydronorketamine. Low oral bioavailability of ketamine is due to the first-pass effect and, possibly, ketamine intestinal metabolism by CYP3A4. As a result, norketamine plasma levels are several-fold higher than ketamine following oral administration, and norketamine may play a role in anesthetic and analgesic action of oral ketamine. This also explains why oral ketamine levels are independent of CYP2B6 activity, unlike subcutaneous ketamine levels.
After an intravenous injection of tritium-labelled ketamine, 91% of the radioactivity is recovered from urine and 3% from the feces. The medication is excreted mostly in the form of metabolites, with only 2% remaining unchanged. Conjugated hydroxylated derivatives of ketamine (80%) followed by dehydronorketamine (16%) are the most prevalent metabolites detected in urine.
2-chlorobenzonitrile is reacted with the Grignard reagent cyclopentylmagnesium bromide to give (2-chlorophenyl)(cyclopentyl)methanone. This is then brominated using bromine to form the corresponding bromoketone, which is then reacted with methylamine in an aqueous solution to form the methylimino derivative, 1-(2-Chloro-N-methylbenzimidoyl)cyclopentanol, with hydrolysis of the tertiary bromine atom. This final intermediate is then heated in decalin or another suitable high-boiling solvent, upon which an Alpha-ketol rearrangement occurs resulting in a ring-expansion, and the formation of racemic ketamine.
In chemical structure, ketamine is an arylcyclohexylamine derivative. Ketamine is a chiral compound. The more active enantiomer, esketamine (S-ketamine), is also available for medical use under the brand name Ketanest S, while the less active enantiomer, arketamine (R-ketamine), has never been marketed as an enantiopure drug for clinical use. While S-ketamine is more effective as an analgesic and anesthetic through NMDA receptor antagonism, R-ketamine produces longer-lasting effects as an antidepressant.
The optical rotation of a given enantiomer of ketamine can vary between its salts and free base form. The free base form of (S)‑ketamine exhibits dextrorotation and is therefore labelled (S)‑(+)‑ketamine. However, its hydrochloride salt shows levorotation and is thus labelled (S)‑(−)‑ketamine hydrochloride.
Ketamine may be quantitated in blood or plasma to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized people, provide evidence in an impaired driving arrest, or to assist in a medicolegal death investigation. Blood or plasma ketamine concentrations are usually in a range of 0.5–5.0 mg/L in persons receiving the drug therapeutically (during general anesthesia), 1–2 mg/L in those arrested for impaired driving and 3–20 mg/L in victims of acute fatal overdosage. Urine is often the preferred specimen for routine drug use monitoring purposes. The presence of norketamine, a pharmacologically active metabolite, is useful for confirmation of ketamine ingestion.
Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 by Calvin L. Stevens, a professor of chemistry at Wayne State University and a Parke-Davis consultant. It was known by the developmental code name CI-581. After promising preclinical research in animals, ketamine was tested in human prisoners in 1964. These investigations demonstrated ketamine's short duration of action and reduced behavioral toxicity made it a favorable choice over phencyclidine (PCP) as an anesthetic. The researchers wanted to call the state of ketamine anesthesia "dreaming", but Parke-Davis did not approve of the name. Hearing about this problem and about the "disconnected" appearance of treated people, Mrs. Edward F. Domino, the wife of one of the pharmacologists working on ketamine, suggested "dissociative anesthesia". Following FDA approval in 1970, ketamine anesthesia was first given to American soldiers during the Vietnam War.
The discovery of antidepressive action of ketamine in 2000 has been described as the single most important advance in the treatment of depression in more than 50 years. It has sparked interest in NMDA receptor antagonists for depression, and has shifted the direction of antidepressant research and development.
While ketamine is marketed legally in many countries worldwide, it is also a controlled substance in many countries.
At sub-anesthetic doses ketamine produces a dissociative state, characterised by a sense of detachment from one's physical body and the external world that is known as depersonalization and derealization. At sufficiently high doses, users may experience what is called the "K-hole", a state of dissociation with visual and auditory hallucination. John C. Lilly, Marcia Moore, D. M. Turner, and David Woodard (among others) have written extensively about their own entheogenic and psychonautic experiences with ketamine. Turner died prematurely due to drowning during presumed unsupervised ketamine use. In 2006, the Russian edition of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture II was banned and destroyed by authorities owing to its inclusion of an essay by Woodard about the entheogenic use of, and psychonautic experiences with, ketamine. Recreational ketamine use has been implicated in deaths globally, with more than 90 deaths in England and Wales in the years of 2005–2013. They include accidental poisonings, drownings, traffic accidents, and suicides. The majority of deaths were among young people. Several months after being found dead in his hot tub, actor Matthew Perry's October, 2023 apparent drowning death was revealed to have been caused by a ketamine overdose, and while other factors were present, the acute effects of ketamine were ruled to be the primary cause of death. Because of its ability to cause confusion and amnesia, ketamine has been used for date rape.
Ketamine is under investigation for its potential in treating treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine is a known psychoplastogen, which refers to a compound capable of promoting rapid and sustained neuroplasticity.
In veterinary anesthesia, ketamine is often used for its anesthetic and analgesic effects on cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, and other small animals. It is frequently used in induction and anesthetic maintenance in horses. It is an important part of the "rodent cocktail", a mixture of drugs used for anesthetising rodents. Veterinarians often use ketamine with sedative drugs to produce balanced anesthesia and analgesia, and as a constant-rate infusion to help prevent pain wind-up. Ketamine is also used to manage pain among large animals. It is the primary intravenous anesthetic agent used in equine surgery, often in conjunction with detomidine and thiopental, or sometimes guaifenesin.
Ketamine appears not to produce sedation or anesthesia in snails. Instead, it appears to have an excitatory effect.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a treatment for depression, and as a pain management tool. Ketamine is a novel compound that was derived from phencyclidine in 1962 in pursuit of a safer anesthetic with fewer hallucinogenic effects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "At anesthetic doses, ketamine induces a state of dissociative anesthesia, a trance-like state providing pain relief, sedation, and amnesia. The distinguishing features of ketamine as anesthesia are preserved breathing and airway reflexes, stimulated heart function with increased blood pressure, and moderate bronchodilation. At lower, sub-anesthetic doses, ketamine is a promising agent for pain and treatment-resistant depression. As with many antidepressants, the results of a single administration of ketamine wane with time. The long-term effects of repeated use are largely unknown, and are an area of active investigation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Liver and urinary toxicity have been reported among regular users of high doses of ketamine for recreational purposes. Ketamine is an NMDA receptor antagonist, accounting for most of its psychoactive effects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 and approved for use in the United States in 1970. It has been regularly used in veterinary medicine and was extensively used for surgical anesthesia in the Vietnam War. Along with other psychotropic drugs, it is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. It is available as a generic medication. When used as a recreational drug, it is found both in crystalline powder and liquid form, and is often referred to by recreational users as \"Special K\" or simply \"K\". It is used as a recreational drug for its hallucinogenic and dissociative effects.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The use of ketamine in anesthesia reflects its characteristics. It is a drug of choice for short-term procedures when muscle relaxation is not required. The effect of ketamine on the respiratory and circulatory systems is different from that of other anesthetics. It suppresses breathing much less than most other available anesthetics. When used at anesthetic doses, ketamine usually stimulates rather than depresses the circulatory system. Protective airway reflexes are preserved and it is sometimes possible to administer ketamine anesthesia without protective measures to the airways. Psychotomimetic effects limit the acceptance of ketamine; however, lamotrigine and nimodipine decrease psychotomimetic effects and can be counteracted also by benzodiazepines administered or propofol. Ketofol is a combination of ketamine and propofol.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Ketamine is frequently used in severely injured people and appears to be safe in this group. It has been widely used for emergency surgery in field conditions in war zones, for example, during the Vietnam War. A 2011 clinical practice guideline supports the use of ketamine as a sedative in emergency medicine, including during physically painful procedures. It is the drug of choice for people in traumatic shock who are at risk of hypotension. Ketamine is unlikely to lower blood pressure, which is dangerous for people with severe head injury; in fact, it can raise blood pressure, often making it useful in treating such injuries.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Ketamine is an option in children as the sole anesthetic for minor procedures or as an induction agent followed by neuromuscular blocker and tracheal intubation In particular, children with cyanotic heart disease and neuromuscular disorders are good candidates for ketamine anesthesia.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Due to the bronchodilating properties of ketamine it can be used for anesthesia in people with asthma, chronic obstructive airway disease, and with severe reactive airway disease including active bronchospasm.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Ketamine infusions are used for acute pain treatment in emergency departments and in the perioperative period for individuals with refractory pain. The doses are lower than those used for anesthesia; they are usually referred to as sub-anesthetic doses. Adjunctive to morphine or on its own, ketamine reduces morphine use, pain level, nausea, and vomiting after surgery. Ketamine is likely to be most beneficial for surgical patients when severe post-operative pain is expected, and for opioid-tolerant patients.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ketamine is especially useful in the prehospital setting, due to its effectiveness and low risk of respiratory depression. Ketamine has similar efficacy to opioids in a hospital emergency department setting for management of acute pain and for control of procedural pain. It may also prevent opioid-induced hyperalgesia and postanesthetic shivering.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "For chronic pain, ketamine is used as an intravenous analgesic, particularly if the pain is neuropathic. It has the added benefit of counteracting spinal sensitization or wind-up phenomena experienced with chronic pain. In multiple clinical trials, ketamine infusions delivered short-term pain relief in neuropathic pain diagnoses, pain after traumatic spine injury, fibromyalgia, and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). However, the 2018 consensus guidelines on chronic pain concluded that, overall, there is only weak evidence in favor of ketamine use in spinal injury pain, moderate evidence in favor of ketamine for CRPS, and weak or no evidence for ketamine in mixed neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, and cancer pain. In particular, only for CRPS there is evidence of medium to longer term pain relief.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Ketamine is a rapid-acting antidepressant, although its effect is transient. Intravenous ketamine infusion in treatment-resistant depression may result in improved mood within 4 hours reaching the peak at 24 hours. A single dose of intravenous ketamine has been shown to result in a response rate greater than 60% as early as 4.5 hours after the dose (with a sustained effect after 24 hours) and greater than 40% after 7 days. Although there are only a few pilot studies studying the optimal dose, increasing evidence suggests that 0.5 mg/kg dose injected over 40 minutes gives an optimal outcome. The antidepressant effect of ketamine is diminished at 7 days, and most people relapse within 10 days, although for a significant minority the improvement may last 30 days or more. One of the main challenges with ketamine treatment can be the length of time that the antidepressant effects lasts after finishing a course of treatment. A possible option may be maintenance therapy with ketamine which usually runs twice a week to once in two weeks. Ketamine may decrease suicidal thoughts for up to three days after the injection.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "An enantiomer of ketamine – esketamine commercially sold as Spravato – was approved as an antidepressant by the European Medicines Agency in 2019. Esketamine was approved as a nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression in the United States and elsewhere in 2019 (see Esketamine and Depression). The Canadian Network for Mood and Anxiety Treatments (CANMAT) recommends esketamine as a third-line treatment for depression.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "A Cochrane review of randomized controlled trials in adults with unipolar major depressive disorder, found that when compared with placebo, people treated with either ketamine or esketamine experienced reduction or remission of symptoms lasting 1 to 7 days. There were 18.7% (4.1 to 40.4%) more people reporting some benefit and 9.6% (0.2 to 39.4%) more who achieved remission within 24 hours of ketamine treatment. Among people receiving esketamine, 2.1% (2.5 to 24.4%) more encountered some relief at 24 hours and 10.3% (4.5 to 18.2%) more had few or no symptoms. These effects did not persist beyond one week, although higher dropout rate in some studies mean that the duration of benefit remains unclear.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Ketamine may partially improve depressive symptoms among people with bipolar depression, at 24 hours after treatment, but not 3 or more days. Potentially, 10 more people with bipolar depression per 1000 may experience brief improvement, but not cessation of symptoms, one day following treatment. These estimates are based on limited available research.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "In February 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an alert to health care professionals concerning compounded nasal spray products containing ketamine intended to treat depression: \"There is no FDA-approved ketamine nasal spray product. Compounded drugs are not FDA-approved, which means FDA has not evaluated their safety, effectiveness, or quality prior to marketing.\"",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Most people who were able to remember their dreams during ketamine anesthesia report near-death experiences (NDE) when the widest possible definition of an NDE is used. Ketamine can reproduce features that commonly have been associated with NDEs. A 2019 large-scale study found that written reports of ketamine experiences had a high degree of similarity to written reports of NDE in comparison to other written reports of drug experiences.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Ketamine is used to treat status epilepticus that has not responded to standard treatments, but only case studies and no randomized controlled trials support its use.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Ketamine has been suggested as a possible therapy for children with severe acute asthma who do not respond to standard treatment. This is due to its bronchodilator effects. A 2012 Cochrane review found there were minimal adverse effects reported, but the limited studies showed no significant benefit.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Some major contraindications for ketamine are:",
"title": "Contraindications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "At anesthetic doses, 10–20% of adults and 1–2% of children experience adverse psychiatric reactions that occur during emergence from anesthesia, ranging from dreams and dysphoria to hallucinations and emergence delirium. Psychotomimetic effects decrease adding lamotrigine and nimodipine and can be counteracted by pretreatment with a benzodiazepine or propofol. Ketamine anesthesia commonly causes tonic-clonic movements (greater than 10% of people) and rarely hypertonia. Vomiting can be expected in 5–15% of the patients; pretreatment with propofol mitigates it as well. Laryngospasm occurs only rarely with ketamine. Ketamine, generally, stimulates breathing; however, in the first 2–3 minutes of a high-dose rapid intravenous injection it may cause a transient respiratory depression.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "At lower sub-anesthetic doses, psychiatric side effects are prominent. Most people feel strange, spacey, woozy, or a sense of floating, or have visual distortions or numbness. Also very frequent (20–50%) are difficulty speaking, confusion, euphoria, drowsiness, and difficulty concentrating. The symptoms of psychosis such as going into a hole, disappearing, feeling as if melting, experiencing colors, and hallucinations are described by 6–10% of people. Dizziness, blurred vision, dry mouth, hypertension, nausea, increased or decreased body temperature, or feeling flushed are the common (>10%) non-psychiatric side effects. All these adverse effects are most pronounced by the end of the injection, dramatically reduced 40 minutes afterward, and completely disappear within 4 hours after the injection.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Urinary toxicity occurs primarily in people who use large amounts of ketamine routinely, with 20–30% of frequent users having bladder complaints. It includes a range of disorders from cystitis to hydronephrosis to kidney failure. The typical symptoms of ketamine-induced cystitis are frequent urination, dysuria, and urinary urgency sometimes accompanied by pain during urination and blood in urine. The damage to the bladder wall has similarities to both interstitial and eosinophilic cystitis. The wall is thickened and the functional bladder capacity is as low as 10–150 mL. Studies indicate that ketamine-induced cystitis is caused by ketamine and its metabolites directly interacting with urothelium, resulting in damage of the epithelial cells of the bladder lining and increased permeability of the urothelial barrier which results in clinical symptoms.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Management of ketamine-induced cystitis involves ketamine cessation as the first step. This is followed by NSAIDs and anticholinergics and, if the response is insufficient, by tramadol. The second line treatments are epithelium-protective agents such as oral pentosan polysulfate or intravesical (intra-bladder) instillation of hyaluronic acid. Intravesical botulinum toxin is also useful.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Liver toxicity of ketamine involves higher doses and repeated administration. In a group of chronic high dose ketamine users, the frequency of liver injury was reported to be about 10%. There are case reports of increased liver enzymes involving ketamine treatment of chronic pain. Chronic ketamine abuse has also been associated with biliary colic, cachexia, gastrointestinal diseases, hepatobiliary disorder, and acute kidney injury.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although the incidence of ketamine dependence is unknown, some people who regularly use ketamine develop ketamine dependence. Animal experiments also confirm the risk of misuse. Additionally, the rapid onset of effects following insufflation may increase potential use as a recreational drug. The short duration of effects promotes bingeing. Ketamine tolerance rapidly develops, even with repeated medical use, prompting the use of higher doses. Some daily users reported withdrawal symptoms, primarily anxiety, shaking, sweating, and palpitations, following the attempts to stop. Cognitive deficits as well as increased dissociation and delusion symptoms were observed in frequent recreational users of ketamine.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Ketamine potentiates the sedative effects of propofol and midazolam. Naltrexone potentiates psychotomimetic effects of a low dose of ketamine, while lamotrigine and nimodipine decrease them. Clonidine reduces the increase of salivation, heart-rate and blood-pressure during ketamine anesthesia and decreases the incidence of nightmares.",
"title": "Interactions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Clinical observations suggest that benzodiazepines may diminish the antidepressant effects of ketamine. It appears most conventional antidepressants can be safely combined with ketamine.",
"title": "Interactions"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Pore blocking of the NMDA receptor is responsible for the anesthetic, analgesic, and psychotomimetic effects of ketamine. Blocking of the NMDA receptor results in analgesia by preventing central sensitization in dorsal horn neurons; in other words, ketamine's actions interfere with pain transmission in the spinal cord.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The mechanism of action of ketamine in alleviating depression is not well understood, and is an area of active investigation. Possible mechanisms include direct action on the NMDA receptor, downstream effects on regulators such as BDNF and mTOR, and effects of ketamine's metabolites such as hydroxynorketamine. It is not clear whether NMDA receptor is solely responsible for this action or interactions with other receptors are also necessary. It is also not clear whether ketamine alone is sufficient for the antidepressive action or its metabolites also are important. In any case, it has been elucidated that acute blockade of NMDA receptors in the brain results in an increase in the release of glutamate, which leads to an activation of α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid receptors (AMPA receptors), which in turn modulate a variety of downstream signaling pathways to influence neurotransmission in the limbic system and mediate antidepressant effects of NMDA receptor antagonists like ketamine. Such downstream actions of this activation of AMPA receptors include upregulation of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and activation of its signaling receptor tropomyosin receptor kinase B (TrkB), activation of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway, deactivation of glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK-3), and inhibition of the phosphorylation of the eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF2) kinase. In addition to blockade of the NMDA receptor, the active metabolite of ketamine hydroxynorketamine, which does not interact importantly with the NMDA receptor, but nonetheless indirectly activates AMPA receptors similarly, may also or alternatively be involved in the rapid-onset antidepressant effects of ketamine. Recent research has elucidated that an acute inhibition of the lateral habenula, a part of the brain in the limbic system that has been referred to as the \"anti-reward center\" (projecting to and inhibiting the mesolimbic reward pathway and modulating other limbic areas), may be involved in the antidepressant effects of ketamine.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Ketamine is a mixture of equal amounts of two enantiomers: esketamine and arketamine. Esketamine is a more potent NMDA receptor pore blocker and dissociative hallucinogen than arketamine. Because of the hypothesis that NMDA receptor antagonism underlies the antidepressant effects of ketamine, esketamine was developed as an antidepressant. However, multiple other NMDA receptor antagonists, including memantine, lanicemine, rislenemdaz, rapastinel, and 4-chlorokynurenine, thus far have failed to demonstrate sufficient effectiveness for depression. Furthermore, animal research indicates that arketamine, the enantiomer with a weaker NMDA receptor antagonism, as well as (2R,6R)-hydroxynorketamine, the metabolite with negligible affinity for the NMDA receptor, but a potent alpha-7 nicotinic receptor antagonist may have antidepressive action. It is now argued that NMDA receptor antagonism may not be primarily responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ketamine principally acts as a pore blocker of the NMDA receptor, an ionotropic glutamate receptor. The S-(+) and R-(–) stereoisomers of ketamine bind to the dizocilpine site of the NMDA receptor with different affinities, the former showing approximately 3- to 4-fold greater affinity for the receptor than the latter. As a result, the S isomer is a more potent anesthetic and analgesic than its R counterpart.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Ketamine may interact with and inhibit the NMDAR via another allosteric site on the receptor.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "With a couple of exceptions, ketamine actions at other receptors are far weaker than ketamine's antagonism of the NMDA receptor (see the activity table to the right).",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Although ketamine is a very weak ligand of the monoamine transporters (Ki > 60 μM), it has been suggested that it may interact with allosteric sites on the monoamine transporters to produce monoamine reuptake inhibition. However, no functional inhibition (IC50) of the human monoamine transporters has been observed with ketamine or its metabolites at concentrations of up to 10,000 nM. Moreover, animal studies and at least three human case reports have found no interaction between ketamine and the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) tranylcypromine, which is of importance as the combination of a monoamine reuptake inhibitor with an MAOI can produce severe toxicity such as serotonin syndrome or hypertensive crisis. Collectively, these findings shed doubt on the involvement of monoamine reuptake inhibition in the effects of ketamine in humans. Ketamine has been found to increase dopaminergic neurotransmission in the brain, but instead of being due to dopamine reuptake inhibition, this may be via indirect/downstream mechanisms, namely through antagonism of the NMDA receptor.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Whether ketamine is an agonist of D2 receptors is controversial. Early research by the Philip Seeman group found ketamine to be a D2 partial agonist with the potency similar to that of its NMDA receptor antagonism. However, later studies by different researchers found the affinity of ketamine of >10 μM for the regular human and rat D2 receptors, Moreover, whereas D2 receptor agonists such as bromocriptine are able to rapidly and powerfully suppress prolactin secretion, subanesthetic doses of ketamine have not been found to do this in humans and in fact, have been found to dose-dependently increase prolactin levels. Imaging studies have shown mixed results on inhibition of striatal [C] raclopride binding by ketamine in humans, with some studies finding a significant decrease and others finding no such effect. However, changes in [C] raclopride binding may be due to changes in dopamine concentrations induced by ketamine rather than binding of ketamine to the D2 receptor.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Dissociation and psychotomimetic effects are reported in people treated with ketamine at plasma concentrations of approximately 100 to 250 ng/mL (0.42–1.1 μM). The typical intravenous antidepressant dosage of ketamine used to treat depression is low and results in maximal plasma concentrations of 70 to 200 ng/mL (0.29–0.84 μM). At similar plasma concentrations (70 to 160 ng/mL; 0.29–0.67 μM) it also shows analgesic effects. In 1–5 minutes after inducing anesthesia by a rapid intravenous injection of ketamine, its plasma concentration reaches as high as 60–110 μM. When the anesthesia was maintained using nitrous oxide together with continuous injection of ketamine, the ketamine concentration stabilized at approximately 9.3 μM. In an experiment with purely ketamine anesthesia, people began to awaken once the plasma level of ketamine decreased to about 2,600 ng/mL (11 μM) and became oriented in place and time when the level was down to 1,000 ng/mL (4 μM). In a single-case study, the concentration of ketamine in cerebrospinal fluid, a proxy for the brain concentration, during anesthesia varied between 2.8 and 6.5 μM and was approximately 40% lower than in plasma.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Ketamine can be absorbed by many different routes due to both its water and lipid solubility. Intravenous ketamine bioavailability is 100% by definition, intramuscular injection bioavailability is slightly lower at 93%, and epidural bioavailability is 77%. Subcutaneous bioavailability has never been measured, but is presumed to be high. Among the less invasive routes, the intranasal route has the highest bioavailability (45–50%) and oral – the lowest (16–20%). Sublingual and rectal bioavailabilities are intermediate at approximately 25–50%.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "After absorption ketamine is rapidly distributed into the brain and other tissues. The plasma protein binding of ketamine is variable at 23–47%.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "In the body ketamine undergoes extensive metabolism. It is biotransformed by CYP3A4 and CYP2B6 isoenzymes into norketamine, which, in turn, is converted by CYP2A6 and CYP2B6 into hydroxynorketamine and dehydronorketamine. Low oral bioavailability of ketamine is due to the first-pass effect and, possibly, ketamine intestinal metabolism by CYP3A4. As a result, norketamine plasma levels are several-fold higher than ketamine following oral administration, and norketamine may play a role in anesthetic and analgesic action of oral ketamine. This also explains why oral ketamine levels are independent of CYP2B6 activity, unlike subcutaneous ketamine levels.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "After an intravenous injection of tritium-labelled ketamine, 91% of the radioactivity is recovered from urine and 3% from the feces. The medication is excreted mostly in the form of metabolites, with only 2% remaining unchanged. Conjugated hydroxylated derivatives of ketamine (80%) followed by dehydronorketamine (16%) are the most prevalent metabolites detected in urine.",
"title": "Pharmacology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "2-chlorobenzonitrile is reacted with the Grignard reagent cyclopentylmagnesium bromide to give (2-chlorophenyl)(cyclopentyl)methanone. This is then brominated using bromine to form the corresponding bromoketone, which is then reacted with methylamine in an aqueous solution to form the methylimino derivative, 1-(2-Chloro-N-methylbenzimidoyl)cyclopentanol, with hydrolysis of the tertiary bromine atom. This final intermediate is then heated in decalin or another suitable high-boiling solvent, upon which an Alpha-ketol rearrangement occurs resulting in a ring-expansion, and the formation of racemic ketamine.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In chemical structure, ketamine is an arylcyclohexylamine derivative. Ketamine is a chiral compound. The more active enantiomer, esketamine (S-ketamine), is also available for medical use under the brand name Ketanest S, while the less active enantiomer, arketamine (R-ketamine), has never been marketed as an enantiopure drug for clinical use. While S-ketamine is more effective as an analgesic and anesthetic through NMDA receptor antagonism, R-ketamine produces longer-lasting effects as an antidepressant.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The optical rotation of a given enantiomer of ketamine can vary between its salts and free base form. The free base form of (S)‑ketamine exhibits dextrorotation and is therefore labelled (S)‑(+)‑ketamine. However, its hydrochloride salt shows levorotation and is thus labelled (S)‑(−)‑ketamine hydrochloride.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Ketamine may be quantitated in blood or plasma to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized people, provide evidence in an impaired driving arrest, or to assist in a medicolegal death investigation. Blood or plasma ketamine concentrations are usually in a range of 0.5–5.0 mg/L in persons receiving the drug therapeutically (during general anesthesia), 1–2 mg/L in those arrested for impaired driving and 3–20 mg/L in victims of acute fatal overdosage. Urine is often the preferred specimen for routine drug use monitoring purposes. The presence of norketamine, a pharmacologically active metabolite, is useful for confirmation of ketamine ingestion.",
"title": "Chemistry"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 by Calvin L. Stevens, a professor of chemistry at Wayne State University and a Parke-Davis consultant. It was known by the developmental code name CI-581. After promising preclinical research in animals, ketamine was tested in human prisoners in 1964. These investigations demonstrated ketamine's short duration of action and reduced behavioral toxicity made it a favorable choice over phencyclidine (PCP) as an anesthetic. The researchers wanted to call the state of ketamine anesthesia \"dreaming\", but Parke-Davis did not approve of the name. Hearing about this problem and about the \"disconnected\" appearance of treated people, Mrs. Edward F. Domino, the wife of one of the pharmacologists working on ketamine, suggested \"dissociative anesthesia\". Following FDA approval in 1970, ketamine anesthesia was first given to American soldiers during the Vietnam War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The discovery of antidepressive action of ketamine in 2000 has been described as the single most important advance in the treatment of depression in more than 50 years. It has sparked interest in NMDA receptor antagonists for depression, and has shifted the direction of antidepressant research and development.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "While ketamine is marketed legally in many countries worldwide, it is also a controlled substance in many countries.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "At sub-anesthetic doses ketamine produces a dissociative state, characterised by a sense of detachment from one's physical body and the external world that is known as depersonalization and derealization. At sufficiently high doses, users may experience what is called the \"K-hole\", a state of dissociation with visual and auditory hallucination. John C. Lilly, Marcia Moore, D. M. Turner, and David Woodard (among others) have written extensively about their own entheogenic and psychonautic experiences with ketamine. Turner died prematurely due to drowning during presumed unsupervised ketamine use. In 2006, the Russian edition of Adam Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture II was banned and destroyed by authorities owing to its inclusion of an essay by Woodard about the entheogenic use of, and psychonautic experiences with, ketamine. Recreational ketamine use has been implicated in deaths globally, with more than 90 deaths in England and Wales in the years of 2005–2013. They include accidental poisonings, drownings, traffic accidents, and suicides. The majority of deaths were among young people. Several months after being found dead in his hot tub, actor Matthew Perry's October, 2023 apparent drowning death was revealed to have been caused by a ketamine overdose, and while other factors were present, the acute effects of ketamine were ruled to be the primary cause of death. Because of its ability to cause confusion and amnesia, ketamine has been used for date rape.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Ketamine is under investigation for its potential in treating treatment-resistant depression. Ketamine is a known psychoplastogen, which refers to a compound capable of promoting rapid and sustained neuroplasticity.",
"title": "Research"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In veterinary anesthesia, ketamine is often used for its anesthetic and analgesic effects on cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, and other small animals. It is frequently used in induction and anesthetic maintenance in horses. It is an important part of the \"rodent cocktail\", a mixture of drugs used for anesthetising rodents. Veterinarians often use ketamine with sedative drugs to produce balanced anesthesia and analgesia, and as a constant-rate infusion to help prevent pain wind-up. Ketamine is also used to manage pain among large animals. It is the primary intravenous anesthetic agent used in equine surgery, often in conjunction with detomidine and thiopental, or sometimes guaifenesin.",
"title": "Veterinary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Ketamine appears not to produce sedation or anesthesia in snails. Instead, it appears to have an excitatory effect.",
"title": "Veterinary medicine"
}
] |
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used medically for induction and maintenance of anesthesia. It is also used as a treatment for depression, and as a pain management tool. Ketamine is a novel compound that was derived from phencyclidine in 1962 in pursuit of a safer anesthetic with fewer hallucinogenic effects. At anesthetic doses, ketamine induces a state of dissociative anesthesia, a trance-like state providing pain relief, sedation, and amnesia. The distinguishing features of ketamine as anesthesia are preserved breathing and airway reflexes, stimulated heart function with increased blood pressure, and moderate bronchodilation. At lower, sub-anesthetic doses, ketamine is a promising agent for pain and treatment-resistant depression. As with many antidepressants, the results of a single administration of ketamine wane with time. The long-term effects of repeated use are largely unknown, and are an area of active investigation. Liver and urinary toxicity have been reported among regular users of high doses of ketamine for recreational purposes. Ketamine is an NMDA receptor antagonist, accounting for most of its psychoactive effects. Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 and approved for use in the United States in 1970. It has been regularly used in veterinary medicine and was extensively used for surgical anesthesia in the Vietnam War. Along with other psychotropic drugs, it is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. It is available as a generic medication. When used as a recreational drug, it is found both in crystalline powder and liquid form, and is often referred to by recreational users as "Special K" or simply "K". It is used as a recreational drug for its hallucinogenic and dissociative effects.
|
2001-11-06T17:56:33Z
|
2023-12-31T20:28:17Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine
|
16,954 |
Kickapoo people
|
The Kickapoo people (Kickapoo: Kiikaapoa or Kiikaapoi; Spanish: Kikapú) are an Algonquian-speaking Native American and Indigenous Mexican tribe, originating in the region south of the Great Lakes. Today, three federally recognized Kickapoo tribes are in the United States: the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. The Oklahoma and Texas bands are politically associated with each other. The Kickapoo in Kansas came from a relocation from southern Missouri in 1832 as a land exchange from their reserve there. Around 3,000 people are enrolled tribal members.
Another band, the Tribu Kikapú, resides in Múzquiz Municipality in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Smaller bands live in Sonora, to the west, and Durango, to the southwest.
According to some sources, the name "Kickapoo" (Giiwigaabaw in the Anishinaabe language and its Kickapoo cognate Kiwikapawa) means "stands here and there," which may have referred to the tribe's migratory patterns. The name can also mean "wanderer". This interpretation is contested and generally believed to be a folk etymology.
The Kickapoo are an Algonquian-language people who likely migrated to or developed as a people in a large territory along the southern Wabash River in the area of modern Terre Haute, Indiana, where they were located at the time of first contact with Europeans in the 1600s. They were confederated with the larger Wabash Confederacy, which included the Piankeshaw and the Wea to their north, and the powerful Miami Tribe, to their east. A subgroup occupied the Upper Iowa River region in what was later known as northeast Iowa and the Root River region in southeast Minnesota in the late 1600s and early 1700s. This group was probably known by the clan name "Mahouea", derived from the Illinoian word for wolf, m'hwea.
The earliest European contact with the Kickapoo tribe occurred during the La Salle Expeditions into Illinois Country in the late 17th century. The French colonists set up remote fur trading posts throughout the region, including on the Wabash River. They typically set up posts at or near Native American villages. Terre Haute was founded as an associated French village. The Kickapoo had to contend with a changing cast of Europeans; the British defeated the French in the Seven Years' War and took over nominal rule of former French territory east of the Mississippi River after 1763. They increased their own trading with the Kickapoo.
The United States acquired the territory east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River after it gained independence from the United Kingdom. As white settlers moved into the region from the United States' eastern areas, beginning in the early 19th century, the Kickapoo were under pressure. They negotiated with the United States over their territory in several treaties, including the Treaty of Vincennes, the Treaty of Grouseland, and the Treaty of Fort Wayne. They sold most of their lands to the United States and moved north to settle among the Wea.
Rising tensions between the regional tribes and the United States led to Tecumseh's War in 1811. The Kickapoo were among the closest allies of Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Many Kickapoo warriors participated in the Battle of Tippecanoe and the subsequent War of 1812 on the side of the British, hoping to expel the white American settlers from the region.
The 1819 treaty of Edwardsville saw the Kickapoo cede the entirety of their holdings in Illinois comprising nearly one-half area of the state, in exchange for a smaller tract on the Osage river in Missouri and $3,000 worth of goods. The Kickapoo were not eager to move, partly as their assigned tract in Missouri was made of rugged hills and already occupied by the Osage, who were their hereditary enemies. Instead, half of the population traveled south and crossed onto the Spanish side of the Red river in modern day Texas. The US government quickly mobilized to prevent this emigration and force their removal to Missouri. This remnant of Kickapoo remained in Illinois under the guidance of Kennekuk, a prominent, nonviolent spiritual leader among the Kickapoo. He led his followers during the Indian Removal in the 1830s to their current tribal lands in Kansas. He died there of smallpox in 1852.
The close of the war led to a change of federal Indian policy in the Indiana Territory, and later the state of Indiana. White American leaders began to advocate the removal of tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River, to extinguish their claims to lands wanted by white American settlers. The Kickapoo were among the first tribes to leave Indiana under this program. They accepted land in Kansas and an annual subsidy in exchange for leaving the state.
Kickapoo is dialect of the Fox language closely related to dialects spoken by the Sauk people and Meskwaki people. They are classified with the Central Algonquian languages, and are also related to the Illinois Confederation.
In 1985, the Kickapoo Nation's School in Horton, Kansas, began a language-immersion program for elementary school grades to revive teaching and use of the Kickapoo language in kindergarten through grade 6. Efforts in language education continue at most Kickapoo sites.
In 2010, the Head Start Program at the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas reservation, which teaches the Kickapoo language, became "the first Native American school to earn Texas School Ready! (TSR) Project certification."
Also in 2010, Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia participated in the elaboration of a Kickapoo alphabet. The Kickapoo in Mexico are known for their whistled speech.
Texts, recordings, and a vocabulary of the language are available.
The Kickapoo language and members of the Kickapoo tribe were featured in the movie The Only Good Indian (2009), directed by Greg Wilmott and starring Wes Studi. This was a fictionalized account of Native American children forced to attend an Indian boarding school, where they were forced to speak English and give up their cultural practices.
A Kickapoo alphabet was developed by Paul Voorhis in 1974 and was revised in 1981. A new orthography is used by the Kickapoo Language Development Program in Oklahoma.
Eleven consonant phonemes are used in Kickapoo:
Three federally recognized Kickapoo communities are in the United States in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. The Mexican Kickapoo are closely tied to the Texas and Oklahoma communities. These groups migrate annually among the three locations to maintain connections. Indeed, the Texas and Mexican branches are the same cross-border nation, called Kickapoo of Coahuila/Texas
The tribe in Kansas was home to prophet Kenekuk, who was known for his astute leadership that allowed the small group to maintain their reservation. Kenekuk wanted to keep order among the tribe he was in, while living in Kansas. He also wanted to focus on keeping the identity of the Kickapoo people, because of all the relocations they had done.
The basis of Kenekuk's leadership began in the religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s, with a blend of Protestantism and Catholicism. Kenekuk taught his tribesmen and white audiences to obey God's commands, for sinners were damned to the pits of hell. Once the Kickapoo people got relocated to Kansas they resisted the ideas of Protestantism and Catholicism and started focusing more on farming, so they could provide food for the rest of the tribe. After this had happened they remained together and claimed some of the original land that they had before it was taken by Americans.
The Kickapoo Indian Reservation of Kansas is located at 39°40′51″N 95°36′41″W / 39.68083°N 95.61139°W / 39.68083; -95.61139 in the northeastern part of the state in parts of three counties: Brown, Jackson, and Atchison. It has a land area of 612.203 square kilometres (236.373 sq mi) and a resident population of 4,419 as of the 2000 census. The largest community on the reservation is the city of Horton. The other communities are:
The Kickapoo Indian Reservation of Texas is located at 28°36′37″N 100°26′19″W / 28.61028°N 100.43861°W / 28.61028; -100.43861 on the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border in western Maverick County, just south of the city of Ciudad Acuña, as part of the community of Rosita South. It has a land area of 0.4799 square kilometres (118.6 acres) and a 2000 census population of 420 persons. The Texas Indian Commission officially recognized the tribe in 1977.
Other Kickapoo in Maverick County, Texas, constitute the "South Texas Subgroup of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma". That tribe formerly owned 917.79 acres (3.7142 km) of non-reservation land in Maverick County, primarily to the north of Eagle Pass, but has sold most of it to a developer. It has an office in that city.
After being expelled from the Republic of Texas, many Kickapoo moved south to Mexico, but the population of two villages settled in Indian Territory. One village settled within the Chickasaw Nation and the other within the Muscogee Creek Nation. These Kickapoo were granted their own reservation in 1883 and became recognized as the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma.
The reservation was short-lived. In 1893 under the Dawes Act, their communal tribal lands were broken up and assigned to separate member households by allotments. The tribe's government was dismantled by the Curtis Act of 1898, which encouraged assimilation by Native Americans to the majority culture. Tribal members struggled under these conditions.
In the 1930s the federal and state governments encouraged tribes to reorganize their governments. This one formed the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma in 1936, under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act.
Today the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma is headquartered in McLoud, Oklahoma. Their tribal jurisdictional area is in Oklahoma, Pottawatomie, and Lincoln counties. They have 2,719 enrolled tribal members.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kickapoo people (Kickapoo: Kiikaapoa or Kiikaapoi; Spanish: Kikapú) are an Algonquian-speaking Native American and Indigenous Mexican tribe, originating in the region south of the Great Lakes. Today, three federally recognized Kickapoo tribes are in the United States: the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. The Oklahoma and Texas bands are politically associated with each other. The Kickapoo in Kansas came from a relocation from southern Missouri in 1832 as a land exchange from their reserve there. Around 3,000 people are enrolled tribal members.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Another band, the Tribu Kikapú, resides in Múzquiz Municipality in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Smaller bands live in Sonora, to the west, and Durango, to the southwest.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "According to some sources, the name \"Kickapoo\" (Giiwigaabaw in the Anishinaabe language and its Kickapoo cognate Kiwikapawa) means \"stands here and there,\" which may have referred to the tribe's migratory patterns. The name can also mean \"wanderer\". This interpretation is contested and generally believed to be a folk etymology.",
"title": "Name and etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The Kickapoo are an Algonquian-language people who likely migrated to or developed as a people in a large territory along the southern Wabash River in the area of modern Terre Haute, Indiana, where they were located at the time of first contact with Europeans in the 1600s. They were confederated with the larger Wabash Confederacy, which included the Piankeshaw and the Wea to their north, and the powerful Miami Tribe, to their east. A subgroup occupied the Upper Iowa River region in what was later known as northeast Iowa and the Root River region in southeast Minnesota in the late 1600s and early 1700s. This group was probably known by the clan name \"Mahouea\", derived from the Illinoian word for wolf, m'hwea.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The earliest European contact with the Kickapoo tribe occurred during the La Salle Expeditions into Illinois Country in the late 17th century. The French colonists set up remote fur trading posts throughout the region, including on the Wabash River. They typically set up posts at or near Native American villages. Terre Haute was founded as an associated French village. The Kickapoo had to contend with a changing cast of Europeans; the British defeated the French in the Seven Years' War and took over nominal rule of former French territory east of the Mississippi River after 1763. They increased their own trading with the Kickapoo.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The United States acquired the territory east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River after it gained independence from the United Kingdom. As white settlers moved into the region from the United States' eastern areas, beginning in the early 19th century, the Kickapoo were under pressure. They negotiated with the United States over their territory in several treaties, including the Treaty of Vincennes, the Treaty of Grouseland, and the Treaty of Fort Wayne. They sold most of their lands to the United States and moved north to settle among the Wea.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Rising tensions between the regional tribes and the United States led to Tecumseh's War in 1811. The Kickapoo were among the closest allies of Shawnee leader Tecumseh. Many Kickapoo warriors participated in the Battle of Tippecanoe and the subsequent War of 1812 on the side of the British, hoping to expel the white American settlers from the region.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The 1819 treaty of Edwardsville saw the Kickapoo cede the entirety of their holdings in Illinois comprising nearly one-half area of the state, in exchange for a smaller tract on the Osage river in Missouri and $3,000 worth of goods. The Kickapoo were not eager to move, partly as their assigned tract in Missouri was made of rugged hills and already occupied by the Osage, who were their hereditary enemies. Instead, half of the population traveled south and crossed onto the Spanish side of the Red river in modern day Texas. The US government quickly mobilized to prevent this emigration and force their removal to Missouri. This remnant of Kickapoo remained in Illinois under the guidance of Kennekuk, a prominent, nonviolent spiritual leader among the Kickapoo. He led his followers during the Indian Removal in the 1830s to their current tribal lands in Kansas. He died there of smallpox in 1852.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The close of the war led to a change of federal Indian policy in the Indiana Territory, and later the state of Indiana. White American leaders began to advocate the removal of tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River, to extinguish their claims to lands wanted by white American settlers. The Kickapoo were among the first tribes to leave Indiana under this program. They accepted land in Kansas and an annual subsidy in exchange for leaving the state.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Kickapoo is dialect of the Fox language closely related to dialects spoken by the Sauk people and Meskwaki people. They are classified with the Central Algonquian languages, and are also related to the Illinois Confederation.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1985, the Kickapoo Nation's School in Horton, Kansas, began a language-immersion program for elementary school grades to revive teaching and use of the Kickapoo language in kindergarten through grade 6. Efforts in language education continue at most Kickapoo sites.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 2010, the Head Start Program at the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas reservation, which teaches the Kickapoo language, became \"the first Native American school to earn Texas School Ready! (TSR) Project certification.\"",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Also in 2010, Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia participated in the elaboration of a Kickapoo alphabet. The Kickapoo in Mexico are known for their whistled speech.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Texts, recordings, and a vocabulary of the language are available.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The Kickapoo language and members of the Kickapoo tribe were featured in the movie The Only Good Indian (2009), directed by Greg Wilmott and starring Wes Studi. This was a fictionalized account of Native American children forced to attend an Indian boarding school, where they were forced to speak English and give up their cultural practices.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A Kickapoo alphabet was developed by Paul Voorhis in 1974 and was revised in 1981. A new orthography is used by the Kickapoo Language Development Program in Oklahoma.",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Eleven consonant phonemes are used in Kickapoo:",
"title": "Language"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Three federally recognized Kickapoo communities are in the United States in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma. The Mexican Kickapoo are closely tied to the Texas and Oklahoma communities. These groups migrate annually among the three locations to maintain connections. Indeed, the Texas and Mexican branches are the same cross-border nation, called Kickapoo of Coahuila/Texas",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The tribe in Kansas was home to prophet Kenekuk, who was known for his astute leadership that allowed the small group to maintain their reservation. Kenekuk wanted to keep order among the tribe he was in, while living in Kansas. He also wanted to focus on keeping the identity of the Kickapoo people, because of all the relocations they had done.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The basis of Kenekuk's leadership began in the religious revivals of the 1820s and 1830s, with a blend of Protestantism and Catholicism. Kenekuk taught his tribesmen and white audiences to obey God's commands, for sinners were damned to the pits of hell. Once the Kickapoo people got relocated to Kansas they resisted the ideas of Protestantism and Catholicism and started focusing more on farming, so they could provide food for the rest of the tribe. After this had happened they remained together and claimed some of the original land that they had before it was taken by Americans.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Kickapoo Indian Reservation of Kansas is located at 39°40′51″N 95°36′41″W / 39.68083°N 95.61139°W / 39.68083; -95.61139 in the northeastern part of the state in parts of three counties: Brown, Jackson, and Atchison. It has a land area of 612.203 square kilometres (236.373 sq mi) and a resident population of 4,419 as of the 2000 census. The largest community on the reservation is the city of Horton. The other communities are:",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Kickapoo Indian Reservation of Texas is located at 28°36′37″N 100°26′19″W / 28.61028°N 100.43861°W / 28.61028; -100.43861 on the Rio Grande on the U.S.-Mexico border in western Maverick County, just south of the city of Ciudad Acuña, as part of the community of Rosita South. It has a land area of 0.4799 square kilometres (118.6 acres) and a 2000 census population of 420 persons. The Texas Indian Commission officially recognized the tribe in 1977.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Other Kickapoo in Maverick County, Texas, constitute the \"South Texas Subgroup of the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma\". That tribe formerly owned 917.79 acres (3.7142 km) of non-reservation land in Maverick County, primarily to the north of Eagle Pass, but has sold most of it to a developer. It has an office in that city.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "After being expelled from the Republic of Texas, many Kickapoo moved south to Mexico, but the population of two villages settled in Indian Territory. One village settled within the Chickasaw Nation and the other within the Muscogee Creek Nation. These Kickapoo were granted their own reservation in 1883 and became recognized as the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The reservation was short-lived. In 1893 under the Dawes Act, their communal tribal lands were broken up and assigned to separate member households by allotments. The tribe's government was dismantled by the Curtis Act of 1898, which encouraged assimilation by Native Americans to the majority culture. Tribal members struggled under these conditions.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In the 1930s the federal and state governments encouraged tribes to reorganize their governments. This one formed the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma in 1936, under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "Today the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma is headquartered in McLoud, Oklahoma. Their tribal jurisdictional area is in Oklahoma, Pottawatomie, and Lincoln counties. They have 2,719 enrolled tribal members.",
"title": "Tribes and communities"
}
] |
The Kickapoo people are an Algonquian-speaking Native American and Indigenous Mexican tribe, originating in the region south of the Great Lakes. Today, three federally recognized Kickapoo tribes are in the United States: the Kickapoo Tribe in Kansas, the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas. The Oklahoma and Texas bands are politically associated with each other. The Kickapoo in Kansas came from a relocation from southern Missouri in 1832 as a land exchange from their reserve there. Around 3,000 people are enrolled tribal members. Another band, the Tribu Kikapú, resides in Múzquiz Municipality in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. Smaller bands live in Sonora, to the west, and Durango, to the southwest.
|
2001-10-10T14:49:02Z
|
2023-12-06T22:09:46Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickapoo_people
|
16,957 |
Kata (disambiguation)
|
Kata is a martial arts term referring to a pattern of defense-and-attack.
Kata may also refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kata is a martial arts term referring to a pattern of defense-and-attack.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kata may also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kata is a martial arts term referring to a pattern of defense-and-attack. Kata may also refer to:
|
2001-10-10T21:15:25Z
|
2023-12-01T08:46:31Z
|
[
"Template:TOC right",
"Template:Transclude list",
"Template:Disambiguation"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(disambiguation)
|
16,959 |
Katyusha rocket launcher
|
The Katyusha (Russian: Катю́ша, IPA: [kɐˈtʲuʂə] ) is a type of rocket artillery first built and fielded by the Soviet Union in World War II. Multiple rocket launchers such as these deliver explosives to a target area more intensively than conventional artillery, but with lower accuracy and requiring a longer time to reload. They are fragile compared to artillery guns, but are cheap, easy to produce, and usable on almost any chassis. The Katyushas of World War II, the first self-propelled artillery mass-produced by the Soviet Union, were usually mounted on ordinary trucks. This mobility gave the Katyusha, and other self-propelled artillery, another advantage: being able to deliver a large blow all at once, and then move before being located and attacked with counter-battery fire.
Katyusha weapons of World War II included the BM-13 launcher, light BM-8, and heavy BM-31. Today, the nickname Katyusha is also applied to newer truck-mounted post-Soviet – in addition to non-Soviet – multiple-rocket launchers, notably the common BM-21 Grad and its derivatives.
Initially, concerns for secrecy kept the military designation of the Katyushas from being known by the soldiers who operated them. They were called by code names such as Kostikov guns, after A. Kostikov, the head of the RNII, the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, and finally classed as Guards Mortars. The name BM-13 was only allowed into secret documents in 1942, and remained classified until after the war.
Because they were marked with the letter K (for Voronezh Komintern Factory), Red Army troops adopted a nickname from Mikhail Isakovsky's popular wartime song, "Katyusha", about a girl longing for her absent beloved, who has gone away on military service. Katyusha is the Russian equivalent of Katie, an endearing diminutive form of the name Katherine. Yekaterina is given the diminutive Katya, which itself is then given the affectionate diminutive Katyusha.
German troops coined the nickname "Stalin's organ" (Stalinorgel), after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, comparing the visual resemblance of the launch array to a pipe organ, and the sound of the weapon's rocket motors, a distinctive howling sound which terrified the German troops, adding a psychological warfare aspect to their use. Weapons of this type are known by the same name in Denmark (Danish: Stalinorgel), Finland (Finnish: Stalinin urut), France (French: orgue de Staline), Norway (Norwegian: Stalinorgel), the Netherlands and Belgium (Dutch: Stalinorgel), Hungary (Hungarian: Sztálinorgona), Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries (Spanish: Órganos de Stalin) as well as in Sweden (Swedish: Stalinorgel).
The heavy BM-31 launcher was also referred to as Andryusha (Андрюша, an affectionate diminutive of "Andrew").
Katyusha rocket launchers, which were built in Voronezh, were mounted on many platforms during World War II, including on trucks, artillery tractors, tanks, and armoured trains, as well as on naval and riverine vessels as assault support weapons. Soviet engineers also mounted single Katyusha rockets on lengths of railway track to serve in urban combat.
The design was relatively simple, consisting of racks of parallel rails on which rockets were mounted, with a folding frame to raise the rails to launch position. Each truck had 14 to 48 launchers. The M-13 rocket of the BM-13 system was 80 cm (2 ft 7 in) long, 13.2 cm (5.2 in) in diameter and weighed 42 kg (93 lb).
The weapon is less accurate than conventional artillery guns, but is extremely effective in saturation bombardment. A battery of four BM-13 launchers could fire a salvo in 7–10 seconds that delivered 4.35 tons of high explosives over a 400,000-square-metre (4,300,000 sq ft) impact zone, making its power roughly equivalent to that of 72 conventional artillery guns. With an efficient crew, the launchers could redeploy to a new location immediately after firing, denying the enemy the opportunity for counterbattery fire. Katyusha batteries were often massed in very large numbers to create a shock effect on enemy forces. The weapon's disadvantage was the long time it took to reload a launcher, in contrast to conventional guns which could sustain a continuous low rate of fire.
Initial development of solid propellant rockets was carried out by Nikolai Tikhomirov at the Soviet Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL), with the first test-firing of a solid fuel rocket carried out in March 1928, which flew for about 1,300 meters The rockets were used to assist take-off of aircraft and were later developed into the RS-82 and RS-132 (RS for Reaktivnyy Snaryad, 'rocket-powered shell') in the early 1930s led by Georgy Langemak, including firing rockets from aircraft and the ground. In June 1938, GDL's successor Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII) began building several prototype launchers for the modified 132 mm M-132 rockets. Firing over the sides of ZIS-5 trucks proved unstable, and V.N. Galkovskiy proposed mounting the launch rails longitudinally. In August 1939, the result was the BM-13 (BM stands for боевая машина (translit. boyevaya mashina), 'combat vehicle' for M-13 rockets).
The first large-scale testing of the rocket launchers took place at the end of 1938, when 233 rounds of various types were used. A salvo of rockets could completely straddle a target at a range of 5,500 metres (3.4 mi). But the artillery branch was not fond of the Katyusha, because it took up to 50 minutes to load and fire 24 rounds, while a conventional howitzer could fire 95 to 150 rounds in the same time. Testing with various rockets was conducted through 1940, and the BM-13-16 with launch rails for sixteen rockets was authorized for production. Only forty launchers were built before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
After their success in the first month of the war, mass production was ordered and the development of other models proceeded. The Katyusha was inexpensive and could be manufactured in light industrial installations which did not have the heavy equipment to build conventional artillery gun barrels. By the end of 1942, 3,237 Katyusha launchers of all types had been built, and by the end of the war total production reached about 10,000.
The truck-mounted Katyushas were installed on ZIS-6 6×4 trucks, as well as the two-axle ZIS-5 and ZIS-5V. In 1941, a small number of BM-13 launchers were mounted on STZ-5 artillery tractors. A few were also tried on KV tank chassis as the KV-1K, but this was a needless waste of heavy armour. Starting in 1942, they were also mounted on various British, Canadian and U.S. Lend-Lease trucks, in which case they were sometimes referred to as BM-13S. The cross-country performance of the Studebaker US6 2½-ton 6×6 truck was so good that it became the GAU's standard mounting in 1943, designated BM-13N (normalizovanniy, 'standardized'), and more than 1,800 of this model were manufactured by the end of World War II. After World War II, BM-13s were based on Soviet-built ZIS-151 trucks.
The 82 mm BM-8 was approved in August 1941, and deployed as the BM-8-36 on truck beds and BM-8-24 on T-40 and T-60 light tank chassis. Later these were also installed on GAZ-67 jeeps as the BM-8-8, and on the larger Studebaker trucks as the BM-8-48. In 1942, the team of scientists Leonid Shvarts, Moisei Komissarchik and engineer Yakov Shor received the Stalin Prize for the development of the BM-8-48.
Based on the M-13, the M-30 rocket was developed in 1942. Its bulbous warhead required it to be fired from a grounded frame, called the M-30 (single frame, four round; later double frame, 8 round), instead of a launch rail mounted on a truck. In 1944 it became the basis for the BM-31-12 truck-mounted launcher.
A battery of BM-13-16 launchers included four firing vehicles, two reload trucks and two technical support trucks, with each firing vehicle having a crew of six. Reloading was executed in 3–4 minutes, although the standard procedure was to switch to a new position some 10 km away due to the ease with which the battery could be identified by the enemy. Three batteries were combined into a division (company), and three divisions into a separate mine-firing regiment of rocket artillery.
Soviet World War II rocket systems were named according to the following templates:
where:
In particular, BM-8-16 is a vehicle which fires M-8 missiles and has 16 rails. BM-31-12 is a vehicle which fires M-31 missiles and has 12 launch tubes. Short names such as BM-8 or BM-13 were used too. Number of launch rails/tubes is absent here. Such names describe launchers only no matter what vehicle they are mounted on. In particular BM-8-24 had a number of variants: vehicle mounted (ZIS-5 truck), tank mounted (T-40) and tractor mounted (STZ-3). All of them had the same name: BM-8-24. Other launchers had a number of variants mounted on different vehicles too. Typical set of vehicles for soviet missile systems is the following:
Note: There was also an experimental KV-1K – Katyusha mounted on KV-1 tank which was not taken in service.
A list of some implementations of the Katyusha follows:
Rockets used in the above implementations were:
The M-8 and M-13 rocket could also be fitted with smoke warheads, although this was not common.
The Axis powers had captured Katyushas during the war. Germany considered producing a local copy, but instead created the 8 cm Raketen-Vielfachwerfer, which was based on the Katyusha.
Romania had started developing its Mareșal tank destroyer in late 1942. One of the first experimental models was equipped with a Katyusha rocket launcher and tested in the summer of 1943. The project was not continued.
The multiple rocket launchers were top secret in the beginning of World War II. A special unit of the NKVD troops was raised to operate them. On July 14, 1941, an experimental artillery battery of seven launchers was first used in battle at Rudnya in Smolensk Oblast of Russia, under the command of Captain Ivan Flyorov, destroying a concentration of German troops with tanks, armored vehicles and trucks at the marketplace, causing massive German Army casualties and its retreat from the town in panic, see also in articles by a Russian military historian Andrey Sapronov, an eyewitness of the maiden launches. Following the success, the Red Army organized new Guards mortar batteries for the support of infantry divisions. A battery's complement was standardized at four launchers. They remained under NKVD control until German Nebelwerfer rocket launchers became common later in the war.
On August 8, 1941, Stalin ordered the formation of eight special Guards mortar regiments under the direct control of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command (RVGK). Each regiment comprised three battalions of three batteries, totalling 36 BM-13 or BM-8 launchers. Independent Guards mortar battalions were also formed, comprising 12 launchers in three batteries of four. By the end of 1941, there were eight regiments, 35 independent battalions, and two independent batteries in service, fielding a total of 554 launchers.
In June 1942 heavy Guards mortar battalions were formed around the new M-30 static rocket launch frames, consisting of 96 launchers in three batteries. In July, a battalion of BM-13s was added to the establishment of a tank corps. In 1944, the BM-31 was used in motorized heavy Guards mortar battalions of 48 launchers. In 1943, Guards mortar brigades, and later divisions, were formed equipped with static launchers.
By the end of 1942, 57 regiments were in service—together with the smaller independent battalions, this was the equivalent of 216 batteries: 21% BM-8 light launchers, 56% BM-13, and 23% M-30 heavy launchers. By the end of the war, the equivalent of 518 batteries were in service.
The success and economy of multiple rocket launchers (MRL) have led them to continue to be developed. In the years following WWII, the BM-13 was replaced by the 140 mm BM-14 and the BM-31 was replaced by the 240 mm BM-24. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union fielded several models of Katyusha-like MRL, notably the BM-21 Grad launchers somewhat inspired by the earlier weapon, and the larger BM-27 Uragan. Advances in artillery munitions have been applied to some Katyusha-type multiple launch rocket systems, including bomblet submunitions, remotely deployed land mines, and chemical warheads.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited most of its military arsenal including its large complement of MRLs. In recent history, they have been used by the Russian Armed Forces during the First and Second Chechen Wars and by the Armenian and Azerbaijani Armed Forces during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The Georgian Defence Forces are reported to have used BM-21 Grad or similar rocket artillery in fighting in the Russo-Georgian War.
Katyusha-like launchers were exported to Afghanistan, Angola, Czechoslovakia, Khmer Republic, Egypt, East Germany, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Mongolia, North Korea, Poland, Syria, Yemen and Vietnam. They were also built in Czechoslovakia, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and Iran.
Proper Katyushas (BM-13s) also saw action in the Korean War, used by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and Korean People's Army against the South Korean and United Nations forces. Soviet BM-13s were known to have been imported to China before the Sino-Soviet split and were operational in the People's Liberation Army. The Viet Minh deployed them against the French Far East Expeditionary Corps during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu at the end of the First Indochina War.
Israel captured BM-24 MRLs during the Six-Day War (1967), used them in two battalions during the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the 1982 Lebanon War, and later developed the MAR-240 launcher for the same rockets, based on a Sherman tank chassis.
The rockets were employed by the Tanzania People's Defence Force in the Uganda-Tanzania War. Tanzanian forces called them Baba Mtakatifu (Kiswahili for "Holy Father") while the Ugandans called them Saba Saba.
During the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired between 3,970 and 4,228 rockets, from light truck-mounts and single-rail man-portable launchers. About 95% of these were 122 mm (4.8 in) Syrian-manufactured M-21OF type artillery rockets which carried warheads up to 30 kg (66 lb) and had a range of 20 km, perhaps up to 30 km (19 mi). Most rockets fired at Israel by Hamas from the Gaza Strip are of the simpler Qassam rocket type, but Hamas has also launched 122-mm Grad-type Katyusha rockets against several cities in Israel, although they are not reported to have truck-mounted launchers. Although Katyusha originally referred to the mobile launcher, today the rockets are often referred to as Katyushas.
Some allege that the Central Intelligence Agency bought Katyushas from the Egyptian Armed Forces and supplied them to the Mujahideen (via Pakistan's ISI) during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Katyusha-like MRLs were also allegedly used by the Rwandan Patriotic Front during its 1990 invasion of Rwanda, through the 1994 genocide. They were effective in battle, but translated into much anti-Tutsi sentiment in the local media.
It was reported that BM-21 Grad launchers were used against the U.S. Army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They have also been used in the Afghanistan and Iraq insurgencies. In Iraq, according to Associated Press and Agence France-Presse reports, Katyusha-like rockets were fired at the Green Zone late March 2008.
Katyusha rockets were reportedly used by both Gaddafi Loyalists and anti-Gaddafi forces during the Libyan Civil War.
In February 2013, the Defence Ministry of Yemen reported seizing an Iranian ship, and that the ship's cargo included (among its other weapons) Katyusha rockets.
On May 19, 2019, a Katyusha rocket was fired inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, landing less than a mile from the US Embassy near the statue of the Unknown Soldier. No casualties were reported.
On January 4, 2020, four Katyusha rockets were fired in the Baghdad area. According to two Iraqi Police sources and an official Iraqi Armed Forces statement, one Katyusha rocket landed in the Green Zone in Celebration Square near the U.S. embassy and another landed in the nearby Jadriya neighborhood. Two other Katyusha rockets landed in Balad Air Base, which housed U.S. Armed Forces troops, according to two security sources.
Participants in the creation of the Katyusha rocket launcher received official recognition only in 1991. By decree of the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev dated June 21, 1991, I. T. Kleymenov, G. E. Langemak, V. N. Luzhin, B. S. Petropavlovsky, B. M. Slonimer and N. I. Tikhomirov were posthumously awarded title of the Hero of Socialist Labour for their work on the creation of the Katyusha.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Katyusha (Russian: Катю́ша, IPA: [kɐˈtʲuʂə] ) is a type of rocket artillery first built and fielded by the Soviet Union in World War II. Multiple rocket launchers such as these deliver explosives to a target area more intensively than conventional artillery, but with lower accuracy and requiring a longer time to reload. They are fragile compared to artillery guns, but are cheap, easy to produce, and usable on almost any chassis. The Katyushas of World War II, the first self-propelled artillery mass-produced by the Soviet Union, were usually mounted on ordinary trucks. This mobility gave the Katyusha, and other self-propelled artillery, another advantage: being able to deliver a large blow all at once, and then move before being located and attacked with counter-battery fire.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Katyusha weapons of World War II included the BM-13 launcher, light BM-8, and heavy BM-31. Today, the nickname Katyusha is also applied to newer truck-mounted post-Soviet – in addition to non-Soviet – multiple-rocket launchers, notably the common BM-21 Grad and its derivatives.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Initially, concerns for secrecy kept the military designation of the Katyushas from being known by the soldiers who operated them. They were called by code names such as Kostikov guns, after A. Kostikov, the head of the RNII, the Reactive Scientific Research Institute, and finally classed as Guards Mortars. The name BM-13 was only allowed into secret documents in 1942, and remained classified until after the war.",
"title": "Nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Because they were marked with the letter K (for Voronezh Komintern Factory), Red Army troops adopted a nickname from Mikhail Isakovsky's popular wartime song, \"Katyusha\", about a girl longing for her absent beloved, who has gone away on military service. Katyusha is the Russian equivalent of Katie, an endearing diminutive form of the name Katherine. Yekaterina is given the diminutive Katya, which itself is then given the affectionate diminutive Katyusha.",
"title": "Nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "German troops coined the nickname \"Stalin's organ\" (Stalinorgel), after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, comparing the visual resemblance of the launch array to a pipe organ, and the sound of the weapon's rocket motors, a distinctive howling sound which terrified the German troops, adding a psychological warfare aspect to their use. Weapons of this type are known by the same name in Denmark (Danish: Stalinorgel), Finland (Finnish: Stalinin urut), France (French: orgue de Staline), Norway (Norwegian: Stalinorgel), the Netherlands and Belgium (Dutch: Stalinorgel), Hungary (Hungarian: Sztálinorgona), Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries (Spanish: Órganos de Stalin) as well as in Sweden (Swedish: Stalinorgel).",
"title": "Nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The heavy BM-31 launcher was also referred to as Andryusha (Андрюша, an affectionate diminutive of \"Andrew\").",
"title": "Nickname"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Katyusha rocket launchers, which were built in Voronezh, were mounted on many platforms during World War II, including on trucks, artillery tractors, tanks, and armoured trains, as well as on naval and riverine vessels as assault support weapons. Soviet engineers also mounted single Katyusha rockets on lengths of railway track to serve in urban combat.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The design was relatively simple, consisting of racks of parallel rails on which rockets were mounted, with a folding frame to raise the rails to launch position. Each truck had 14 to 48 launchers. The M-13 rocket of the BM-13 system was 80 cm (2 ft 7 in) long, 13.2 cm (5.2 in) in diameter and weighed 42 kg (93 lb).",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The weapon is less accurate than conventional artillery guns, but is extremely effective in saturation bombardment. A battery of four BM-13 launchers could fire a salvo in 7–10 seconds that delivered 4.35 tons of high explosives over a 400,000-square-metre (4,300,000 sq ft) impact zone, making its power roughly equivalent to that of 72 conventional artillery guns. With an efficient crew, the launchers could redeploy to a new location immediately after firing, denying the enemy the opportunity for counterbattery fire. Katyusha batteries were often massed in very large numbers to create a shock effect on enemy forces. The weapon's disadvantage was the long time it took to reload a launcher, in contrast to conventional guns which could sustain a continuous low rate of fire.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Initial development of solid propellant rockets was carried out by Nikolai Tikhomirov at the Soviet Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL), with the first test-firing of a solid fuel rocket carried out in March 1928, which flew for about 1,300 meters The rockets were used to assist take-off of aircraft and were later developed into the RS-82 and RS-132 (RS for Reaktivnyy Snaryad, 'rocket-powered shell') in the early 1930s led by Georgy Langemak, including firing rockets from aircraft and the ground. In June 1938, GDL's successor Reactive Scientific Research Institute (RNII) began building several prototype launchers for the modified 132 mm M-132 rockets. Firing over the sides of ZIS-5 trucks proved unstable, and V.N. Galkovskiy proposed mounting the launch rails longitudinally. In August 1939, the result was the BM-13 (BM stands for боевая машина (translit. boyevaya mashina), 'combat vehicle' for M-13 rockets).",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The first large-scale testing of the rocket launchers took place at the end of 1938, when 233 rounds of various types were used. A salvo of rockets could completely straddle a target at a range of 5,500 metres (3.4 mi). But the artillery branch was not fond of the Katyusha, because it took up to 50 minutes to load and fire 24 rounds, while a conventional howitzer could fire 95 to 150 rounds in the same time. Testing with various rockets was conducted through 1940, and the BM-13-16 with launch rails for sixteen rockets was authorized for production. Only forty launchers were built before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "After their success in the first month of the war, mass production was ordered and the development of other models proceeded. The Katyusha was inexpensive and could be manufactured in light industrial installations which did not have the heavy equipment to build conventional artillery gun barrels. By the end of 1942, 3,237 Katyusha launchers of all types had been built, and by the end of the war total production reached about 10,000.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The truck-mounted Katyushas were installed on ZIS-6 6×4 trucks, as well as the two-axle ZIS-5 and ZIS-5V. In 1941, a small number of BM-13 launchers were mounted on STZ-5 artillery tractors. A few were also tried on KV tank chassis as the KV-1K, but this was a needless waste of heavy armour. Starting in 1942, they were also mounted on various British, Canadian and U.S. Lend-Lease trucks, in which case they were sometimes referred to as BM-13S. The cross-country performance of the Studebaker US6 2½-ton 6×6 truck was so good that it became the GAU's standard mounting in 1943, designated BM-13N (normalizovanniy, 'standardized'), and more than 1,800 of this model were manufactured by the end of World War II. After World War II, BM-13s were based on Soviet-built ZIS-151 trucks.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The 82 mm BM-8 was approved in August 1941, and deployed as the BM-8-36 on truck beds and BM-8-24 on T-40 and T-60 light tank chassis. Later these were also installed on GAZ-67 jeeps as the BM-8-8, and on the larger Studebaker trucks as the BM-8-48. In 1942, the team of scientists Leonid Shvarts, Moisei Komissarchik and engineer Yakov Shor received the Stalin Prize for the development of the BM-8-48.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Based on the M-13, the M-30 rocket was developed in 1942. Its bulbous warhead required it to be fired from a grounded frame, called the M-30 (single frame, four round; later double frame, 8 round), instead of a launch rail mounted on a truck. In 1944 it became the basis for the BM-31-12 truck-mounted launcher.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "A battery of BM-13-16 launchers included four firing vehicles, two reload trucks and two technical support trucks, with each firing vehicle having a crew of six. Reloading was executed in 3–4 minutes, although the standard procedure was to switch to a new position some 10 km away due to the ease with which the battery could be identified by the enemy. Three batteries were combined into a division (company), and three divisions into a separate mine-firing regiment of rocket artillery.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Soviet World War II rocket systems were named according to the following templates:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "where:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In particular, BM-8-16 is a vehicle which fires M-8 missiles and has 16 rails. BM-31-12 is a vehicle which fires M-31 missiles and has 12 launch tubes. Short names such as BM-8 or BM-13 were used too. Number of launch rails/tubes is absent here. Such names describe launchers only no matter what vehicle they are mounted on. In particular BM-8-24 had a number of variants: vehicle mounted (ZIS-5 truck), tank mounted (T-40) and tractor mounted (STZ-3). All of them had the same name: BM-8-24. Other launchers had a number of variants mounted on different vehicles too. Typical set of vehicles for soviet missile systems is the following:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Note: There was also an experimental KV-1K – Katyusha mounted on KV-1 tank which was not taken in service.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A list of some implementations of the Katyusha follows:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Rockets used in the above implementations were:",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The M-8 and M-13 rocket could also be fitted with smoke warheads, although this was not common.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "The Axis powers had captured Katyushas during the war. Germany considered producing a local copy, but instead created the 8 cm Raketen-Vielfachwerfer, which was based on the Katyusha.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Romania had started developing its Mareșal tank destroyer in late 1942. One of the first experimental models was equipped with a Katyusha rocket launcher and tested in the summer of 1943. The project was not continued.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The multiple rocket launchers were top secret in the beginning of World War II. A special unit of the NKVD troops was raised to operate them. On July 14, 1941, an experimental artillery battery of seven launchers was first used in battle at Rudnya in Smolensk Oblast of Russia, under the command of Captain Ivan Flyorov, destroying a concentration of German troops with tanks, armored vehicles and trucks at the marketplace, causing massive German Army casualties and its retreat from the town in panic, see also in articles by a Russian military historian Andrey Sapronov, an eyewitness of the maiden launches. Following the success, the Red Army organized new Guards mortar batteries for the support of infantry divisions. A battery's complement was standardized at four launchers. They remained under NKVD control until German Nebelwerfer rocket launchers became common later in the war.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On August 8, 1941, Stalin ordered the formation of eight special Guards mortar regiments under the direct control of the Reserve of the Supreme High Command (RVGK). Each regiment comprised three battalions of three batteries, totalling 36 BM-13 or BM-8 launchers. Independent Guards mortar battalions were also formed, comprising 12 launchers in three batteries of four. By the end of 1941, there were eight regiments, 35 independent battalions, and two independent batteries in service, fielding a total of 554 launchers.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "In June 1942 heavy Guards mortar battalions were formed around the new M-30 static rocket launch frames, consisting of 96 launchers in three batteries. In July, a battalion of BM-13s was added to the establishment of a tank corps. In 1944, the BM-31 was used in motorized heavy Guards mortar battalions of 48 launchers. In 1943, Guards mortar brigades, and later divisions, were formed equipped with static launchers.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "By the end of 1942, 57 regiments were in service—together with the smaller independent battalions, this was the equivalent of 216 batteries: 21% BM-8 light launchers, 56% BM-13, and 23% M-30 heavy launchers. By the end of the war, the equivalent of 518 batteries were in service.",
"title": "World War II"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The success and economy of multiple rocket launchers (MRL) have led them to continue to be developed. In the years following WWII, the BM-13 was replaced by the 140 mm BM-14 and the BM-31 was replaced by the 240 mm BM-24. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union fielded several models of Katyusha-like MRL, notably the BM-21 Grad launchers somewhat inspired by the earlier weapon, and the larger BM-27 Uragan. Advances in artillery munitions have been applied to some Katyusha-type multiple launch rocket systems, including bomblet submunitions, remotely deployed land mines, and chemical warheads.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited most of its military arsenal including its large complement of MRLs. In recent history, they have been used by the Russian Armed Forces during the First and Second Chechen Wars and by the Armenian and Azerbaijani Armed Forces during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War. The Georgian Defence Forces are reported to have used BM-21 Grad or similar rocket artillery in fighting in the Russo-Georgian War.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Katyusha-like launchers were exported to Afghanistan, Angola, Czechoslovakia, Khmer Republic, Egypt, East Germany, Hungary, Iran, Iraq, Mongolia, North Korea, Poland, Syria, Yemen and Vietnam. They were also built in Czechoslovakia, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and Iran.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Proper Katyushas (BM-13s) also saw action in the Korean War, used by the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and Korean People's Army against the South Korean and United Nations forces. Soviet BM-13s were known to have been imported to China before the Sino-Soviet split and were operational in the People's Liberation Army. The Viet Minh deployed them against the French Far East Expeditionary Corps during the Battle of Dien Bien Phu at the end of the First Indochina War.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Israel captured BM-24 MRLs during the Six-Day War (1967), used them in two battalions during the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the 1982 Lebanon War, and later developed the MAR-240 launcher for the same rockets, based on a Sherman tank chassis.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The rockets were employed by the Tanzania People's Defence Force in the Uganda-Tanzania War. Tanzanian forces called them Baba Mtakatifu (Kiswahili for \"Holy Father\") while the Ugandans called them Saba Saba.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "During the 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired between 3,970 and 4,228 rockets, from light truck-mounts and single-rail man-portable launchers. About 95% of these were 122 mm (4.8 in) Syrian-manufactured M-21OF type artillery rockets which carried warheads up to 30 kg (66 lb) and had a range of 20 km, perhaps up to 30 km (19 mi). Most rockets fired at Israel by Hamas from the Gaza Strip are of the simpler Qassam rocket type, but Hamas has also launched 122-mm Grad-type Katyusha rockets against several cities in Israel, although they are not reported to have truck-mounted launchers. Although Katyusha originally referred to the mobile launcher, today the rockets are often referred to as Katyushas.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "Some allege that the Central Intelligence Agency bought Katyushas from the Egyptian Armed Forces and supplied them to the Mujahideen (via Pakistan's ISI) during the Soviet–Afghan War.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Katyusha-like MRLs were also allegedly used by the Rwandan Patriotic Front during its 1990 invasion of Rwanda, through the 1994 genocide. They were effective in battle, but translated into much anti-Tutsi sentiment in the local media.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "It was reported that BM-21 Grad launchers were used against the U.S. Army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They have also been used in the Afghanistan and Iraq insurgencies. In Iraq, according to Associated Press and Agence France-Presse reports, Katyusha-like rockets were fired at the Green Zone late March 2008.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Katyusha rockets were reportedly used by both Gaddafi Loyalists and anti-Gaddafi forces during the Libyan Civil War.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In February 2013, the Defence Ministry of Yemen reported seizing an Iranian ship, and that the ship's cargo included (among its other weapons) Katyusha rockets.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "On May 19, 2019, a Katyusha rocket was fired inside the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, landing less than a mile from the US Embassy near the statue of the Unknown Soldier. No casualties were reported.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "On January 4, 2020, four Katyusha rockets were fired in the Baghdad area. According to two Iraqi Police sources and an official Iraqi Armed Forces statement, one Katyusha rocket landed in the Green Zone in Celebration Square near the U.S. embassy and another landed in the nearby Jadriya neighborhood. Two other Katyusha rockets landed in Balad Air Base, which housed U.S. Armed Forces troops, according to two security sources.",
"title": "Post-war development"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Participants in the creation of the Katyusha rocket launcher received official recognition only in 1991. By decree of the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev dated June 21, 1991, I. T. Kleymenov, G. E. Langemak, V. N. Luzhin, B. S. Petropavlovsky, B. M. Slonimer and N. I. Tikhomirov were posthumously awarded title of the Hero of Socialist Labour for their work on the creation of the Katyusha.",
"title": "Recognition and honours"
}
] |
The Katyusha is a type of rocket artillery first built and fielded by the Soviet Union in World War II. Multiple rocket launchers such as these deliver explosives to a target area more intensively than conventional artillery, but with lower accuracy and requiring a longer time to reload. They are fragile compared to artillery guns, but are cheap, easy to produce, and usable on almost any chassis. The Katyushas of World War II, the first self-propelled artillery mass-produced by the Soviet Union, were usually mounted on ordinary trucks. This mobility gave the Katyusha, and other self-propelled artillery, another advantage: being able to deliver a large blow all at once, and then move before being located and attacked with counter-battery fire. Katyusha weapons of World War II included the BM-13 launcher, light BM-8, and heavy BM-31. Today, the nickname Katyusha is also applied to newer truck-mounted post-Soviet – in addition to non-Soviet – multiple-rocket launchers, notably the common BM-21 Grad and its derivatives.
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2001-10-10T21:22:37Z
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2023-12-30T05:57:25Z
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyusha_rocket_launcher
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Kathy Acker
|
Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 [disputed] – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.
The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in 1947, although the Library of Congress gives her birth year as 1948, while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S. and died November 30, 1997, Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as 1944.
Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated, German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her paternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. According to Acker, her grandparents were "first generation French-German Jews" whose ancestors originally hailed from the Pale of Settlement. In an interview with the magazine Tattoo Jew, Acker stated that religious Judaism "means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me" and elaborated that her parents were "high-German Jews" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. ("I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.")
The pregnancy was unplanned; Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Karen's birth. Her relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Karen was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. Karen (later Kathy) had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Kathy's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested. Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side. In 1978, Claire Alexander, Karen's mother, committed suicide. As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father, but abandoned her search after she discovered that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a psychiatric asylum until the state excused him of murder charges.
Acker attended the Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she studied Classics and "took advantage of loosened mores, attending orgies thrown by theatre kids." In 1966, she married Robert Acker, and took his surname. Robert Acker was the son of lower-middle-class Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her mother and stepfather had hoped she would marry a wealthy man and did not expect the marriage to Acker to last long. She became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved to California to attend University of California, San Diego, where David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg were among her teachers. She received her bachelor's degree in 1968. After moving to New York, she attended two years of graduate school at the City College of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek. She did not earn a graduate degree. During her time in New York, she was employed as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer.
Although her birth name was Karen, she was known as Kathy to her friends and family. Her first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground of the mid-1970s. During the 1970s, Acker often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco, and New York. She married the composer and experimental musician Peter Gordon shortly before the end of their seven-year relationship. Later, she had relationships with the theorist, publisher, and critic Sylvère Lotringer and then with the filmmaker and film theorist Peter Wollen. In 1996, Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray. She married twice. She was openly bisexual.
In 1979, she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." During the early 1980s, she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about six years and as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Idaho, the University of California, San Diego (UC-San Diego), University of California, Santa Barbara (UC-Santa Barbara), the California Institute of Arts, and Roanoke College.
In April 1996, Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer and she elected to have a double mastectomy. In January 1997, she wrote about her loss of faith in conventional medicine in a Guardian article, "The Gift of Disease."
In the article, she explains that after unsuccessful surgery, which left her feeling physically mutilated and emotionally debilitated, she rejected the passivity of the patient in the medical mainstream and began to seek out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Chinese herbalists. She found appealing the claim that instead of being an object of knowledge, as in Western medicine, the patient becomes a seer, a seeker of wisdom, that illness becomes the teacher and the patient the student. After pursuing several forms of alternative medicine in England and the United States, Acker died a year and a half later, on November 30, 1997, aged 50, from complications of cancer in a Tijuana alternative cancer clinic, the only alternative-treatment facility that accepted her with her advanced stage of cancer. She died in what was called "Room 101", to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, "There's nothing that woman can't turn into a literary reference." (Room 101, in the climax of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, turns out to be the torture chamber in which the Inner Party subjects its political prisoners to their own worst fears.)
Acker was associated with the New York punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The punk aesthetic influenced her literary style. In the 1970s, before the term "postmodernism" was popular, Acker began writing her books. These books contain features that would eventually be considered postmodernist work. Her controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras. Her writing strategies at times used forms of pastiche and deployed Burroughs's cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences into a somewhat random remix. Acker defined her writing as existing post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence. Indeed, critics often compare her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics have noticed links to Gertrude Stein and photographers Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Acker's novels also exhibit a fascination with and an indebtedness to tattoos. She dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist.
Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973, she published her first novel (under the pseudonym Black Tarantula), The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses. The following year, she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. Both works are reprinted in Portrait of an Eye.
In 1979, she received popular attention after winning a Pushcart Prize for her short story "New York City in 1979." She did not receive critical attention, however, until publishing Great Expectations in 1982. The opening of Great Expectations is an obvious re-writing of Charles Dickens's work of the same name. It features her usual subject matter, including a semi-autobiographical account of her mother's suicide and the appropriation of several other texts, including Pierre Guyotat's violent and sexually explicit "Eden Eden Eden." That same year, Acker published a chapbook, entitled Hello, I'm Erica Jong. She appropriated from a number of influential writers. These writers include Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Brontë sisters, the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud.
Acker wrote the script for the 1983 film Variety. Acker wrote a text on the photographer Marcus Leatherdale that was published in 1983, in an art catalogue for the Molotov Gallery in Vienna.
In 1984, Acker's first British publication, the novel Blood and Guts in High School was published soon after its publication by Grove Press in New York. That same year, she was signed by Grove Press, one of the legendary independent publishers committed to controversial and avant-garde writing; she was one of the last writers taken on by Barney Rosset before the end of his tenure there. Most of her work was published by them, including re-issues of important earlier work. She wrote for several magazines and anthologies, including the periodicals RE/Search, Angel Exhaust, monochrom and Rapid Eye. As she neared the end of her life, her work was more well-received by the conventional press; for example, The Guardian published a number of her essays, interviews, and articles, among them was an interview with the Spice Girls. In Memoriam to Identity draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Although known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she was also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, strong-willed women, and violence.
Notwithstanding the increased recognition she garnered for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School is often considered Acker's breakthrough work. Published in 1984, it is one of her most extreme explorations of sexuality and violence. Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex-addicted and pelvic inflammatory disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery. Many critics criticized it for being demeaning toward women, and Germany banned it completely. Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father.
Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988, and considered it a turning point in her writing. While she still borrows from other texts, including Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the appropriation is less obvious. However, one of Acker's more controversial appropriations is from William Gibson's 1984 text, Neuromancer, in which Acker equates code with the female body and its militaristic implications. In 1988, she published Literal Madness: Three Novels, which included three previously-published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston's 1948 film noir Key Largo into its base sexual politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman's relationship and sexual exploits while on vacation, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography of the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.
Between 1990 and 1993, she published four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already-published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992). Her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was published in 1996, which she, Rico Bell, and the rest of rock band the Mekons also reworked into an operetta, which they performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1997.
In 2007, Amandla Publishing re-published Acker's articles that she wrote for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991. Grove Press published two unpublished early novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, and a collection of selected work, Essential Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper in 2002.
Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and republished since her death. In 2002, New York University staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective exhibition of her works, while in 2008, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts screened an evening of films influenced by Acker.
A collection of essays on Acker's work, titled Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder, was published by Verso in 2006 and includes essays by Nayland Blake, Leslie Dick, Robert Glück, Carla Harryman, Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell, Barrett Watten, and Peter Wollen. In 2009, the first collection of essays to focus on academic study of Acker, Kathy Acker and Transnationalism was published. In 2015, Semiotext(e) published I'm Very Into You, a book of Acker's email correspondence with media theorist McKenzie Wark, edited by Matias Viegener, her executor and head of the Kathy Acker Literary Trust. Her personal library is housed in a reading room at the University of Cologne in Germany, and her papers are divided between NYU's Fales Library and the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. A limited body of her recorded readings and discussions of her works exists in the special collections archive of University of California, San Diego.
In 2013, the Acker Award was launched and named for Kathy Acker. Awarded to living and deceased members of the San Francisco or New York avant-garde art scene, the award is financed by Alan Kaufman and Clayton Patterson.
In 2017, American writer and artist Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, the first book-length biography of Acker's life experiences and literary strategies. American writer Douglas A. Martin published Acker. a book-length study of Acker's influences and artistic trajectory.
In 2018, British writer Olivia Laing published Crudo, a novel which references Acker's works and life, and whose main character is a woman called Kathy, suffering double breast cancer; yet book's events are situated in August–September 2017. In 2019, Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin co-edited Kathy Acker: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Kate Zambreno wrote on Kathy Acker in her essay "New York City, Summer 2013" published as part of the collection Screen Tests (Harpers Collins, 2019). The essay was originally published in Icon edited by Amy Scholder (Feminist Press, 2014).
Between May 1, 2019 and August 4, 2019, the exhibition I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The exhibition featured works by more than 40 artists, such as Reza Abdoh, Johanna Hedva and Reba Maybury. In 2020, Grove Press issued a new edition of Portrait of an Eye, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno.
Some of the contents from * Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical edition of unpublished early writings from 1971 to 1975
This is not a complete list.
This symbol # indicates published in Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical edition of unpublished early writings from 1971 to 1975
Discussion/reading of two poems from the novel Blood and Guts in High School
This is not a complete list. The symbols ^^ indicate it's available at Duke University's collection of Kathy Acker's papers. The symbol # indicates the essay is included in the Kathy Acker collection Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).
Book reviews – typescripts of sixteen different reviews from 1985 to 1989 – available at Duke University's collection of Kathy Acker papers.
Incomplete list:
Incomplete list:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kathy Acker (April 18, 1947 [disputed] – November 30, 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The only child of Donald and Claire (nee Weill) Lehman, Acker was born Karen Lehman in New York City in 1947, although the Library of Congress gives her birth year as 1948, while the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica gave her birth year as April 18, 1948, New York, New York, U.S. and died November 30, 1997, Tijuana, Mexico. Most obituaries, including The New York Times, cited her birth year as 1944.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Her family was from a wealthy, assimilated, German-Jewish background that was culturally but not religiously Jewish. Her paternal grandmother, Florence Weill, was an Austrian Jew who had inherited a small fortune from her husband's glove-making business. Acker's grandparents went into political exile from Alsace-Lorraine prior to World War I, due to the rising nationalism of pre-Nazi Germany, moving to Paris and then to the United States. According to Acker, her grandparents were \"first generation French-German Jews\" whose ancestors originally hailed from the Pale of Settlement. In an interview with the magazine Tattoo Jew, Acker stated that religious Judaism \"means nothing to me. I don't run away from it, it just means nothing to me\" and elaborated that her parents were \"high-German Jews\" who held cultural prejudices against Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. (\"I was trained to run away from Polish Jews.\")",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The pregnancy was unplanned; Donald Lehman abandoned the family before Karen's birth. Her relationship with her domineering mother even into adulthood was fraught with hostility and anxiety because Acker felt unloved and unwanted. Her mother soon remarried, to Albert Alexander, whose surname Karen was given, although the writer later described her mother's union with Alexander as a passionless marriage to an ineffectual man. Karen (later Kathy) had a half-sister, Wendy, by her mother's second marriage, but the two women were never close and long estranged. By the time of Kathy's death, she had requested that her friends not contact Wendy, as some had suggested. Acker was raised in her mother and stepfather's home in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan's prosperous Upper East Side. In 1978, Claire Alexander, Karen's mother, committed suicide. As an adult, Acker tried to track down her father, but abandoned her search after she discovered that her father had disappeared after killing a trespasser on his yacht and spending six months in a psychiatric asylum until the state excused him of murder charges.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Acker attended the Birch Wathen Lenox School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side. As an undergraduate at Brandeis University, she studied Classics and \"took advantage of loosened mores, attending orgies thrown by theatre kids.\" In 1966, she married Robert Acker, and took his surname. Robert Acker was the son of lower-middle-class Polish-Jewish immigrants. Her mother and stepfather had hoped she would marry a wealthy man and did not expect the marriage to Acker to last long. She became interested in writing novels and, with Robert, moved to California to attend University of California, San Diego, where David Antin, Eleanor Antin, and Jerome Rothenberg were among her teachers. She received her bachelor's degree in 1968. After moving to New York, she attended two years of graduate school at the City College of New York in Classics, specializing in Greek. She did not earn a graduate degree. During her time in New York, she was employed as a file clerk, secretary, stripper, and porn performer.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Although her birth name was Karen, she was known as Kathy to her friends and family. Her first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground of the mid-1970s. During the 1970s, Acker often moved back and forth between San Diego, San Francisco, and New York. She married the composer and experimental musician Peter Gordon shortly before the end of their seven-year relationship. Later, she had relationships with the theorist, publisher, and critic Sylvère Lotringer and then with the filmmaker and film theorist Peter Wollen. In 1996, Acker left San Francisco and moved to London to live with the writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray. She married twice. She was openly bisexual.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In 1979, she won the Pushcart Prize for her short story \"New York City in 1979.\" During the early 1980s, she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. After returning to the United States in the late 1980s, she worked as an adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute for about six years and as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Idaho, the University of California, San Diego (UC-San Diego), University of California, Santa Barbara (UC-Santa Barbara), the California Institute of Arts, and Roanoke College.",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In April 1996, Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer and she elected to have a double mastectomy. In January 1997, she wrote about her loss of faith in conventional medicine in a Guardian article, \"The Gift of Disease.\"",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the article, she explains that after unsuccessful surgery, which left her feeling physically mutilated and emotionally debilitated, she rejected the passivity of the patient in the medical mainstream and began to seek out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Chinese herbalists. She found appealing the claim that instead of being an object of knowledge, as in Western medicine, the patient becomes a seer, a seeker of wisdom, that illness becomes the teacher and the patient the student. After pursuing several forms of alternative medicine in England and the United States, Acker died a year and a half later, on November 30, 1997, aged 50, from complications of cancer in a Tijuana alternative cancer clinic, the only alternative-treatment facility that accepted her with her advanced stage of cancer. She died in what was called \"Room 101\", to which her friend Alan Moore quipped, \"There's nothing that woman can't turn into a literary reference.\" (Room 101, in the climax of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, turns out to be the torture chamber in which the Inner Party subjects its political prisoners to their own worst fears.)",
"title": "Biography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Acker was associated with the New York punk movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The punk aesthetic influenced her literary style. In the 1970s, before the term \"postmodernism\" was popular, Acker began writing her books. These books contain features that would eventually be considered postmodernist work. Her controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras. Her writing strategies at times used forms of pastiche and deployed Burroughs's cut-up technique, involving cutting-up and scrambling passages and sentences into a somewhat random remix. Acker defined her writing as existing post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence. Indeed, critics often compare her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics have noticed links to Gertrude Stein and photographers Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Acker's novels also exhibit a fascination with and an indebtedness to tattoos. She dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her tattooist.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Acker published her first book, Politics, in 1972. Although the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973, she published her first novel (under the pseudonym Black Tarantula), The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses. The following year, she published her second novel, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. Both works are reprinted in Portrait of an Eye.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In 1979, she received popular attention after winning a Pushcart Prize for her short story \"New York City in 1979.\" She did not receive critical attention, however, until publishing Great Expectations in 1982. The opening of Great Expectations is an obvious re-writing of Charles Dickens's work of the same name. It features her usual subject matter, including a semi-autobiographical account of her mother's suicide and the appropriation of several other texts, including Pierre Guyotat's violent and sexually explicit \"Eden Eden Eden.\" That same year, Acker published a chapbook, entitled Hello, I'm Erica Jong. She appropriated from a number of influential writers. These writers include Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Keats, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, the Brontë sisters, the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Arthur Rimbaud.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Acker wrote the script for the 1983 film Variety. Acker wrote a text on the photographer Marcus Leatherdale that was published in 1983, in an art catalogue for the Molotov Gallery in Vienna.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In 1984, Acker's first British publication, the novel Blood and Guts in High School was published soon after its publication by Grove Press in New York. That same year, she was signed by Grove Press, one of the legendary independent publishers committed to controversial and avant-garde writing; she was one of the last writers taken on by Barney Rosset before the end of his tenure there. Most of her work was published by them, including re-issues of important earlier work. She wrote for several magazines and anthologies, including the periodicals RE/Search, Angel Exhaust, monochrom and Rapid Eye. As she neared the end of her life, her work was more well-received by the conventional press; for example, The Guardian published a number of her essays, interviews, and articles, among them was an interview with the Spice Girls. In Memoriam to Identity draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Although known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she was also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, strong-willed women, and violence.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Notwithstanding the increased recognition she garnered for Great Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School is often considered Acker's breakthrough work. Published in 1984, it is one of her most extreme explorations of sexuality and violence. Borrowing from, among other texts, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Blood and Guts details the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex-addicted and pelvic inflammatory disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery. Many critics criticized it for being demeaning toward women, and Germany banned it completely. Acker published the German court judgment against Blood and Guts in High School in Hannibal Lecter, My Father.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Acker published Empire of the Senseless in 1988, and considered it a turning point in her writing. While she still borrows from other texts, including Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the appropriation is less obvious. However, one of Acker's more controversial appropriations is from William Gibson's 1984 text, Neuromancer, in which Acker equates code with the female body and its militaristic implications. In 1988, she published Literal Madness: Three Novels, which included three previously-published works: Florida deconstructs and reduces John Huston's 1948 film noir Key Largo into its base sexual politics, Kathy Goes to Haiti details a young woman's relationship and sexual exploits while on vacation, and My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini provides a fictional autobiography of the Italian filmmaker in which he solves his own murder.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Between 1990 and 1993, she published four more books: In Memoriam to Identity (1990); Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991); Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (1992), also composed of already-published works; and My Mother: Demonology (1992). Her last novel, Pussy, King of the Pirates, was published in 1996, which she, Rico Bell, and the rest of rock band the Mekons also reworked into an operetta, which they performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1997.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In 2007, Amandla Publishing re-published Acker's articles that she wrote for the New Statesman from 1989 to 1991. Grove Press published two unpublished early novellas in the volume Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America, and a collection of selected work, Essential Acker, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper in 2002.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Three volumes of her non-fiction have been published and republished since her death. In 2002, New York University staged Discipline and Anarchy, a retrospective exhibition of her works, while in 2008, London's Institute of Contemporary Arts screened an evening of films influenced by Acker.",
"title": "Literary overview"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "A collection of essays on Acker's work, titled Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, and Amy Scholder, was published by Verso in 2006 and includes essays by Nayland Blake, Leslie Dick, Robert Glück, Carla Harryman, Laurence Rickels, Avital Ronell, Barrett Watten, and Peter Wollen. In 2009, the first collection of essays to focus on academic study of Acker, Kathy Acker and Transnationalism was published. In 2015, Semiotext(e) published I'm Very Into You, a book of Acker's email correspondence with media theorist McKenzie Wark, edited by Matias Viegener, her executor and head of the Kathy Acker Literary Trust. Her personal library is housed in a reading room at the University of Cologne in Germany, and her papers are divided between NYU's Fales Library and the Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University. A limited body of her recorded readings and discussions of her works exists in the special collections archive of University of California, San Diego.",
"title": "Posthumous reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 2013, the Acker Award was launched and named for Kathy Acker. Awarded to living and deceased members of the San Francisco or New York avant-garde art scene, the award is financed by Alan Kaufman and Clayton Patterson.",
"title": "Posthumous reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In 2017, American writer and artist Chris Kraus published After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, the first book-length biography of Acker's life experiences and literary strategies. American writer Douglas A. Martin published Acker. a book-length study of Acker's influences and artistic trajectory.",
"title": "Posthumous reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In 2018, British writer Olivia Laing published Crudo, a novel which references Acker's works and life, and whose main character is a woman called Kathy, suffering double breast cancer; yet book's events are situated in August–September 2017. In 2019, Amy Scholder and Douglas A. Martin co-edited Kathy Acker: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Kate Zambreno wrote on Kathy Acker in her essay \"New York City, Summer 2013\" published as part of the collection Screen Tests (Harpers Collins, 2019). The essay was originally published in Icon edited by Amy Scholder (Feminist Press, 2014).",
"title": "Posthumous reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Between May 1, 2019 and August 4, 2019, the exhibition I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The exhibition featured works by more than 40 artists, such as Reza Abdoh, Johanna Hedva and Reba Maybury. In 2020, Grove Press issued a new edition of Portrait of an Eye, with an introduction by Kate Zambreno.",
"title": "Posthumous reputation"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "Some of the contents from * Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical edition of unpublished early writings from 1971 to 1975",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "This is not a complete list.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "This symbol # indicates published in Kathy Acker (1971–1975) (2019, Éditions Ismael, 656 pgs.), ed. Justin Gajoux and Claire Finch, critical edition of unpublished early writings from 1971 to 1975",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Discussion/reading of two poems from the novel Blood and Guts in High School",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "This is not a complete list. The symbols ^^ indicate it's available at Duke University's collection of Kathy Acker's papers. The symbol # indicates the essay is included in the Kathy Acker collection Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent's Tail, 1997).",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Book reviews – typescripts of sixteen different reviews from 1985 to 1989 – available at Duke University's collection of Kathy Acker papers.",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Incomplete list:",
"title": "Bibliography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Incomplete list:",
"title": "Bibliography"
}
] |
Kathy Acker was an American experimental novelist, playwright, essayist, and postmodernist writer, known for her idiosyncratic and transgressive writing that dealt with themes such as childhood trauma, sexuality and rebellion. She was influenced by the Black Mountain School poets, William S. Burroughs, David Antin, Carolee Schneeman, Eleanor Antin, French critical theory, mysticism, and pornography, as well as classic literature.
|
2001-10-12T19:32:18Z
|
2023-12-29T18:16:21Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Acker
|
16,966 |
Koh-i-Noor
|
The Koh-i-Noor (Persian for 'Mountain of Light'; /ˌkoʊɪˈnʊər/ KOH-in-OOR), also spelled Koh-e-Noor, Kohinoor and Koh-i-Nur, is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, weighing 105.6 carats (21.12 g). It is part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The diamond is currently set in the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
There are multiple conflicting legends on the origin of the diamond. However, in the words of the colonial administrator Theo Metcalfe, there is "very meagre and imperfect" evidence of the early history of the Koh-i-Noor before the 1740s. There is no record of its original weight, but the earliest attested weight is 186 old carats (191 metric carats or 38.2 g). The first verifiable record of the diamond comes from a history by Muhammad Kazim Marvi of the 1740s invasion of Northern India by Nader Shah. Marvi notes the Koh-i-Noor as being one of many stones on the Mughal Peacock Throne that Nader Shah looted from Delhi. The diamond then changed hands between various empires in south and west Asia, until being given to Queen Victoria after the British East India Company's annexation of the Punjab in 1849, during the reign of the then 11-year-old Maharaja of the Sikh Empire Duleep Singh, who ruled under the shadow influence of the Company ally Gulab Singh, the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, who had previously possessed the stone.
Originally, the stone was of a similar cut to other Mughal-era diamonds, like the Daria-i-Noor, which are now in the Iranian National Jewels. In 1851, it went on display at the Great Exhibition in London, but the lackluster cut failed to impress viewers. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, ordered it to be re-cut as an oval brilliant by Coster Diamonds. By modern standards, the culet (point at the bottom of a gemstone) is unusually broad, giving the impression of a black hole when the stone is viewed head-on; it is nevertheless regarded by gemologists as "full of life".
Since arriving in the UK, it has only been worn by female members of the British royal family. Victoria wore the stone in a brooch and a circlet. After she died in 1901, it was set in the Crown of Queen Alexandra. It was transferred to the Crown of Queen Mary in 1911, and finally to the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1937 for her coronation.
Today, the diamond is on public display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. The governments of India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban, have all claimed ownership of the Koh-i-Noor, demanding its return ever since India gained independence from the British Empire in 1947. The British government insists the gem was obtained legally under the terms of the Last Treaty of Lahore and has rejected the claims.
In 2018, at the Supreme Court of India the Archeological Survey of India clarified that the diamond was surrendered to the British and "it (the diamond) was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away".
Babur, the Turco-Mongol founder of the Mughal Empire, wrote about a "famous" diamond that weighed just over 187 old carats – approximately the size of the 186-carat Koh-i-Noor. According to the diary of Alauddin Khalji of the Khalji dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, he acquired a large diamond when he invaded the kingdoms of southern India at the beginning of the 14th century and looted it from the Kakatiyas. It later passed on to succeeding dynasties of the Sultanate, and Babur received the diamond in 1526 as a tribute for his conquest of Delhi and Agra at the Battle of Panipat. However, it is impossible to verify these details exactly about when or where it was found, and many competing theories exist as to its original owner.
For some time it was alleged that while in the possession of Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, the stone was cut by Hortense Borgia, a Venetian lapidarist, who reduced the weight of the large stone to 186 carats (37.2 g). For this carelessness, Borgia was reprimanded and fined 10,000 rupees. However according to recent research, the story of Borgia cutting the diamond is not correct, and most probably mixed up with that of the Orlov, part of Catherine the Great's imperial Russian scepter in the Kremlin.
In early Indian history, diamonds were the most valued of gemstones. However, during the period of Mughal rule, diamonds lost this distinction. When looking at the Mughal treasury, Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, the Grand vizier to Akbar, noted that red spinels and Burmese rubies had become the most desirable jewels by the nobility. During this time the Persian new year ceremony, Nowruz, had become a period in which the subjects could bring offerings of gems and money to the imperial family in exchange for political promotions within the greater bureaucracy. By the time Shah Jahan ascended the throne as the fifth Mughal emperor, there were so many jewels in the treasury that he decided to use many of them in the making of the ornate Peacock Throne in 1635.
Over a century later in 1738 Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, following the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty of Persia two years earlier began raiding into Mughal territory before soon launching a full-scale invasion of North-West India. This invading force soon captured Delhi, where after a massacre of the civilian population the army began a systematic looting of the wealth of the city and the treasury of the Mughal Empire. With nearly 10,000 wagons of loot, along with millions of rupees and an assortment of other historic jewels, Nader Shah also carried away the imperial Peacock Throne. And it is here on the head of one of the peacocks on the throne that Nader Shah's biographer Muhammad Kazim Marvi first records seeing the Koh-i-Noor in the 1740s along with other prominent gems, such as the great Timur Ruby and the Daria-i-Noor. It is alleged that Nader Shah exclaimed "Koh-i-Noor!", Persian and Hindi-Urdu for "Mountain of Light", when he first obtained the famous stone. One of his consorts is even noted to have said, "If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor".
After Nadir Shah was killed and his empire collapsed in 1747, the Koh-i-Noor fell to his grandson, who in 1751 gave it to Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Empire, in return for his support. One of Ahmed's grandsons, Shuja Shah Durrani, wore a bracelet containing the Koh-i-Noor on the occasion of Mountstuart Elphinstone's visit to Peshawar in 1808. A year later, Shah Shuja formed an alliance with the United Kingdom to help defend against a possible invasion of Afghanistan by Russia. He was quickly overthrown, but fled with the diamond to Lahore (in modern Pakistan), where Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire, in return for his hospitality, insisted upon the gem being given to him, and he took possession of it in 1813.
Ranjit Singh had the diamond examined by jewelers of Lahore for two days to ensure that Shuja had not tricked him. After the jewelers confirmed its genuineness, he donated 125,000 rupees to Shuja. Ranjit Singh then asked the principal jewelers of Amritsar to estimate the diamond's value; the jewelers declared that the value of the diamond was "far beyond all computation". Ranjit Singh then affixed the diamond to the front of his turban, and paraded on an elephant to enable his subjects to see it. He used to wear it as an armlet during major festivals such as Diwali and Dusserah, and took it with him during travel. He would exhibit it to prominent visitors, especially British officers.
One day, Ranjit Singh asked the diamond's former owners – Shuja and his wife Wafa Begum – to estimate its value. Wafa Begum replied that if a strong man threw a stone in four cardinal directions and vertically, Koh-i-Noor would be worth more than the gold and precious stones filled in the space. Ranjit Singh grew paranoid about the Koh-i-Noor being stolen, because in the past, another valuable jewel had been stolen from him while he was intoxicated. He kept the diamond within a high-security facility at the Gobindgarh Fort when it was not in use. When the diamond was to be transported, it was placed in a pannier on a guarded camel; 39 other camels with identical panniers were included in the convoy; the diamond was always placed on the first camel immediately behind the guards, but great secrecy was maintained regarding which camel carried it. Only Ranjit Singh's treasurer Misr Beli Ram knew which camel carried the diamond.
In June 1839, Ranjit Singh suffered his third stroke, and it became apparent that he would die soon. On his deathbed, he started giving away his valuable possessions to religious charities, and appointed his eldest son Kharak Singh as his successor. A day before his death, on 26 June 1839, a major argument broke out between his courtiers regarding the fate of Koh-i-Noor. Ranjit Singh himself was too weak to speak, and communicated using gestures. Bhai Gobind Ram, the head Brahmin of Ranjit Singh, insisted that the king had willed Koh-i-Noor and other jewels to the Jagannath Temple in Puri: the king apparently supported this claim through gestures, as recorded in his court chronicle Umdat ul-Tawarikh. However, treasurer Beli Ram insisted that it was a state property rather than Ranjit Singh's personal property, and therefore, should be handed over to Kharak Singh.
After Ranjit Singh's death, Beli Ram refused to send the diamond to the temple, and hid it in his vaults. Meanwhile, Kharak Singh and wazir Dhian Singh also issued orders stating that the diamond should not be taken out of Lahore.
On 8 October 1839, the new emperor Kharak Singh was overthrown in a coup by his prime minister Dhian Singh. The prime minister's brother Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu, came into possession of the Koh-i-Noor. Kharak Singh later died in prison, soon followed by the mysterious death of his son and successor Nau Nihal Singh on 5 November 1840. Gulab Singh held onto the stone until January 1841, when he presented it to emperor Sher Singh in order to win his favour, after his brother Dhian Singh negotiated a ceasefire between Sher Singh and the overthrown empress Chand Kaur. Gulab Singh had attempted to defend the widowed empress at her fort in Lahore, during two days of conflict and shelling by Sher Singh and his troops. Despite handing over the Koh-i-noor, Gulab Singh as a result of the ceasefire returned safely to Jammu with a wealth of gold and other jewels taken from the treasury.
On 15 September 1843, both Sher Singh and prime minister Dhian Singh were assassinated in a coup led by Ajit Singh Sandhawalia. However, the next day in a counter coup led by Dhian's son Hira Singh the assassins were killed. Aged 24, Hira Singh succeeded his father as prime minister, and installed the five-year old Duleep Singh as emperor. The Koh-i-noor was now fastened to the arm of the child emperor in court at Lahore. Duleep Singh and his mother empress Jind Kaur, had till then resided in Jammu, the kingdom governed by Gulab Singh.
Following his nephew Prime Minister Hira Singh's assassination on 27 March 1844, and the subsequent outbreak of the First Anglo-Sikh War, Gulab Singh himself led the Sikh empire as its prime minister, and despite defeat in the war, he became the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir on 16 March 1846, under the Treaty of Amritsar.
On 29 March 1849, following the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the Kingdom of Punjab was formally annexed to Company rule, and the Last Treaty of Lahore was signed, officially ceding the Koh-i-Noor to Queen Victoria and the Maharaja's other assets to the company. Article III of the treaty read:
The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England [sic].
The lead signatory of the treaty for the by then eleven-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh was his commander-in-chief Tej Singh, a loyalist of Maharaja Gulab Singh who had previously been in possession of the Koh-i-Noor and gained Kashmir from the Sikh empire, via treaty with Britain, following the First Anglo-Sikh War.
The Governor-General in charge of the ratification of this treaty was the Marquess of Dalhousie. The manner of his aiding in the transfer of the diamond was criticized even by some of his contemporaries in Britain. Although some thought it should have been presented as a gift to Queen Victoria by the East India Company, it is clear that Dalhousie believed the stone was a spoil of war, and treated it accordingly, ensuring that it was officially surrendered to her by Duleep Singh, the youngest son of Ranjit Singh. The presentation of the Koh-i-Noor by the East India Company to the queen was the latest in a long history of transfers of the diamond as a coveted spoil of war. Duleep Singh had been placed in the guardianship of Dr John Login, a surgeon in the British Army serving in the Presidency of Bengal. Duleep Singh moved to England in 1854 and spent the rest of his life in exile.
In due course, the Governor-General received the Koh-i-Noor from Dr Login, who had been appointed Governor of the Citadel, on 6 April 1848 under a receipt dated 7 December 1849, in the presence of members of the Board of Administration for the affairs of the Punjab: Sir Henry Lawrence (President), C. G. Mansel, John Lawrence and Sir Henry Elliot (Secretary to the Government of India).
Legend in the Lawrence family has it that before the voyage, John Lawrence left the jewel in his waistcoat pocket when it was sent to be laundered, and was most grateful when it was returned promptly by the valet who found it.
On 1 February 1850, the jewel was sealed in a small iron safe inside a red dispatch box, both sealed with red tape and a wax seal and kept in a chest at Bombay Treasury awaiting a steamer ship from China. It was then sent to England for presentation to Queen Victoria in the care of Captain J. Ramsay and Brevet Lt. Col F. Mackeson under tight security arrangements, one of which was the placement of the dispatch box in a larger iron safe. They departed from Bombay on 6 April on board HMS Medea, captained by Captain Lockyer.
The ship had a difficult voyage: an outbreak of cholera on board when the ship was in Mauritius had the locals demanding its departure, and they asked their governor to open fire on the vessel and destroy it if there was no response. Shortly afterwards, the vessel was hit by a severe gale that blew for some 12 hours.
On arrival in Britain on 29 June, the passengers and mail were unloaded in Plymouth, but the Koh-i-Noor stayed on board until the ship reached Spithead, near Portsmouth, on 1 July. The next morning, Ramsay and Mackeson, in the company of Mr Onslow, the private secretary to the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the British East India Company, proceeded by train to East India House in the City of London and passed the diamond into the care of the chairman and deputy chairman of the East India Company.
The Koh-i-Noor was formally presented to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850 at Buckingham Palace by the deputy chairman of the East India Company. The date had been chosen to coincide with the Company's 250th anniversary.
Members of the public were given a chance to see the Koh-i-Noor when The Great Exhibition was staged at Hyde Park, London, in 1851. It represented the might of the British Empire and took pride of place in the eastern part of the central gallery.
Its mysterious past and advertised value of £1–2 million drew large crowds. At first, the stone was put inside a gilded birdcage, but after complaints about its dull appearance, the Koh-i-Noor was moved to a case with black velvet and gas lamps in the hope that it would sparkle better. Despite this, the flawed and asymmetrical diamond still failed to please viewers.
Originally, the diamond had 169 facets and was 4.1 centimetres (1.6 in) long, 3.26 centimetres (1.28 in) wide, and 1.62 centimetres (0.64 in) deep. It was high-domed, with a flat base and both triangular and rectangular facets, similar in overall appearance to other Mughal-era diamonds which are now in the Iranian Crown Jewels.
Disappointment in the appearance of the stone was not uncommon. After consulting mineralogists, including Sir David Brewster, Victoria's husband Prince Albert with the consent of the government decided to have the diamond polished. For this task, he employed one of the largest and most famous Dutch diamond merchants, Mozes Coster. He sent to London one of his most experienced artisans, Levie Benjamin Voorzanger, and his assistants.
On 17 July 1852, the cutting began at the factory of Garrard & Co. in Haymarket, using a steam-powered mill built specially for the job by Maudslay, Sons and Field. Supervised by Albert and the Duke of Wellington, and the technical direction of the Queen's mineralogist, James Tennant, the cutting took 38 days, cost Albert £8,000, and reduced the diamond from 186 old carats (191 modern carats or 38.2 g) to its current weight 105.6 carats (21.12 g). The stone now measures 3.6 cm (1.4 in) long, 3.2 cm (1.3 in) wide, and 1.3 cm (0.5 in) deep. Brilliant-cut diamonds usually have 58 facets, but the Koh-i-Noor has 8 additional "star" facets around the culet, making a total of 66 facets.
The great loss of weight was to some extent due to removal of several flaws, one especially big, which Voorzanger discovered. Although Prince Albert was dissatisfied with such a huge reduction, most experts agreed that Voorzanger had made the right decision and did the job with impeccable skill. When Queen Victoria showed the re-cut diamond to the young Maharaja Duleep Singh, the Koh-i-Noor's last non-British owner, he was apparently unable to speak for several minutes afterwards.
The much lighter but more dazzling stone was mounted in a honeysuckle brooch and a circlet worn by the queen. At this time, it belonged to her personally, and was not yet part of the Crown Jewels. Although Victoria wore it often, she became uneasy about the way in which the diamond had been acquired. In a letter to her eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, she wrote in the 1870s: "No one feels more strongly than I do about India or how much I opposed our taking those countries and I think no more will be taken, for it is very wrong and no advantage to us. You know also how I dislike wearing the Koh-i-Noor".
After Queen Victoria's death, the Koh-i-Noor was set in the Crown of Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII, that was used to crown her at their coronation in 1902. The diamond was transferred to Queen Mary's Crown in 1911, and finally to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's Crown in 1937. When the Queen Mother died in 2002, the crown was placed on top of her coffin for the lying-in-state and funeral. Queen Camilla was crowned with Queen Mary's Crown at the coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023, but without the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
All these crowns are on display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London with crystal replicas of the diamond set in the older crowns. The original bracelet given to Queen Victoria can also be seen there. A glass model of the Koh-i-Noor shows visitors how it looked when it was brought to the United Kingdom. Replicas of the diamond in this and its re-cut forms can also be seen in the 'Vault' exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London.
During the Second World War, the Crown Jewels were moved from their home at the Tower of London to Windsor Castle. They were kept in leather hat boxes under lock and key in the office of the Royal Librarian Sir Owen Morshead until 1941 when they were transferred to a specially dug tunnel under the walls of the castle. At this time Morshead and the Keeper of the Tower Armouries removed some of the larger stones, including the Koh-i-Noor, and wrapping them in cotton wool, inserted them in a glass preserving-jar, which was then placed in a biscuit tin; the thinking being that, unlike the bulkier crowns, this would allow their swift relocation if the German invasion occurred.
The Koh-i-Noor has long been a subject of diplomatic controversy, with India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan all demanding its return from the UK at various points.
The Government of India first demanded the return of the Koh-i-Noor as soon as independence was granted in 1947. A second request followed in 1953, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Each time, the British Government rejected the claims, saying that ownership was non-negotiable.
In 2000, several members of the Indian Parliament signed a letter calling for the diamond to be given back to India, claiming it was taken illegally. British officials said that a variety of claims meant it was impossible to establish the diamond's original owner, and that it had been part of Britain's heritage for more than 150 years.
In July 2010, while visiting India, David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, said of returning the diamond, "If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I am afraid to say, it is going to have to stay put." On a subsequent visit in February 2013, he said, "They're not having that back."
In April 2016, the Indian Culture Ministry stated it would make "all possible efforts" to arrange the return of the Koh-i-Noor to India. The then solicitor general of India, Ranjit Kumar said, "It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-Noor is not a stolen object."
In 1976, Pakistan asserted its ownership of the diamond, saying its return would be "a convincing demonstration of the spirit that moved Britain voluntarily to shed its imperial encumbrances and lead the process of decolonisation". In a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, James Callaghan, wrote, "I need not remind you of the various hands through which the stone has passed over the past two centuries, nor that explicit provision for its transfer to the British crown was made in the peace treaty with the Maharajah of the Sikh Empire in 1849. I could not advise Her Majesty that it should be surrendered."
In 2000, the Taliban's foreign affairs spokesman, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, said the Koh-i-Noor was the legitimate property of Afghanistan, and demanded for it to be handed over to the regime. "The history of the diamond shows it was taken from us (Afghanistan) to India, and from there to Britain. We have a much better claim than the Indians", he said. The Afghan claim derives from Shah Shuja Durrani's memoirs, which states he surrendered the diamond to Ranjit Singh while Singh was having his son tortured in front of him, so he argued that the Maharajah of Lahore acquired the stone illegitimately.
Because of the disputes over the diamond's rightful ownership, there have been various compromises suggested. These include dividing it into four, with a piece given to each of Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, with the final piece retained by the British Crown. Another suggestion is that the jewel be housed in a special museum at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan. However this suggestion does not cater to Afghan claims, nor the reality of current British possession. The British Government rejects these compromises, and has stated since the end of the British Raj that the status of the diamond is 'non-negotiable'.
The Koh-i-Noor was one of the inspirations for the eponymous gemstone in The Moonstone (1868), a 19th-century British epistolary novel by Wilkie Collins, generally considered to be the first full length detective novel in the English language. In his preface to the first edition of the book, Collins says that he based his eponymous "Moonstone" on the histories of two stones: the Orlov, a 189.62-carat (37.9 g) diamond in the Russian Imperial Sceptre, and the Koh-i-Noor. In the 1966 Penguin Books edition of The Moonstone, J. I. M. Stewart states that Collins used G. C. King's The Natural History, Ancient and Modern, of Precious Stones ... (1865) to research the history of the Koh-i-Noor.
The Koh-i-Noor also features in Agatha Christie's 1925 detective novel The Secret of Chimneys where it is hidden somewhere inside a large country house and is discovered at the end of the novel. The diamond had been stolen from the Tower of London by a Parisian gang leader who replaced it with a replica stone.
The Koh-i-Noor is a central plot point in George MacDonald Fraser's 1990 historical novel and satire, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, which refers to the diamond in its title.
Kohinoor, a 2005 Indian mystery television series follows a search for the diamond after its supposed return to India.
The Koh-i-Noor is a main part of the 2014 Indian film Bang Bang!.
Kolkatay Kohinoor, a 2019 mystery thriller film is based on a similar premise and explores the diamond's fictional relations to Kolkata.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor (Persian for 'Mountain of Light'; /ˌkoʊɪˈnʊər/ KOH-in-OOR), also spelled Koh-e-Noor, Kohinoor and Koh-i-Nur, is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, weighing 105.6 carats (21.12 g). It is part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The diamond is currently set in the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "There are multiple conflicting legends on the origin of the diamond. However, in the words of the colonial administrator Theo Metcalfe, there is \"very meagre and imperfect\" evidence of the early history of the Koh-i-Noor before the 1740s. There is no record of its original weight, but the earliest attested weight is 186 old carats (191 metric carats or 38.2 g). The first verifiable record of the diamond comes from a history by Muhammad Kazim Marvi of the 1740s invasion of Northern India by Nader Shah. Marvi notes the Koh-i-Noor as being one of many stones on the Mughal Peacock Throne that Nader Shah looted from Delhi. The diamond then changed hands between various empires in south and west Asia, until being given to Queen Victoria after the British East India Company's annexation of the Punjab in 1849, during the reign of the then 11-year-old Maharaja of the Sikh Empire Duleep Singh, who ruled under the shadow influence of the Company ally Gulab Singh, the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, who had previously possessed the stone.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Originally, the stone was of a similar cut to other Mughal-era diamonds, like the Daria-i-Noor, which are now in the Iranian National Jewels. In 1851, it went on display at the Great Exhibition in London, but the lackluster cut failed to impress viewers. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, ordered it to be re-cut as an oval brilliant by Coster Diamonds. By modern standards, the culet (point at the bottom of a gemstone) is unusually broad, giving the impression of a black hole when the stone is viewed head-on; it is nevertheless regarded by gemologists as \"full of life\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Since arriving in the UK, it has only been worn by female members of the British royal family. Victoria wore the stone in a brooch and a circlet. After she died in 1901, it was set in the Crown of Queen Alexandra. It was transferred to the Crown of Queen Mary in 1911, and finally to the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1937 for her coronation.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Today, the diamond is on public display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. The governments of India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban, have all claimed ownership of the Koh-i-Noor, demanding its return ever since India gained independence from the British Empire in 1947. The British government insists the gem was obtained legally under the terms of the Last Treaty of Lahore and has rejected the claims.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In 2018, at the Supreme Court of India the Archeological Survey of India clarified that the diamond was surrendered to the British and \"it (the diamond) was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Babur, the Turco-Mongol founder of the Mughal Empire, wrote about a \"famous\" diamond that weighed just over 187 old carats – approximately the size of the 186-carat Koh-i-Noor. According to the diary of Alauddin Khalji of the Khalji dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate, he acquired a large diamond when he invaded the kingdoms of southern India at the beginning of the 14th century and looted it from the Kakatiyas. It later passed on to succeeding dynasties of the Sultanate, and Babur received the diamond in 1526 as a tribute for his conquest of Delhi and Agra at the Battle of Panipat. However, it is impossible to verify these details exactly about when or where it was found, and many competing theories exist as to its original owner.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "For some time it was alleged that while in the possession of Shah Jahan's son Aurangzeb, the stone was cut by Hortense Borgia, a Venetian lapidarist, who reduced the weight of the large stone to 186 carats (37.2 g). For this carelessness, Borgia was reprimanded and fined 10,000 rupees. However according to recent research, the story of Borgia cutting the diamond is not correct, and most probably mixed up with that of the Orlov, part of Catherine the Great's imperial Russian scepter in the Kremlin.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In early Indian history, diamonds were the most valued of gemstones. However, during the period of Mughal rule, diamonds lost this distinction. When looking at the Mughal treasury, Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak, the Grand vizier to Akbar, noted that red spinels and Burmese rubies had become the most desirable jewels by the nobility. During this time the Persian new year ceremony, Nowruz, had become a period in which the subjects could bring offerings of gems and money to the imperial family in exchange for political promotions within the greater bureaucracy. By the time Shah Jahan ascended the throne as the fifth Mughal emperor, there were so many jewels in the treasury that he decided to use many of them in the making of the ornate Peacock Throne in 1635.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Over a century later in 1738 Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty, following the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty of Persia two years earlier began raiding into Mughal territory before soon launching a full-scale invasion of North-West India. This invading force soon captured Delhi, where after a massacre of the civilian population the army began a systematic looting of the wealth of the city and the treasury of the Mughal Empire. With nearly 10,000 wagons of loot, along with millions of rupees and an assortment of other historic jewels, Nader Shah also carried away the imperial Peacock Throne. And it is here on the head of one of the peacocks on the throne that Nader Shah's biographer Muhammad Kazim Marvi first records seeing the Koh-i-Noor in the 1740s along with other prominent gems, such as the great Timur Ruby and the Daria-i-Noor. It is alleged that Nader Shah exclaimed \"Koh-i-Noor!\", Persian and Hindi-Urdu for \"Mountain of Light\", when he first obtained the famous stone. One of his consorts is even noted to have said, \"If a strong man were to throw four stones – one north, one south, one east, one west, and a fifth stone up into the air – and if the space between them were to be filled with gold, all would not equal the value of the Koh-i-Noor\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "After Nadir Shah was killed and his empire collapsed in 1747, the Koh-i-Noor fell to his grandson, who in 1751 gave it to Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Empire, in return for his support. One of Ahmed's grandsons, Shuja Shah Durrani, wore a bracelet containing the Koh-i-Noor on the occasion of Mountstuart Elphinstone's visit to Peshawar in 1808. A year later, Shah Shuja formed an alliance with the United Kingdom to help defend against a possible invasion of Afghanistan by Russia. He was quickly overthrown, but fled with the diamond to Lahore (in modern Pakistan), where Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire, in return for his hospitality, insisted upon the gem being given to him, and he took possession of it in 1813.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Ranjit Singh had the diamond examined by jewelers of Lahore for two days to ensure that Shuja had not tricked him. After the jewelers confirmed its genuineness, he donated 125,000 rupees to Shuja. Ranjit Singh then asked the principal jewelers of Amritsar to estimate the diamond's value; the jewelers declared that the value of the diamond was \"far beyond all computation\". Ranjit Singh then affixed the diamond to the front of his turban, and paraded on an elephant to enable his subjects to see it. He used to wear it as an armlet during major festivals such as Diwali and Dusserah, and took it with him during travel. He would exhibit it to prominent visitors, especially British officers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "One day, Ranjit Singh asked the diamond's former owners – Shuja and his wife Wafa Begum – to estimate its value. Wafa Begum replied that if a strong man threw a stone in four cardinal directions and vertically, Koh-i-Noor would be worth more than the gold and precious stones filled in the space. Ranjit Singh grew paranoid about the Koh-i-Noor being stolen, because in the past, another valuable jewel had been stolen from him while he was intoxicated. He kept the diamond within a high-security facility at the Gobindgarh Fort when it was not in use. When the diamond was to be transported, it was placed in a pannier on a guarded camel; 39 other camels with identical panniers were included in the convoy; the diamond was always placed on the first camel immediately behind the guards, but great secrecy was maintained regarding which camel carried it. Only Ranjit Singh's treasurer Misr Beli Ram knew which camel carried the diamond.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "In June 1839, Ranjit Singh suffered his third stroke, and it became apparent that he would die soon. On his deathbed, he started giving away his valuable possessions to religious charities, and appointed his eldest son Kharak Singh as his successor. A day before his death, on 26 June 1839, a major argument broke out between his courtiers regarding the fate of Koh-i-Noor. Ranjit Singh himself was too weak to speak, and communicated using gestures. Bhai Gobind Ram, the head Brahmin of Ranjit Singh, insisted that the king had willed Koh-i-Noor and other jewels to the Jagannath Temple in Puri: the king apparently supported this claim through gestures, as recorded in his court chronicle Umdat ul-Tawarikh. However, treasurer Beli Ram insisted that it was a state property rather than Ranjit Singh's personal property, and therefore, should be handed over to Kharak Singh.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "After Ranjit Singh's death, Beli Ram refused to send the diamond to the temple, and hid it in his vaults. Meanwhile, Kharak Singh and wazir Dhian Singh also issued orders stating that the diamond should not be taken out of Lahore.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "On 8 October 1839, the new emperor Kharak Singh was overthrown in a coup by his prime minister Dhian Singh. The prime minister's brother Gulab Singh, Raja of Jammu, came into possession of the Koh-i-Noor. Kharak Singh later died in prison, soon followed by the mysterious death of his son and successor Nau Nihal Singh on 5 November 1840. Gulab Singh held onto the stone until January 1841, when he presented it to emperor Sher Singh in order to win his favour, after his brother Dhian Singh negotiated a ceasefire between Sher Singh and the overthrown empress Chand Kaur. Gulab Singh had attempted to defend the widowed empress at her fort in Lahore, during two days of conflict and shelling by Sher Singh and his troops. Despite handing over the Koh-i-noor, Gulab Singh as a result of the ceasefire returned safely to Jammu with a wealth of gold and other jewels taken from the treasury.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "On 15 September 1843, both Sher Singh and prime minister Dhian Singh were assassinated in a coup led by Ajit Singh Sandhawalia. However, the next day in a counter coup led by Dhian's son Hira Singh the assassins were killed. Aged 24, Hira Singh succeeded his father as prime minister, and installed the five-year old Duleep Singh as emperor. The Koh-i-noor was now fastened to the arm of the child emperor in court at Lahore. Duleep Singh and his mother empress Jind Kaur, had till then resided in Jammu, the kingdom governed by Gulab Singh.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Following his nephew Prime Minister Hira Singh's assassination on 27 March 1844, and the subsequent outbreak of the First Anglo-Sikh War, Gulab Singh himself led the Sikh empire as its prime minister, and despite defeat in the war, he became the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir on 16 March 1846, under the Treaty of Amritsar.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "On 29 March 1849, following the conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the Kingdom of Punjab was formally annexed to Company rule, and the Last Treaty of Lahore was signed, officially ceding the Koh-i-Noor to Queen Victoria and the Maharaja's other assets to the company. Article III of the treaty read:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The gem called the Koh-i-Noor, which was taken from Shah Sooja-ool-moolk by Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England [sic].",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The lead signatory of the treaty for the by then eleven-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh was his commander-in-chief Tej Singh, a loyalist of Maharaja Gulab Singh who had previously been in possession of the Koh-i-Noor and gained Kashmir from the Sikh empire, via treaty with Britain, following the First Anglo-Sikh War.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The Governor-General in charge of the ratification of this treaty was the Marquess of Dalhousie. The manner of his aiding in the transfer of the diamond was criticized even by some of his contemporaries in Britain. Although some thought it should have been presented as a gift to Queen Victoria by the East India Company, it is clear that Dalhousie believed the stone was a spoil of war, and treated it accordingly, ensuring that it was officially surrendered to her by Duleep Singh, the youngest son of Ranjit Singh. The presentation of the Koh-i-Noor by the East India Company to the queen was the latest in a long history of transfers of the diamond as a coveted spoil of war. Duleep Singh had been placed in the guardianship of Dr John Login, a surgeon in the British Army serving in the Presidency of Bengal. Duleep Singh moved to England in 1854 and spent the rest of his life in exile.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "In due course, the Governor-General received the Koh-i-Noor from Dr Login, who had been appointed Governor of the Citadel, on 6 April 1848 under a receipt dated 7 December 1849, in the presence of members of the Board of Administration for the affairs of the Punjab: Sir Henry Lawrence (President), C. G. Mansel, John Lawrence and Sir Henry Elliot (Secretary to the Government of India).",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Legend in the Lawrence family has it that before the voyage, John Lawrence left the jewel in his waistcoat pocket when it was sent to be laundered, and was most grateful when it was returned promptly by the valet who found it.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On 1 February 1850, the jewel was sealed in a small iron safe inside a red dispatch box, both sealed with red tape and a wax seal and kept in a chest at Bombay Treasury awaiting a steamer ship from China. It was then sent to England for presentation to Queen Victoria in the care of Captain J. Ramsay and Brevet Lt. Col F. Mackeson under tight security arrangements, one of which was the placement of the dispatch box in a larger iron safe. They departed from Bombay on 6 April on board HMS Medea, captained by Captain Lockyer.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "The ship had a difficult voyage: an outbreak of cholera on board when the ship was in Mauritius had the locals demanding its departure, and they asked their governor to open fire on the vessel and destroy it if there was no response. Shortly afterwards, the vessel was hit by a severe gale that blew for some 12 hours.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "On arrival in Britain on 29 June, the passengers and mail were unloaded in Plymouth, but the Koh-i-Noor stayed on board until the ship reached Spithead, near Portsmouth, on 1 July. The next morning, Ramsay and Mackeson, in the company of Mr Onslow, the private secretary to the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the British East India Company, proceeded by train to East India House in the City of London and passed the diamond into the care of the chairman and deputy chairman of the East India Company.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor was formally presented to Queen Victoria on 3 July 1850 at Buckingham Palace by the deputy chairman of the East India Company. The date had been chosen to coincide with the Company's 250th anniversary.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Members of the public were given a chance to see the Koh-i-Noor when The Great Exhibition was staged at Hyde Park, London, in 1851. It represented the might of the British Empire and took pride of place in the eastern part of the central gallery.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Its mysterious past and advertised value of £1–2 million drew large crowds. At first, the stone was put inside a gilded birdcage, but after complaints about its dull appearance, the Koh-i-Noor was moved to a case with black velvet and gas lamps in the hope that it would sparkle better. Despite this, the flawed and asymmetrical diamond still failed to please viewers.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Originally, the diamond had 169 facets and was 4.1 centimetres (1.6 in) long, 3.26 centimetres (1.28 in) wide, and 1.62 centimetres (0.64 in) deep. It was high-domed, with a flat base and both triangular and rectangular facets, similar in overall appearance to other Mughal-era diamonds which are now in the Iranian Crown Jewels.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Disappointment in the appearance of the stone was not uncommon. After consulting mineralogists, including Sir David Brewster, Victoria's husband Prince Albert with the consent of the government decided to have the diamond polished. For this task, he employed one of the largest and most famous Dutch diamond merchants, Mozes Coster. He sent to London one of his most experienced artisans, Levie Benjamin Voorzanger, and his assistants.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "On 17 July 1852, the cutting began at the factory of Garrard & Co. in Haymarket, using a steam-powered mill built specially for the job by Maudslay, Sons and Field. Supervised by Albert and the Duke of Wellington, and the technical direction of the Queen's mineralogist, James Tennant, the cutting took 38 days, cost Albert £8,000, and reduced the diamond from 186 old carats (191 modern carats or 38.2 g) to its current weight 105.6 carats (21.12 g). The stone now measures 3.6 cm (1.4 in) long, 3.2 cm (1.3 in) wide, and 1.3 cm (0.5 in) deep. Brilliant-cut diamonds usually have 58 facets, but the Koh-i-Noor has 8 additional \"star\" facets around the culet, making a total of 66 facets.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The great loss of weight was to some extent due to removal of several flaws, one especially big, which Voorzanger discovered. Although Prince Albert was dissatisfied with such a huge reduction, most experts agreed that Voorzanger had made the right decision and did the job with impeccable skill. When Queen Victoria showed the re-cut diamond to the young Maharaja Duleep Singh, the Koh-i-Noor's last non-British owner, he was apparently unable to speak for several minutes afterwards.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The much lighter but more dazzling stone was mounted in a honeysuckle brooch and a circlet worn by the queen. At this time, it belonged to her personally, and was not yet part of the Crown Jewels. Although Victoria wore it often, she became uneasy about the way in which the diamond had been acquired. In a letter to her eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal, she wrote in the 1870s: \"No one feels more strongly than I do about India or how much I opposed our taking those countries and I think no more will be taken, for it is very wrong and no advantage to us. You know also how I dislike wearing the Koh-i-Noor\".",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "After Queen Victoria's death, the Koh-i-Noor was set in the Crown of Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII, that was used to crown her at their coronation in 1902. The diamond was transferred to Queen Mary's Crown in 1911, and finally to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother's Crown in 1937. When the Queen Mother died in 2002, the crown was placed on top of her coffin for the lying-in-state and funeral. Queen Camilla was crowned with Queen Mary's Crown at the coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023, but without the Koh-i-Noor diamond.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "All these crowns are on display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London with crystal replicas of the diamond set in the older crowns. The original bracelet given to Queen Victoria can also be seen there. A glass model of the Koh-i-Noor shows visitors how it looked when it was brought to the United Kingdom. Replicas of the diamond in this and its re-cut forms can also be seen in the 'Vault' exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "During the Second World War, the Crown Jewels were moved from their home at the Tower of London to Windsor Castle. They were kept in leather hat boxes under lock and key in the office of the Royal Librarian Sir Owen Morshead until 1941 when they were transferred to a specially dug tunnel under the walls of the castle. At this time Morshead and the Keeper of the Tower Armouries removed some of the larger stones, including the Koh-i-Noor, and wrapping them in cotton wool, inserted them in a glass preserving-jar, which was then placed in a biscuit tin; the thinking being that, unlike the bulkier crowns, this would allow their swift relocation if the German invasion occurred.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor has long been a subject of diplomatic controversy, with India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan all demanding its return from the UK at various points.",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The Government of India first demanded the return of the Koh-i-Noor as soon as independence was granted in 1947. A second request followed in 1953, the year of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Each time, the British Government rejected the claims, saying that ownership was non-negotiable.",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In 2000, several members of the Indian Parliament signed a letter calling for the diamond to be given back to India, claiming it was taken illegally. British officials said that a variety of claims meant it was impossible to establish the diamond's original owner, and that it had been part of Britain's heritage for more than 150 years.",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In July 2010, while visiting India, David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, said of returning the diamond, \"If you say yes to one you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty. I am afraid to say, it is going to have to stay put.\" On a subsequent visit in February 2013, he said, \"They're not having that back.\"",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "In April 2016, the Indian Culture Ministry stated it would make \"all possible efforts\" to arrange the return of the Koh-i-Noor to India. The then solicitor general of India, Ranjit Kumar said, \"It was given voluntarily by Ranjit Singh to the British as compensation for help in the Sikh Wars. The Koh-i-Noor is not a stolen object.\"",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "In 1976, Pakistan asserted its ownership of the diamond, saying its return would be \"a convincing demonstration of the spirit that moved Britain voluntarily to shed its imperial encumbrances and lead the process of decolonisation\". In a letter to the prime minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, James Callaghan, wrote, \"I need not remind you of the various hands through which the stone has passed over the past two centuries, nor that explicit provision for its transfer to the British crown was made in the peace treaty with the Maharajah of the Sikh Empire in 1849. I could not advise Her Majesty that it should be surrendered.\"",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "In 2000, the Taliban's foreign affairs spokesman, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, said the Koh-i-Noor was the legitimate property of Afghanistan, and demanded for it to be handed over to the regime. \"The history of the diamond shows it was taken from us (Afghanistan) to India, and from there to Britain. We have a much better claim than the Indians\", he said. The Afghan claim derives from Shah Shuja Durrani's memoirs, which states he surrendered the diamond to Ranjit Singh while Singh was having his son tortured in front of him, so he argued that the Maharajah of Lahore acquired the stone illegitimately.",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Because of the disputes over the diamond's rightful ownership, there have been various compromises suggested. These include dividing it into four, with a piece given to each of Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan, with the final piece retained by the British Crown. Another suggestion is that the jewel be housed in a special museum at the Wagah border between India and Pakistan. However this suggestion does not cater to Afghan claims, nor the reality of current British possession. The British Government rejects these compromises, and has stated since the end of the British Raj that the status of the diamond is 'non-negotiable'.",
"title": "Ownership dispute"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor was one of the inspirations for the eponymous gemstone in The Moonstone (1868), a 19th-century British epistolary novel by Wilkie Collins, generally considered to be the first full length detective novel in the English language. In his preface to the first edition of the book, Collins says that he based his eponymous \"Moonstone\" on the histories of two stones: the Orlov, a 189.62-carat (37.9 g) diamond in the Russian Imperial Sceptre, and the Koh-i-Noor. In the 1966 Penguin Books edition of The Moonstone, J. I. M. Stewart states that Collins used G. C. King's The Natural History, Ancient and Modern, of Precious Stones ... (1865) to research the history of the Koh-i-Noor.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor also features in Agatha Christie's 1925 detective novel The Secret of Chimneys where it is hidden somewhere inside a large country house and is discovered at the end of the novel. The diamond had been stolen from the Tower of London by a Parisian gang leader who replaced it with a replica stone.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor is a central plot point in George MacDonald Fraser's 1990 historical novel and satire, Flashman and the Mountain of Light, which refers to the diamond in its title.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Kohinoor, a 2005 Indian mystery television series follows a search for the diamond after its supposed return to India.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "The Koh-i-Noor is a main part of the 2014 Indian film Bang Bang!.",
"title": "In popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Kolkatay Kohinoor, a 2019 mystery thriller film is based on a similar premise and explores the diamond's fictional relations to Kolkata.",
"title": "In popular culture"
}
] |
The Koh-i-Noor, also spelled Koh-e-Noor, Kohinoor and Koh-i-Nur, is one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, weighing 105.6 carats (21.12 g). It is part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. The diamond is currently set in the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. There are multiple conflicting legends on the origin of the diamond. However, in the words of the colonial administrator Theo Metcalfe, there is "very meagre and imperfect" evidence of the early history of the Koh-i-Noor before the 1740s. There is no record of its original weight, but the earliest attested weight is 186 old carats. The first verifiable record of the diamond comes from a history by Muhammad Kazim Marvi of the 1740s invasion of Northern India by Nader Shah. Marvi notes the Koh-i-Noor as being one of many stones on the Mughal Peacock Throne that Nader Shah looted from Delhi. The diamond then changed hands between various empires in south and west Asia, until being given to Queen Victoria after the British East India Company's annexation of the Punjab in 1849, during the reign of the then 11-year-old Maharaja of the Sikh Empire Duleep Singh, who ruled under the shadow influence of the Company ally Gulab Singh, the first Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, who had previously possessed the stone. Originally, the stone was of a similar cut to other Mughal-era diamonds, like the Daria-i-Noor, which are now in the Iranian National Jewels. In 1851, it went on display at the Great Exhibition in London, but the lackluster cut failed to impress viewers. Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, ordered it to be re-cut as an oval brilliant by Coster Diamonds. By modern standards, the culet is unusually broad, giving the impression of a black hole when the stone is viewed head-on; it is nevertheless regarded by gemologists as "full of life". Since arriving in the UK, it has only been worn by female members of the British royal family. Victoria wore the stone in a brooch and a circlet. After she died in 1901, it was set in the Crown of Queen Alexandra. It was transferred to the Crown of Queen Mary in 1911, and finally to the Crown of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1937 for her coronation. Today, the diamond is on public display in the Jewel House at the Tower of London. The governments of India, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban, have all claimed ownership of the Koh-i-Noor, demanding its return ever since India gained independence from the British Empire in 1947. The British government insists the gem was obtained legally under the terms of the Last Treaty of Lahore and has rejected the claims. In 2018, at the Supreme Court of India the Archeological Survey of India clarified that the diamond was surrendered to the British and "it was neither stolen nor forcibly taken away".
|
2001-11-06T04:05:49Z
|
2023-12-12T14:00:18Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor
|
16,971 |
Kvass
|
Kvass is a fermented cereal-based low-alcohol beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-brown colour, and sweet-sour taste.
Kvass originates from northeastern Europe, where grain production was considered insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. The first written mention of kvass is found in Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 996. In the traditional method, kvass is made from a mash obtained from rye bread or rye flour and malt soaked in hot water, fermented for about 12 hours with the help of sugar and bread yeast or baker's yeast at room temperature. In industrial methods, kvass is produced from wort concentrate combined with various grain mixtures. It is a popular drink in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, some parts of Finland, Sweden, and China.
The word kvass is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European base *kwh₂et- ('to become sour'). In English it was first mentioned in a text around 1553 as quass. Nowadays, the name of the drink is almost the same in most languages: in Polish: kwas chlebowy (lit. 'bread kvass', to differentiate it from kwas, 'acid', originally from kwaśny, 'sour'); Belarusian: квас, kvas; Russian: квас, kvas; Ukrainian: квас/хлібний квас/сирівець, kvas/khlibny kvas/syrivets; Latvian: kvass; Romanian: cvas; Hungarian: kvasz; Serbian: квас/kvas; Chinese: 格瓦斯/克瓦斯, géwǎsī/kèwǎsī; Eastern Finnish: vaasa. Non-cognates include Estonian kali, Finnish kalja, Latvian dzersis (lit. 'beverage'), Latgalian dzyra (lit. 'beverage', similar to Lithuanian gira), Lithuanian gira (lit. 'beverage', similar to Latvian dzira), and Swedish bröddricka (lit. 'bread drink').
In the traditional method, either dried rye bread or a combination of rye flour and rye malt is used. The dried rye bread is extracted with hot water and incubated for 12 hours at room temperature, after which bread yeast and sugar are added to the extract and fermented for 12 hours at 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F). Alternatively, rye flour is boiled, mixed with rye malt, sugar, and baker's yeast and then fermented for 12 hours at 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F).
The simplest industrial method produces kvass from a wort concentrate. The concentrate is warmed up and mixed with a water and sugar solution to create wort with a sugar concentration of 5–7% and pasteurized to stabilize it. After that, the wort is pumped into a fermentation tank, where baker's yeast and lactic acid bacteria culture is added, and the solution is fermented for 12–24 hours at 12 to 30 °C (285 to 303 K; 54 to 86 °F). Only around 1% of the extract is fermented out into ethanol, carbon dioxide, and lactic acid. Afterwards, the kvass is cooled to 6 °C (279 K; 43 °F), clarified through either filtration or centrifugation, and adjusted for sugar content, if necessary.
Initially, it was filled in large containers from which the kvass was sold on streets, but now, the vast majority of industrially produced kvass is filled and sold in 1–3-litre plastic bottles and has a shelf life of 4–6 weeks.
Kvass is usually 0.5–1.0% alcohol by weight, but may sometimes be as high as 2.0%.
The exact origins of kvass are unclear, and whether it was invented by Slavic people or any other Eastern European ethnicity is unknown, although some Polish sources claim that kvass was invented by Slavs. Kvass has existed in the northeastern part of Europe, where grain production is thought to have been insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. It has been known among the Early Slavs since the 10th century. Likely invented in the Kievan Rus' and known there since at least the 10th century, kvass has become one of the symbols of East Slavic cuisine. The first written mention of kvass is found in the Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 996, when kvass along with mead and food was given out to the citizens of Kiev. Kvass-making remained a daily household activity well into the 19th century.
In the second half of the 19th century, with military engagement, increasing industrialization, and large-scale projects, such as the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, created a growing need to supply large numbers of people with foodstuff for extended periods of time, commercial kvass producers began appearing in the Russian Empire. Many of them specialised in the use of different raw ingredients, and more than 150 kvass varieties, such as apple, pear, mint, lemon, chicory, raspberry, and cherry kvass, are recorded. As commercial kvass producers began selling it in barrels on the streets, domestic kvass-making started to decline. For example, in the year ended 30 June 1912, there were 17 factories in the Governorate of Livonia, producing a total of 437,255 gallons of kvass.
In the 1890s, the first scientific studies into the production of kvass were conducted in Kyiv, and in the 1960s, commercial mass production technology of kvass was further developed by chemists in Moscow.
Although the massive flood of western soft drinks after the fall of the USSR, such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, substantially shrank the market share of kvass in Russia, in recent years, it has regained its original popularity, often marketed as a national soft drink or "patriotic" alternative to the famous Coca-Cola drink. For example, the Russian company Nikola has promoted its brand of kvass with an advertising campaign emphasizing "anti-cola-nisation." Moscow-based Business Analytica reported in 2008 that bottled kvass sales had tripled since 2005 and estimated that per capita kvass consumption in Russia would reach three litres in 2008. Between 2005 and 2007, cola's share of the Moscow soft drink market fell from 37% to 32%. Meanwhile, kvass's share more than doubled over the same time period, reaching 16% in 2007. In response, Coca-Cola launched its own brand of kvass in May 2008. This is the first time a foreign company has made an appreciable entrance into the Russian kvass market. Pepsi has also signed an agreement with a Russian kvass manufacturer to act as a distribution agent. The development of new technologies for storage and distribution, and heavy advertising, have contributed to this surge in popularity; three new major brands have been introduced since 2004.
Market shares for Russia (2014)
Belarus has several breweries producing kvass: Alivaria Brewery, Babrujski Brovar [be; be-tarask], and Krinitsa [be; be-tarask]. It also has a variety of kvass tasting and entertainment festivals. The largest show takes place in the city of Lida.
Kvass may have appeared in Poland as early as the 10th century, it quickly became a trendy beverage thanks to it easy and cheap method of production as well as its thirst-quenching and digestion-aiding qualities. By the time of Władysław II Jagiełło's rule, kvass was universal. It was at first commonly drunk by peasants in the eastern parts of the country, but eventually the drink spread to the szlachta. One example of this is kwas chlebowy sapieżyński kodeński, an old type of Polish kvass that is still sold as a contemporary brand. Its origins can be traced back to the 1500s, when Jan Sapieha [pl] founded the town of Kodeń on land granted by the Polish king. He then bought the mills and 24 villages of the surrounding areas from their previous landowners. Then, the taste of kvass became known among the Polish szlachta, who used it for its supposed healing qualities. Throughout the 19th century, kvass remained popular among Poles who lived in the Congress Poland of Imperial Russia and in Austrian Galicia, especially the inhabitants of rural areas. Up until the 19th century, recipes for local variants of kvass remained well-guarded secrets of families, religious orders, and monasteries.
The beverage production in Poland on an industrial scale can be traced back to the more recent interwar period, when the Polish state regained independence as the Second Polish Republic. In interwar Poland, kvass was brewed and sold in mass numbers by magnates of the Polish drinks market like the Varsovian brewery Haberbusch i Schiele or the Karpiński company. Kvass remained particularly popular in eastern Poland. However, with the collapse of many prewar businesses and much of the Polish industry during World War II, kvass lost popularity following the aftermath of the war. It also gradually lost favour throughout the 20th century upon introducing mass-produced soft drinks and carbonated water into the Polish market. In the early 21st century, kvass experienced a renaissance in Poland due to the heightened interest in healthy diets, natural products, and traditions.
Kvass can be found in some supermarkets and grocery stores, where it is known in Polish as kwas chlebowy ([kvas xlɛbɔvɨ]). Commercial bottled versions of the drink are the most common variant, as some companies specialise in manufacturing a more modern version of the drink (some variants are manufactured in Poland whilst others are imported from its neighbouring countries, Lithuania and Ukraine being the most popular source). However, old recipes for a traditional version of kvass exist. Some of them originate from eastern Poland; others from more central regions include adding honey for flavour. Although commercial kvass is much easier to find in Polish shops, Polish manufacturers of more natural and healthier variants of kvass have become increasingly popular both within and outside of the country's borders. A less healthy alternative of quick-to-make variants using kvass concentrate can also be purchased in shops. One colloquial Polish name for kwas chlebowy is wiejska oranżada ("rural orangeade"). In some Polish villages, such as Zaława and its surroundings, kvass was traditionally produced on every farm.
In Latvian, kvass was also called dzersis. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the street vendors disappeared from the streets of Latvia due to new health laws that banned its sale on the street. Economic disruptions forced many kvass factories to close. The Coca-Cola Company moved in and began quickly dominating the soft drink market. In 1998, the local soft drink industry adapted by selling bottled kvass and launching aggressive marketing campaigns. This surge in sales was stimulated by the fact that kvass sold for about half the price of Coca-Cola. In just three years, kvass constituted as much as 30% of the soft drink market in Latvia, while the market share of Coca-Cola fell from 65% to 44%. The Coca-Cola Company had losses in Latvia of about $1 million in 1999 and 2000. Coca-Cola responded by purchasing kvass manufacturers and producing kvass at their own soft drink plants.
On 30 September 2010, the Saeima adopted quality and classification requirements for kvass, defining it as "a beverage obtained by fermenting a mixture of kvass wort with a yeast of microorganism cultures to which sugar and other food sources and food additives are added or not added after the fermentation" with a maximum ABV of 1.2 percent, and differentiating it from an unfermented non-alcoholic mixture of grain product extract, water, flavourings, preservatives, and other ingredients, which is designated as a "kvass (malt) beverage".
In 2014, Latvian kvass producers won seven medals at the Russian Beverage exposition in Moscow, with Ilgezeem's Porter Tanheiser kvass winning two gold medals. In 2019, Iļģuciema kvass ranked second in the Most Loved Latvian Beverage Brand Top, and first in the subsequent 2020 top.
In Lithuania, kvass is known as gira and is widely available in bottles and drafts. The first written records of kvass and kvass recipes in Lithuania appeared in the 16th century. Many restaurants in Vilnius make their own kvass, which they sell on the premises. Some brands of mass-produced Lithuanian kvass are also sold on the Polish market. Strictly speaking, gira can be made from anything fermentable—such as caraway tea, beetroot juice, or berries—but it is made mainly from black bread, or barley or rye malt.
In Estonia, kvass is known as kali. Initially, it was made from either brewer's spent grain or wort left to ferment in a closed container, but later, special kvass bread (kaljaleib) or industrially produced malt concentrate started to be used. Nowadays, kali generally is industrially produced with the use of pasteurization, the addition of preservatives, and artificial carbonation.
In Finland, a fermented drink made from a mixture of rye flour and rye malt was ubiquitous in parts of Eastern Finland and was heated in the oven. It was called kalja (which can also be used to refer to small beer) or vaasa (in Eastern Finnish), while nowadays the drink is often known as kotikalja (lit. 'home kalja') and is available in many work canteens, gas stations, and lower-end restaurants.
Traditionally, kalja was usually made in households once a week from a mixture of malted and unmalted rye grains. Other grains, such as oats or barley, were also sometimes used; occasionally, leftover potatoes or pieces of bread were added. Everything was mixed with water in a metal cauldron or a clay pot and kept warm in the oven or by the stove for at least six hours for the mixture to darken and sweeten. Sometimes, the grain solids were filtered out through lautering. In Eastern Finland, the mixture was formed into large loaves and briefly baked for the crust to turn brown. The porridge or pieces of the malt bread were mixed into a wooden cask with water and fermented for one or two days with a previous batch, a sourdough starter, spontaneously or in more recent times with commercial baker's yeast. In the early 20th century, with sugar becoming more readily available, it started replacing the malting process, and modern kalja is made from dark rye malt, sugar, and baker's yeast.
Kvass was also made in Sweden, where it was known as bröddricka (lit. 'bread drink'). However, it was very likely limited only to areas where rye bread was the standard bread as opposed to crispbread, which was more common in Western Sweden and did not stale. Bröddricka was still being made in Öland farms up until 1935.
In the mid-19th century, kvass was introduced in Xinjiang, where it became known as kavas (Chinese: 格瓦斯; pinyin: géwǎsī) and eventually became one of the region's signature drinks. It is usually consumed cold together with barbecue. In 1900, Russian merchant Ivan Churin founded Harbin Churin Food (秋林 Qiulin) in Harbin, offering kvass and other specialities, and by 2009, the company was already producing 5,000 tons of kvass a year, making up 90% of the local market. In 2011, it moved its kvass factory to Tianjin, increasing its sales to 20,000 tons in the first year.
Following the influx of immigrants in the UK due to the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, several stores selling cuisine and beverages from Eastern Europe were established, many of which stock imported (primarily pasteurised) kvass. As a result, since then a number of different flavours of not-pasteurised kvass, fermented using sourdough starter culture, have also become available in the UK in 2023. In recent years, kvass has also become more popular in Serbia.
In 2017, a version of kvass from carrots or beets was developed in California by the producer Biotic Ferments.
Naturally fermented kvass contains 5.9%±0.02 carbohydrates, of which 5.7%±0.02 are sugars (mostly fructose, glucose, and maltose), as well as 0.71±0.09, 1.28±0.12, and 18.14±0.48 mg/100 g of thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin respectively. In addition to that, 19 different aroma volatile compounds have also been identified in naturally fermented kvass, most notably 4-penten-2-ol (10.05×10 PAU), which has a fruity odour; carvone (2.28×10 PAU) originating from caraway fruits used as an ingredient in rye bread; and ethyl octanoate (1.03×10 PAU), which has an odour of fruit and fat.
Traditional kvass made from rye wholemeal bread has been found to have, on average, twice the dietary fibre content, 60% more antioxidant activity (due to the addition of caramel and citric acid to the bread), and three times less reducing sugar content than industrially produced kvass.
Historically, alcohol by volume (ABV) of kvass varied depending on the ingredients, microbial flora, as well as temperature and length of fermentation, but nowadays it is usually not higher than 1.5%. The wide availability and consumption of kvass, including by children of all ages, together with the lacking indication of ABV for kvass on the labels and in advertisements, has been named a possible contributor to chronic alcoholism in the former Soviet Union.
Apart from drinking, kvass is also used by families (especially poor ones) as the basis for many dishes. Traditional cold summertime soups of Russian cuisine, such as okroshka, botvinya, and tyurya, are based on kvass.
The name of Kvasir, a wise being in Norse mythology, is possibly related to kvass.
There is a Russian expression "Перебиваться с хлеба на квас" (literally "to clamber from bread to kvass"), which means "to live from hand to mouth" or to "scrape by" referring to the frugal practice amongst the poor peasants of making kvass from stale leftovers of rye bread. Another kvass-related term in Russian is "kvass patriotism [ru]" (квасной патриотизм) dating back to an 1823 letter by the Russian poet Pyotr Vyazemsky who defined it as "unqualified praise of everything that is your own".
In the Polish language, several traditional sayings that reference kwas chlebowy exist. There is also an old Polish folk rhyming song. It shows the history of kvass in the country as having been drunk by generations of Polish reapers as a thirst-quenching beverage used during periods of hard work during the harvest season, long before it became popular as a medicinal drink among the szlachta. The words of the song go as follows:
In the Polish village of Zaława, there is a customary game known as wulkan ("volcano") that is associated with the beverage. The fermentation of sugars makes kvass slightly carbonated, thus, when shaken or heated, it can cause the liquid to suddenly and rapidly rise out of an open vessel. Playing wulkan consists of vigorously shaking a bottle of kvass shortly before handing it to someone else who is going to drink it; the sudden "shooting out" of the beverage onto the person opening the bottle is a source of entertainment for the youth of Zaława and a well-known prank during regional festivities.
In Tolstoy's War and Peace, French soldiers are aware of kvass on entering Moscow, enjoying it but referring to it as "pig's lemonade". In Sholem Aleichem's Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, diluted kvass is the focus of one of Motl's older brother's get-rich-quick schemes.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kvass is a fermented cereal-based low-alcohol beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-brown colour, and sweet-sour taste.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kvass originates from northeastern Europe, where grain production was considered insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. The first written mention of kvass is found in Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 996. In the traditional method, kvass is made from a mash obtained from rye bread or rye flour and malt soaked in hot water, fermented for about 12 hours with the help of sugar and bread yeast or baker's yeast at room temperature. In industrial methods, kvass is produced from wort concentrate combined with various grain mixtures. It is a popular drink in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, some parts of Finland, Sweden, and China.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The word kvass is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European base *kwh₂et- ('to become sour'). In English it was first mentioned in a text around 1553 as quass. Nowadays, the name of the drink is almost the same in most languages: in Polish: kwas chlebowy (lit. 'bread kvass', to differentiate it from kwas, 'acid', originally from kwaśny, 'sour'); Belarusian: квас, kvas; Russian: квас, kvas; Ukrainian: квас/хлібний квас/сирівець, kvas/khlibny kvas/syrivets; Latvian: kvass; Romanian: cvas; Hungarian: kvasz; Serbian: квас/kvas; Chinese: 格瓦斯/克瓦斯, géwǎsī/kèwǎsī; Eastern Finnish: vaasa. Non-cognates include Estonian kali, Finnish kalja, Latvian dzersis (lit. 'beverage'), Latgalian dzyra (lit. 'beverage', similar to Lithuanian gira), Lithuanian gira (lit. 'beverage', similar to Latvian dzira), and Swedish bröddricka (lit. 'bread drink').",
"title": "Terminology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "In the traditional method, either dried rye bread or a combination of rye flour and rye malt is used. The dried rye bread is extracted with hot water and incubated for 12 hours at room temperature, after which bread yeast and sugar are added to the extract and fermented for 12 hours at 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F). Alternatively, rye flour is boiled, mixed with rye malt, sugar, and baker's yeast and then fermented for 12 hours at 20 °C (293 K; 68 °F).",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The simplest industrial method produces kvass from a wort concentrate. The concentrate is warmed up and mixed with a water and sugar solution to create wort with a sugar concentration of 5–7% and pasteurized to stabilize it. After that, the wort is pumped into a fermentation tank, where baker's yeast and lactic acid bacteria culture is added, and the solution is fermented for 12–24 hours at 12 to 30 °C (285 to 303 K; 54 to 86 °F). Only around 1% of the extract is fermented out into ethanol, carbon dioxide, and lactic acid. Afterwards, the kvass is cooled to 6 °C (279 K; 43 °F), clarified through either filtration or centrifugation, and adjusted for sugar content, if necessary.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Initially, it was filled in large containers from which the kvass was sold on streets, but now, the vast majority of industrially produced kvass is filled and sold in 1–3-litre plastic bottles and has a shelf life of 4–6 weeks.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kvass is usually 0.5–1.0% alcohol by weight, but may sometimes be as high as 2.0%.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "The exact origins of kvass are unclear, and whether it was invented by Slavic people or any other Eastern European ethnicity is unknown, although some Polish sources claim that kvass was invented by Slavs. Kvass has existed in the northeastern part of Europe, where grain production is thought to have been insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. It has been known among the Early Slavs since the 10th century. Likely invented in the Kievan Rus' and known there since at least the 10th century, kvass has become one of the symbols of East Slavic cuisine. The first written mention of kvass is found in the Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 996, when kvass along with mead and food was given out to the citizens of Kiev. Kvass-making remained a daily household activity well into the 19th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In the second half of the 19th century, with military engagement, increasing industrialization, and large-scale projects, such as the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, created a growing need to supply large numbers of people with foodstuff for extended periods of time, commercial kvass producers began appearing in the Russian Empire. Many of them specialised in the use of different raw ingredients, and more than 150 kvass varieties, such as apple, pear, mint, lemon, chicory, raspberry, and cherry kvass, are recorded. As commercial kvass producers began selling it in barrels on the streets, domestic kvass-making started to decline. For example, in the year ended 30 June 1912, there were 17 factories in the Governorate of Livonia, producing a total of 437,255 gallons of kvass.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In the 1890s, the first scientific studies into the production of kvass were conducted in Kyiv, and in the 1960s, commercial mass production technology of kvass was further developed by chemists in Moscow.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Although the massive flood of western soft drinks after the fall of the USSR, such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, substantially shrank the market share of kvass in Russia, in recent years, it has regained its original popularity, often marketed as a national soft drink or \"patriotic\" alternative to the famous Coca-Cola drink. For example, the Russian company Nikola has promoted its brand of kvass with an advertising campaign emphasizing \"anti-cola-nisation.\" Moscow-based Business Analytica reported in 2008 that bottled kvass sales had tripled since 2005 and estimated that per capita kvass consumption in Russia would reach three litres in 2008. Between 2005 and 2007, cola's share of the Moscow soft drink market fell from 37% to 32%. Meanwhile, kvass's share more than doubled over the same time period, reaching 16% in 2007. In response, Coca-Cola launched its own brand of kvass in May 2008. This is the first time a foreign company has made an appreciable entrance into the Russian kvass market. Pepsi has also signed an agreement with a Russian kvass manufacturer to act as a distribution agent. The development of new technologies for storage and distribution, and heavy advertising, have contributed to this surge in popularity; three new major brands have been introduced since 2004.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Market shares for Russia (2014)",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Belarus has several breweries producing kvass: Alivaria Brewery, Babrujski Brovar [be; be-tarask], and Krinitsa [be; be-tarask]. It also has a variety of kvass tasting and entertainment festivals. The largest show takes place in the city of Lida.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Kvass may have appeared in Poland as early as the 10th century, it quickly became a trendy beverage thanks to it easy and cheap method of production as well as its thirst-quenching and digestion-aiding qualities. By the time of Władysław II Jagiełło's rule, kvass was universal. It was at first commonly drunk by peasants in the eastern parts of the country, but eventually the drink spread to the szlachta. One example of this is kwas chlebowy sapieżyński kodeński, an old type of Polish kvass that is still sold as a contemporary brand. Its origins can be traced back to the 1500s, when Jan Sapieha [pl] founded the town of Kodeń on land granted by the Polish king. He then bought the mills and 24 villages of the surrounding areas from their previous landowners. Then, the taste of kvass became known among the Polish szlachta, who used it for its supposed healing qualities. Throughout the 19th century, kvass remained popular among Poles who lived in the Congress Poland of Imperial Russia and in Austrian Galicia, especially the inhabitants of rural areas. Up until the 19th century, recipes for local variants of kvass remained well-guarded secrets of families, religious orders, and monasteries.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The beverage production in Poland on an industrial scale can be traced back to the more recent interwar period, when the Polish state regained independence as the Second Polish Republic. In interwar Poland, kvass was brewed and sold in mass numbers by magnates of the Polish drinks market like the Varsovian brewery Haberbusch i Schiele or the Karpiński company. Kvass remained particularly popular in eastern Poland. However, with the collapse of many prewar businesses and much of the Polish industry during World War II, kvass lost popularity following the aftermath of the war. It also gradually lost favour throughout the 20th century upon introducing mass-produced soft drinks and carbonated water into the Polish market. In the early 21st century, kvass experienced a renaissance in Poland due to the heightened interest in healthy diets, natural products, and traditions.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kvass can be found in some supermarkets and grocery stores, where it is known in Polish as kwas chlebowy ([kvas xlɛbɔvɨ]). Commercial bottled versions of the drink are the most common variant, as some companies specialise in manufacturing a more modern version of the drink (some variants are manufactured in Poland whilst others are imported from its neighbouring countries, Lithuania and Ukraine being the most popular source). However, old recipes for a traditional version of kvass exist. Some of them originate from eastern Poland; others from more central regions include adding honey for flavour. Although commercial kvass is much easier to find in Polish shops, Polish manufacturers of more natural and healthier variants of kvass have become increasingly popular both within and outside of the country's borders. A less healthy alternative of quick-to-make variants using kvass concentrate can also be purchased in shops. One colloquial Polish name for kwas chlebowy is wiejska oranżada (\"rural orangeade\"). In some Polish villages, such as Zaława and its surroundings, kvass was traditionally produced on every farm.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In Latvian, kvass was also called dzersis. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the street vendors disappeared from the streets of Latvia due to new health laws that banned its sale on the street. Economic disruptions forced many kvass factories to close. The Coca-Cola Company moved in and began quickly dominating the soft drink market. In 1998, the local soft drink industry adapted by selling bottled kvass and launching aggressive marketing campaigns. This surge in sales was stimulated by the fact that kvass sold for about half the price of Coca-Cola. In just three years, kvass constituted as much as 30% of the soft drink market in Latvia, while the market share of Coca-Cola fell from 65% to 44%. The Coca-Cola Company had losses in Latvia of about $1 million in 1999 and 2000. Coca-Cola responded by purchasing kvass manufacturers and producing kvass at their own soft drink plants.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "On 30 September 2010, the Saeima adopted quality and classification requirements for kvass, defining it as \"a beverage obtained by fermenting a mixture of kvass wort with a yeast of microorganism cultures to which sugar and other food sources and food additives are added or not added after the fermentation\" with a maximum ABV of 1.2 percent, and differentiating it from an unfermented non-alcoholic mixture of grain product extract, water, flavourings, preservatives, and other ingredients, which is designated as a \"kvass (malt) beverage\".",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In 2014, Latvian kvass producers won seven medals at the Russian Beverage exposition in Moscow, with Ilgezeem's Porter Tanheiser kvass winning two gold medals. In 2019, Iļģuciema kvass ranked second in the Most Loved Latvian Beverage Brand Top, and first in the subsequent 2020 top.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In Lithuania, kvass is known as gira and is widely available in bottles and drafts. The first written records of kvass and kvass recipes in Lithuania appeared in the 16th century. Many restaurants in Vilnius make their own kvass, which they sell on the premises. Some brands of mass-produced Lithuanian kvass are also sold on the Polish market. Strictly speaking, gira can be made from anything fermentable—such as caraway tea, beetroot juice, or berries—but it is made mainly from black bread, or barley or rye malt.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In Estonia, kvass is known as kali. Initially, it was made from either brewer's spent grain or wort left to ferment in a closed container, but later, special kvass bread (kaljaleib) or industrially produced malt concentrate started to be used. Nowadays, kali generally is industrially produced with the use of pasteurization, the addition of preservatives, and artificial carbonation.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "In Finland, a fermented drink made from a mixture of rye flour and rye malt was ubiquitous in parts of Eastern Finland and was heated in the oven. It was called kalja (which can also be used to refer to small beer) or vaasa (in Eastern Finnish), while nowadays the drink is often known as kotikalja (lit. 'home kalja') and is available in many work canteens, gas stations, and lower-end restaurants.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Traditionally, kalja was usually made in households once a week from a mixture of malted and unmalted rye grains. Other grains, such as oats or barley, were also sometimes used; occasionally, leftover potatoes or pieces of bread were added. Everything was mixed with water in a metal cauldron or a clay pot and kept warm in the oven or by the stove for at least six hours for the mixture to darken and sweeten. Sometimes, the grain solids were filtered out through lautering. In Eastern Finland, the mixture was formed into large loaves and briefly baked for the crust to turn brown. The porridge or pieces of the malt bread were mixed into a wooden cask with water and fermented for one or two days with a previous batch, a sourdough starter, spontaneously or in more recent times with commercial baker's yeast. In the early 20th century, with sugar becoming more readily available, it started replacing the malting process, and modern kalja is made from dark rye malt, sugar, and baker's yeast.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kvass was also made in Sweden, where it was known as bröddricka (lit. 'bread drink'). However, it was very likely limited only to areas where rye bread was the standard bread as opposed to crispbread, which was more common in Western Sweden and did not stale. Bröddricka was still being made in Öland farms up until 1935.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In the mid-19th century, kvass was introduced in Xinjiang, where it became known as kavas (Chinese: 格瓦斯; pinyin: géwǎsī) and eventually became one of the region's signature drinks. It is usually consumed cold together with barbecue. In 1900, Russian merchant Ivan Churin founded Harbin Churin Food (秋林 Qiulin) in Harbin, offering kvass and other specialities, and by 2009, the company was already producing 5,000 tons of kvass a year, making up 90% of the local market. In 2011, it moved its kvass factory to Tianjin, increasing its sales to 20,000 tons in the first year.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Following the influx of immigrants in the UK due to the 2004 enlargement of the European Union, several stores selling cuisine and beverages from Eastern Europe were established, many of which stock imported (primarily pasteurised) kvass. As a result, since then a number of different flavours of not-pasteurised kvass, fermented using sourdough starter culture, have also become available in the UK in 2023. In recent years, kvass has also become more popular in Serbia.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "In 2017, a version of kvass from carrots or beets was developed in California by the producer Biotic Ferments.",
"title": "By country"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Naturally fermented kvass contains 5.9%±0.02 carbohydrates, of which 5.7%±0.02 are sugars (mostly fructose, glucose, and maltose), as well as 0.71±0.09, 1.28±0.12, and 18.14±0.48 mg/100 g of thiamine, riboflavin, and niacin respectively. In addition to that, 19 different aroma volatile compounds have also been identified in naturally fermented kvass, most notably 4-penten-2-ol (10.05×10 PAU), which has a fruity odour; carvone (2.28×10 PAU) originating from caraway fruits used as an ingredient in rye bread; and ethyl octanoate (1.03×10 PAU), which has an odour of fruit and fat.",
"title": "Nutritional composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Traditional kvass made from rye wholemeal bread has been found to have, on average, twice the dietary fibre content, 60% more antioxidant activity (due to the addition of caramel and citric acid to the bread), and three times less reducing sugar content than industrially produced kvass.",
"title": "Nutritional composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Historically, alcohol by volume (ABV) of kvass varied depending on the ingredients, microbial flora, as well as temperature and length of fermentation, but nowadays it is usually not higher than 1.5%. The wide availability and consumption of kvass, including by children of all ages, together with the lacking indication of ABV for kvass on the labels and in advertisements, has been named a possible contributor to chronic alcoholism in the former Soviet Union.",
"title": "Nutritional composition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Apart from drinking, kvass is also used by families (especially poor ones) as the basis for many dishes. Traditional cold summertime soups of Russian cuisine, such as okroshka, botvinya, and tyurya, are based on kvass.",
"title": "Use"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The name of Kvasir, a wise being in Norse mythology, is possibly related to kvass.",
"title": "Cultural references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "There is a Russian expression \"Перебиваться с хлеба на квас\" (literally \"to clamber from bread to kvass\"), which means \"to live from hand to mouth\" or to \"scrape by\" referring to the frugal practice amongst the poor peasants of making kvass from stale leftovers of rye bread. Another kvass-related term in Russian is \"kvass patriotism [ru]\" (квасной патриотизм) dating back to an 1823 letter by the Russian poet Pyotr Vyazemsky who defined it as \"unqualified praise of everything that is your own\".",
"title": "Cultural references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "In the Polish language, several traditional sayings that reference kwas chlebowy exist. There is also an old Polish folk rhyming song. It shows the history of kvass in the country as having been drunk by generations of Polish reapers as a thirst-quenching beverage used during periods of hard work during the harvest season, long before it became popular as a medicinal drink among the szlachta. The words of the song go as follows:",
"title": "Cultural references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In the Polish village of Zaława, there is a customary game known as wulkan (\"volcano\") that is associated with the beverage. The fermentation of sugars makes kvass slightly carbonated, thus, when shaken or heated, it can cause the liquid to suddenly and rapidly rise out of an open vessel. Playing wulkan consists of vigorously shaking a bottle of kvass shortly before handing it to someone else who is going to drink it; the sudden \"shooting out\" of the beverage onto the person opening the bottle is a source of entertainment for the youth of Zaława and a well-known prank during regional festivities.",
"title": "Cultural references"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "In Tolstoy's War and Peace, French soldiers are aware of kvass on entering Moscow, enjoying it but referring to it as \"pig's lemonade\". In Sholem Aleichem's Motl, Peysi the Cantor's Son, diluted kvass is the focus of one of Motl's older brother's get-rich-quick schemes.",
"title": "Cultural references"
}
] |
Kvass is a fermented cereal-based low-alcohol beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-brown colour, and sweet-sour taste. Kvass originates from northeastern Europe, where grain production was considered insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. The first written mention of kvass is found in Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 996. In the traditional method, kvass is made from a mash obtained from rye bread or rye flour and malt soaked in hot water, fermented for about 12 hours with the help of sugar and bread yeast or baker's yeast at room temperature. In industrial methods, kvass is produced from wort concentrate combined with various grain mixtures. It is a popular drink in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, some parts of Finland, Sweden, and China.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-26T04:54:26Z
|
[
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass
|
16,972 |
Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem
|
The Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theorem is a result in dynamical systems about the persistence of quasiperiodic motions under small perturbations. The theorem partly resolves the small-divisor problem that arises in the perturbation theory of classical mechanics.
The problem is whether or not a small perturbation of a conservative dynamical system results in a lasting quasiperiodic orbit. The original breakthrough to this problem was given by Andrey Kolmogorov in 1954. This was rigorously proved and extended by Jürgen Moser in 1962 (for smooth twist maps) and Vladimir Arnold in 1963 (for analytic Hamiltonian systems), and the general result is known as the KAM theorem.
Arnold originally thought that this theorem could apply to the motions of the Solar System or other instances of the n-body problem, but it turned out to work only for the three-body problem because of a degeneracy in his formulation of the problem for larger numbers of bodies. Later, Gabriella Pinzari showed how to eliminate this degeneracy by developing a rotation-invariant version of the theorem.
The KAM theorem is usually stated in terms of trajectories in phase space of an integrable Hamiltonian system. The motion of an integrable system is confined to an invariant torus (a doughnut-shaped surface). Different initial conditions of the integrable Hamiltonian system will trace different invariant tori in phase space. Plotting the coordinates of an integrable system would show that they are quasiperiodic.
The KAM theorem states that if the system is subjected to a weak nonlinear perturbation, some of the invariant tori are deformed and survive, i.e. there is a map from the original manifold to the deformed one that is continuous in the perturbation. Conversely, other invariant tori are destroyed: even arbitrarily small perturbations cause the manifold to no longer be invariant and there exists no such map to nearby manifolds. Surviving tori meet the non-resonance condition, i.e., they have “sufficiently irrational” frequencies. This implies that the motion on the deformed torus continues to be quasiperiodic, with the independent periods changed (as a consequence of the non-degeneracy condition). The KAM theorem quantifies the level of perturbation that can be applied for this to be true.
Those KAM tori that are destroyed by perturbation become invariant Cantor sets, named Cantori by Ian C. Percival in 1979.
The non-resonance and non-degeneracy conditions of the KAM theorem become increasingly difficult to satisfy for systems with more degrees of freedom. As the number of dimensions of the system increases, the volume occupied by the tori decreases.
As the perturbation increases and the smooth curves disintegrate we move from KAM theory to Aubry–Mather theory which requires less stringent hypotheses and works with the Cantor-like sets.
The existence of a KAM theorem for perturbations of quantum many-body integrable systems is still an open question, although it is believed that arbitrarily small perturbations will destroy integrability in the infinite size limit.
An important consequence of the KAM theorem is that for a large set of initial conditions the motion remains perpetually quasiperiodic.
The methods introduced by Kolmogorov, Arnold, and Moser have developed into a large body of results related to quasiperiodic motions, now known as KAM theory. Notably, it has been extended to non-Hamiltonian systems (starting with Moser), to non-perturbative situations (as in the work of Michael Herman) and to systems with fast and slow frequencies (as in the work of Mikhail B. Sevryuk).
A manifold T d {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}^{d}} invariant under the action of a flow ϕ t {\displaystyle \phi ^{t}} is called an invariant d {\displaystyle d} -torus, if there exists a diffeomorphism φ : T d → T d {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\varphi }}:{\mathcal {T}}^{d}\rightarrow \mathbb {T} ^{d}} into the standard d {\displaystyle d} -torus T d := S 1 × S 1 × ⋯ × S 1 ⏟ d {\displaystyle \mathbb {T} ^{d}:=\underbrace {\mathbb {S} ^{1}\times \mathbb {S} ^{1}\times \cdots \times \mathbb {S} ^{1}} _{d}} such that the resulting motion on T d {\displaystyle \mathbb {T} ^{d}} is uniform linear but not static, i.e. d φ / d t = ω {\displaystyle \mathrm {d} {\boldsymbol {\varphi }}/\mathrm {d} t={\boldsymbol {\omega }}} ，where ω ∈ R d {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\omega }}\in \mathbb {R} ^{d}} is a non-zero constant vector, called the frequency vector.
If the frequency vector ω {\displaystyle {\boldsymbol {\omega }}} is:
then the invariant d {\displaystyle d} -torus T d {\displaystyle {\mathcal {T}}^{d}} ( d ≥ 2 {\displaystyle d\geq 2} ) is called a KAM torus. The d = 1 {\displaystyle d=1} case is normally excluded in classical KAM theory because it does not involve small divisors.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theorem is a result in dynamical systems about the persistence of quasiperiodic motions under small perturbations. The theorem partly resolves the small-divisor problem that arises in the perturbation theory of classical mechanics.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The problem is whether or not a small perturbation of a conservative dynamical system results in a lasting quasiperiodic orbit. The original breakthrough to this problem was given by Andrey Kolmogorov in 1954. This was rigorously proved and extended by Jürgen Moser in 1962 (for smooth twist maps) and Vladimir Arnold in 1963 (for analytic Hamiltonian systems), and the general result is known as the KAM theorem.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Arnold originally thought that this theorem could apply to the motions of the Solar System or other instances of the n-body problem, but it turned out to work only for the three-body problem because of a degeneracy in his formulation of the problem for larger numbers of bodies. Later, Gabriella Pinzari showed how to eliminate this degeneracy by developing a rotation-invariant version of the theorem.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The KAM theorem is usually stated in terms of trajectories in phase space of an integrable Hamiltonian system. The motion of an integrable system is confined to an invariant torus (a doughnut-shaped surface). Different initial conditions of the integrable Hamiltonian system will trace different invariant tori in phase space. Plotting the coordinates of an integrable system would show that they are quasiperiodic.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The KAM theorem states that if the system is subjected to a weak nonlinear perturbation, some of the invariant tori are deformed and survive, i.e. there is a map from the original manifold to the deformed one that is continuous in the perturbation. Conversely, other invariant tori are destroyed: even arbitrarily small perturbations cause the manifold to no longer be invariant and there exists no such map to nearby manifolds. Surviving tori meet the non-resonance condition, i.e., they have “sufficiently irrational” frequencies. This implies that the motion on the deformed torus continues to be quasiperiodic, with the independent periods changed (as a consequence of the non-degeneracy condition). The KAM theorem quantifies the level of perturbation that can be applied for this to be true.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Those KAM tori that are destroyed by perturbation become invariant Cantor sets, named Cantori by Ian C. Percival in 1979.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The non-resonance and non-degeneracy conditions of the KAM theorem become increasingly difficult to satisfy for systems with more degrees of freedom. As the number of dimensions of the system increases, the volume occupied by the tori decreases.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "As the perturbation increases and the smooth curves disintegrate we move from KAM theory to Aubry–Mather theory which requires less stringent hypotheses and works with the Cantor-like sets.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The existence of a KAM theorem for perturbations of quantum many-body integrable systems is still an open question, although it is believed that arbitrarily small perturbations will destroy integrability in the infinite size limit.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "An important consequence of the KAM theorem is that for a large set of initial conditions the motion remains perpetually quasiperiodic.",
"title": "Statement"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The methods introduced by Kolmogorov, Arnold, and Moser have developed into a large body of results related to quasiperiodic motions, now known as KAM theory. Notably, it has been extended to non-Hamiltonian systems (starting with Moser), to non-perturbative situations (as in the work of Michael Herman) and to systems with fast and slow frequencies (as in the work of Mikhail B. Sevryuk).",
"title": "KAM theory"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A manifold T d {\\displaystyle {\\mathcal {T}}^{d}} invariant under the action of a flow ϕ t {\\displaystyle \\phi ^{t}} is called an invariant d {\\displaystyle d} -torus, if there exists a diffeomorphism φ : T d → T d {\\displaystyle {\\boldsymbol {\\varphi }}:{\\mathcal {T}}^{d}\\rightarrow \\mathbb {T} ^{d}} into the standard d {\\displaystyle d} -torus T d := S 1 × S 1 × ⋯ × S 1 ⏟ d {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {T} ^{d}:=\\underbrace {\\mathbb {S} ^{1}\\times \\mathbb {S} ^{1}\\times \\cdots \\times \\mathbb {S} ^{1}} _{d}} such that the resulting motion on T d {\\displaystyle \\mathbb {T} ^{d}} is uniform linear but not static, i.e. d φ / d t = ω {\\displaystyle \\mathrm {d} {\\boldsymbol {\\varphi }}/\\mathrm {d} t={\\boldsymbol {\\omega }}} ，where ω ∈ R d {\\displaystyle {\\boldsymbol {\\omega }}\\in \\mathbb {R} ^{d}} is a non-zero constant vector, called the frequency vector.",
"title": "KAM torus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "If the frequency vector ω {\\displaystyle {\\boldsymbol {\\omega }}} is:",
"title": "KAM torus"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "then the invariant d {\\displaystyle d} -torus T d {\\displaystyle {\\mathcal {T}}^{d}} ( d ≥ 2 {\\displaystyle d\\geq 2} ) is called a KAM torus. The d = 1 {\\displaystyle d=1} case is normally excluded in classical KAM theory because it does not involve small divisors.",
"title": "KAM torus"
}
] |
The Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theorem is a result in dynamical systems about the persistence of quasiperiodic motions under small perturbations. The theorem partly resolves the small-divisor problem that arises in the perturbation theory of classical mechanics. The problem is whether or not a small perturbation of a conservative dynamical system results in a lasting quasiperiodic orbit. The original breakthrough to this problem was given by Andrey Kolmogorov in 1954. This was rigorously proved and extended by Jürgen Moser in 1962 and Vladimir Arnold in 1963, and the general result is known as the KAM theorem. Arnold originally thought that this theorem could apply to the motions of the Solar System or other instances of the n-body problem, but it turned out to work only for the three-body problem because of a degeneracy in his formulation of the problem for larger numbers of bodies. Later, Gabriella Pinzari showed how to eliminate this degeneracy by developing a rotation-invariant version of the theorem.
|
2023-06-09T14:21:06Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov%E2%80%93Arnold%E2%80%93Moser_theorem
|
|
16,973 |
Kam (disambiguation)
|
Kam or Kaam (from Sanskrit: kama) means deep extensive desire, often sexual, and is counted among the cardinal sins in Sikhism.
Kam or KAM also refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kam or Kaam (from Sanskrit: kama) means deep extensive desire, often sexual, and is counted among the cardinal sins in Sikhism.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kam or KAM also refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
Kam or Kaam means deep extensive desire, often sexual, and is counted among the cardinal sins in Sikhism. Kam or KAM also refer to:
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-05T07:15:02Z
|
[
"Template:In title",
"Template:Disambiguation",
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:TOC right"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kam_(disambiguation)
|
16,974 |
Knapsack problem
|
The knapsack problem is the following problem in combinatorial optimization:
It derives its name from the problem faced by someone who is constrained by a fixed-size knapsack and must fill it with the most valuable items. The problem often arises in resource allocation where the decision-makers have to choose from a set of non-divisible projects or tasks under a fixed budget or time constraint, respectively.
The knapsack problem has been studied for more than a century, with early works dating as far back as 1897.
Knapsack problems appear in real-world decision-making processes in a wide variety of fields, such as finding the least wasteful way to cut raw materials, selection of investments and portfolios, selection of assets for asset-backed securitization, and generating keys for the Merkle–Hellman and other knapsack cryptosystems.
One early application of knapsack algorithms was in the construction and scoring of tests in which the test-takers have a choice as to which questions they answer. For small examples, it is a fairly simple process to provide the test-takers with such a choice. For example, if an exam contains 12 questions each worth 10 points, the test-taker need only answer 10 questions to achieve a maximum possible score of 100 points. However, on tests with a heterogeneous distribution of point values, it is more difficult to provide choices. Feuerman and Weiss proposed a system in which students are given a heterogeneous test with a total of 125 possible points. The students are asked to answer all of the questions to the best of their abilities. Of the possible subsets of problems whose total point values add up to 100, a knapsack algorithm would determine which subset gives each student the highest possible score.
A 1999 study of the Stony Brook University Algorithm Repository showed that, out of 75 algorithmic problems related to the field of combinatorial algorithms and algorithm engineering, the knapsack problem was the 19th most popular and the third most needed after suffix trees and the bin packing problem.
The most common problem being solved is the 0-1 knapsack problem, which restricts the number x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} of copies of each kind of item to zero or one. Given a set of n {\displaystyle n} items numbered from 1 up to n {\displaystyle n} , each with a weight w i {\displaystyle w_{i}} and a value v i {\displaystyle v_{i}} , along with a maximum weight capacity W {\displaystyle W} ,
Here x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} represents the number of instances of item i {\displaystyle i} to include in the knapsack. Informally, the problem is to maximize the sum of the values of the items in the knapsack so that the sum of the weights is less than or equal to the knapsack's capacity.
The bounded knapsack problem (BKP) removes the restriction that there is only one of each item, but restricts the number x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} of copies of each kind of item to a maximum non-negative integer value c {\displaystyle c} :
The unbounded knapsack problem (UKP) places no upper bound on the number of copies of each kind of item and can be formulated as above except that the only restriction on x i {\displaystyle x_{i}} is that it is a non-negative integer.
One example of the unbounded knapsack problem is given using the figure shown at the beginning of this article and the text "if any number of each book is available" in the caption of that figure.
The knapsack problem is interesting from the perspective of computer science for many reasons:
There is a link between the "decision" and "optimization" problems in that if there exists a polynomial algorithm that solves the "decision" problem, then one can find the maximum value for the optimization problem in polynomial time by applying this algorithm iteratively while increasing the value of k. On the other hand, if an algorithm finds the optimal value of the optimization problem in polynomial time, then the decision problem can be solved in polynomial time by comparing the value of the solution output by this algorithm with the value of k. Thus, both versions of the problem are of similar difficulty.
One theme in research literature is to identify what the "hard" instances of the knapsack problem look like, or viewed another way, to identify what properties of instances in practice might make them more amenable than their worst-case NP-complete behaviour suggests. The goal in finding these "hard" instances is for their use in public key cryptography systems, such as the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem. More generally, better understanding of the structure of the space of instances of an optimization problem helps to advance the study of the particular problem and can improve algorithm selection.
Furthermore, notable is the fact that the hardness of the knapsack problem depends on the form of the input. If the weights and profits are given as integers, it is weakly NP-complete, while it is strongly NP-complete if the weights and profits are given as rational numbers. However, in the case of rational weights and profits it still admits a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme.
The NP-hardness of the Knapsack problem relates to computational models in which the size of integers matters (such as the Turing machine). In contrast, decision trees count each decision as a single step. Dobkin and Lipton show an 1 2 n 2 {\displaystyle {1 \over 2}n^{2}} lower bound on linear decision trees for the knapsack problem, that is, trees where decision nodes test the sign of affine functions. This was generalized to algebraic decision trees by Steele and Yao. If the elements in the problem are real numbers or rationals, the decision-tree lower bound extends to the real random-access machine model with an instruction set that includes addition, subtraction and multiplication of real numbers, as well as comparison and either division or remaindering ("floor"). This model covers more algorithms than the algebraic decision-tree model, as it encompasses algorithms that use indexing into tables. However, in this model all program steps are counted, not just decisions. An upper bound for a decision-tree model was given by Meyer auf der Heide who showed that for every n there exists an O(n)-deep linear decision tree that solves the subset-sum problem with n items. Note that this does not imply any upper bound for an algorithm that should solve the problem for any given n.
Several algorithms are available to solve knapsack problems, based on the dynamic programming approach, the branch and bound approach or hybridizations of both approaches.
The unbounded knapsack problem (UKP) places no restriction on the number of copies of each kind of item. Besides, here we assume that x i > 0 {\displaystyle x_{i}>0}
Observe that m [ w ] {\displaystyle m[w]} has the following properties:
1. m [ 0 ] = 0 {\displaystyle m[0]=0\,\!} (the sum of zero items, i.e., the summation of the empty set).
2. m [ w ] = max ( v 1 + m [ w − w 1 ] , v 2 + m [ w − w 2 ] , . . . , v n + m [ w − w n ] ) {\displaystyle m[w]=\max(v_{1}+m[w-w_{1}],v_{2}+m[w-w_{2}],...,v_{n}+m[w-w_{n}])} , w i ≤ w {\displaystyle w_{i}\leq w} , where v i {\displaystyle v_{i}} is the value of the i {\displaystyle i} -th kind of item.
The second property needs to be explained in detail. During the process of the running of this method, how do we get the weight w {\displaystyle w} ? There are only i {\displaystyle i} ways and the previous weights are w − w 1 , w − w 2 , . . . , w − w i {\displaystyle w-w_{1},w-w_{2},...,w-w_{i}} where there are total i {\displaystyle i} kinds of different item (by saying different, we mean that the weight and the value are not completely the same). If we know each value of these i {\displaystyle i} items and the related maximum value previously, we just compare them to each other and get the maximum value ultimately and we are done.
Here the maximum of the empty set is taken to be zero. Tabulating the results from m [ 0 ] {\displaystyle m[0]} up through m [ W ] {\displaystyle m[W]} gives the solution. Since the calculation of each m [ w ] {\displaystyle m[w]} involves examining at most n {\displaystyle n} items, and there are at most W {\displaystyle W} values of m [ w ] {\displaystyle m[w]} to calculate, the running time of the dynamic programming solution is O ( n W ) {\displaystyle O(nW)} . Dividing w 1 , w 2 , … , w n , W {\displaystyle w_{1},\,w_{2},\,\ldots ,\,w_{n},\,W} by their greatest common divisor is a way to improve the running time.
Even if P≠NP, the O ( n W ) {\displaystyle O(nW)} complexity does not contradict the fact that the knapsack problem is NP-complete, since W {\displaystyle W} , unlike n {\displaystyle n} , is not polynomial in the length of the input to the problem. The length of the W {\displaystyle W} input to the problem is proportional to the number of bits in W {\displaystyle W} , log W {\displaystyle \log W} , not to W {\displaystyle W} itself. However, since this runtime is pseudopolynomial, this makes the (decision version of the) knapsack problem a weakly NP-complete problem.
A similar dynamic programming solution for the 0-1 knapsack problem also runs in pseudo-polynomial time. Assume w 1 , w 2 , … , w n , W {\displaystyle w_{1},\,w_{2},\,\ldots ,\,w_{n},\,W} are strictly positive integers. Define m [ i , w ] {\displaystyle m[i,w]} to be the maximum value that can be attained with weight less than or equal to w {\displaystyle w} using items up to i {\displaystyle i} (first i {\displaystyle i} items).
We can define m [ i , w ] {\displaystyle m[i,w]} recursively as follows: (Definition A)
The solution can then be found by calculating m [ n , W ] {\displaystyle m[n,W]} . To do this efficiently, we can use a table to store previous computations.
The following is pseudocode for the dynamic program:
This solution will therefore run in O ( n W ) {\displaystyle O(nW)} time and O ( n W ) {\displaystyle O(nW)} space. (If we only need the value m[n,W], we can modify the code so that the amount of memory required is O(W) which stores the recent two lines of the array "m".)
However, if we take it a step or two further, we should know that the method will run in the time between O ( n W ) {\displaystyle O(nW)} and O ( 2 n ) {\displaystyle O(2^{n})} . From Definition A, we know that there is no need to compute all the weights when the number of items and the items themselves that we chose are fixed. That is to say, the program above computes more than necessary because the weight changes from 0 to W often. From this perspective, we can program this method so that it runs recursively.
For example, there are 10 different items and the weight limit is 67. So,
If you use above method to compute for m ( 10 , 67 ) {\displaystyle m(10,67)} , you will get this, excluding calls that produce m ( i , j ) = 0 {\displaystyle m(i,j)=0} :
Besides, we can break the recursion and convert it into a tree. Then we can cut some leaves and use parallel computing to expedite the running of this method.
To find the actual subset of items, rather than just their total value, we can run this after running the function above:
Another algorithm for 0-1 knapsack, discovered in 1974 and sometimes called "meet-in-the-middle" due to parallels to a similarly named algorithm in cryptography, is exponential in the number of different items but may be preferable to the DP algorithm when W {\displaystyle W} is large compared to n. In particular, if the w i {\displaystyle w_{i}} are nonnegative but not integers, we could still use the dynamic programming algorithm by scaling and rounding (i.e. using fixed-point arithmetic), but if the problem requires d {\displaystyle d} fractional digits of precision to arrive at the correct answer, W {\displaystyle W} will need to be scaled by 10 d {\displaystyle 10^{d}} , and the DP algorithm will require O ( W 10 d ) {\displaystyle O(W10^{d})} space and O ( n W 10 d ) {\displaystyle O(nW10^{d})} time.
The algorithm takes O ( 2 n / 2 ) {\displaystyle O(2^{n/2})} space, and efficient implementations of step 3 (for instance, sorting the subsets of B by weight, discarding subsets of B which weigh more than other subsets of B of greater or equal value, and using binary search to find the best match) result in a runtime of O ( n 2 n / 2 ) {\displaystyle O(n2^{n/2})} . As with the meet in the middle attack in cryptography, this improves on the O ( n 2 n ) {\displaystyle O(n2^{n})} runtime of a naive brute force approach (examining all subsets of { 1... n } {\displaystyle \{1...n\}} ), at the cost of using exponential rather than constant space (see also baby-step giant-step). The current state of the art improvement to the meet-in-the-middle algorithm, using insights from Schroeppel and Shamir's Algorithm for Subset Sum, provides as a corollary a randomized algorithm for Knapsack which preserves the O ∗ ( 2 n / 2 ) {\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/2})} (up to polynomial factors) running time and reduces the space requirements to O ∗ ( 2 0.249999 n ) {\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{0.249999n})} (see Corollary 1.4). In contrast, the best known deterministic algorithm runs in O ∗ ( 2 n / 2 ) {\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/2})} time with a slightly worse space complexity of O ∗ ( 2 n / 4 ) {\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/4})} .
As for most NP-complete problems, it may be enough to find workable solutions even if they are not optimal. Preferably, however, the approximation comes with a guarantee of the difference between the value of the solution found and the value of the optimal solution.
As with many useful but computationally complex algorithms, there has been substantial research on creating and analyzing algorithms that approximate a solution. The knapsack problem, though NP-Hard, is one of a collection of algorithms that can still be approximated to any specified degree. This means that the problem has a polynomial time approximation scheme. To be exact, the knapsack problem has a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS).
George Dantzig proposed a greedy approximation algorithm to solve the unbounded knapsack problem. His version sorts the items in decreasing order of value per unit of weight, v 1 / w 1 ≥ ⋯ ≥ v n / w n {\displaystyle v_{1}/w_{1}\geq \cdots \geq v_{n}/w_{n}} . It then proceeds to insert them into the sack, starting with as many copies as possible of the first kind of item until there is no longer space in the sack for more. Provided that there is an unlimited supply of each kind of item, if m {\displaystyle m} is the maximum value of items that fit into the sack, then the greedy algorithm is guaranteed to achieve at least a value of m / 2 {\displaystyle m/2} .
For the bounded problem, where the supply of each kind of item is limited, the above algorithm may be far from optimal. Nevertheless, a simple modification allows us to solve this case: Assume for simplicity that all items individually fit in the sack ( w i ≤ W {\displaystyle w_{i}\leq W} for all i {\displaystyle i} ). Construct a solution S 1 {\displaystyle S_{1}} by packing items greedily as long as possible, i.e. S 1 = { 1 , … , k } {\displaystyle S_{1}=\left\{1,\ldots ,k\right\}} where k = max 1 ≤ k ′ ≤ n ∑ i = 1 k ′ w i ≤ W {\displaystyle k=\textstyle \max _{1\leq k'\leq n}\textstyle \sum _{i=1}^{k'}w_{i}\leq W} . Furthermore, construct a second solution S 2 = { k + 1 } {\displaystyle S_{2}=\left\{k+1\right\}} containing the first item that did not fit. Since S 1 ∪ S 2 {\displaystyle S_{1}\cup S_{2}} provides an upper bound for the LP relaxation of the problem, one of the sets must have value at least m / 2 {\displaystyle m/2} ; we thus return whichever of S 1 {\displaystyle S_{1}} and S 2 {\displaystyle S_{2}} has better value to obtain a 1 / 2 {\displaystyle 1/2} -approximation.
It can be shown that the average performance converges to the optimal solution in distribution at the error rate n − 1 / 2 {\displaystyle n^{-1/2}}
The fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the knapsack problem takes advantage of the fact that the reason the problem has no known polynomial time solutions is because the profits associated with the items are not restricted. If one rounds off some of the least significant digits of the profit values then they will be bounded by a polynomial and 1/ε where ε is a bound on the correctness of the solution. This restriction then means that an algorithm can find a solution in polynomial time that is correct within a factor of (1-ε) of the optimal solution.
Theorem: The set S ′ {\displaystyle S'} computed by the algorithm above satisfies p r o f i t ( S ′ ) ≥ ( 1 − ε ) ⋅ p r o f i t ( S ∗ ) {\displaystyle \mathrm {profit} (S')\geq (1-\varepsilon )\cdot \mathrm {profit} (S^{*})} , where S ∗ {\displaystyle S^{*}} is an optimal solution.
Solving the unbounded knapsack problem can be made easier by throwing away items which will never be needed. For a given item i {\displaystyle i} , suppose we could find a set of items J {\displaystyle J} such that their total weight is less than the weight of i {\displaystyle i} , and their total value is greater than the value of i {\displaystyle i} . Then i {\displaystyle i} cannot appear in the optimal solution, because we could always improve any potential solution containing i {\displaystyle i} by replacing i {\displaystyle i} with the set J {\displaystyle J} . Therefore, we can disregard the i {\displaystyle i} -th item altogether. In such cases, J {\displaystyle J} is said to dominate i {\displaystyle i} . (Note that this does not apply to bounded knapsack problems, since we may have already used up the items in J {\displaystyle J} .)
Finding dominance relations allows us to significantly reduce the size of the search space. There are several different types of dominance relations, which all satisfy an inequality of the form:
∑ j ∈ J w j x j ≤ α w i {\displaystyle \qquad \sum _{j\in J}w_{j}\,x_{j}\ \leq \alpha \,w_{i}} , and ∑ j ∈ J v j x j ≥ α v i {\displaystyle \sum _{j\in J}v_{j}\,x_{j}\ \geq \alpha \,v_{i}\,} for some x ∈ Z + n {\displaystyle x\in Z_{+}^{n}}
where α ∈ Z + , J ⊊ N {\displaystyle \alpha \in Z_{+}\,,J\subsetneq N} and i ∉ J {\displaystyle i\not \in J} . The vector x {\displaystyle x} denotes the number of copies of each member of J {\displaystyle J} .
There are many variations of the knapsack problem that have arisen from the vast number of applications of the basic problem. The main variations occur by changing the number of some problem parameter such as the number of items, number of objectives, or even the number of knapsacks.
This variation changes the goal of the individual filling the knapsack. Instead of one objective, such as maximizing the monetary profit, the objective could have several dimensions. For example, there could be environmental or social concerns as well as economic goals. Problems frequently addressed include portfolio and transportation logistics optimizations.
As an example, suppose you ran a cruise ship. You have to decide how many famous comedians to hire. This boat can handle no more than one ton of passengers and the entertainers must weigh less than 1000 lbs. Each comedian has a weight, brings in business based on their popularity and asks for a specific salary. In this example, you have multiple objectives. You want, of course, to maximize the popularity of your entertainers while minimizing their salaries. Also, you want to have as many entertainers as possible.
In this variation, the weight of knapsack item i {\displaystyle i} is given by a D-dimensional vector w i ¯ = ( w i 1 , … , w i D ) {\displaystyle {\overline {w_{i}}}=(w_{i1},\ldots ,w_{iD})} and the knapsack has a D-dimensional capacity vector ( W 1 , … , W D ) {\displaystyle (W_{1},\ldots ,W_{D})} . The target is to maximize the sum of the values of the items in the knapsack so that the sum of weights in each dimension d {\displaystyle d} does not exceed W d {\displaystyle W_{d}} .
Multi-dimensional knapsack is computationally harder than knapsack; even for D = 2 {\displaystyle D=2} , the problem does not have EPTAS unless P = {\displaystyle =} NP. However, the algorithm in is shown to solve sparse instances efficiently. An instance of multi-dimensional knapsack is sparse if there is a set J = { 1 , 2 , … , m } {\displaystyle J=\{1,2,\ldots ,m\}} for m < D {\displaystyle m<D} such that for every knapsack item i {\displaystyle i} , ∃ z > m {\displaystyle \exists z>m} such that ∀ j ∈ J ∪ { z } , w i j ≥ 0 {\displaystyle \forall j\in J\cup \{z\},\ w_{ij}\geq 0} and ∀ y ∉ J ∪ { z } , w i y = 0 {\displaystyle \forall y\notin J\cup \{z\},w_{iy}=0} . Such instances occur, for example, when scheduling packets in a wireless network with relay nodes. The algorithm from also solves sparse instances of the multiple choice variant, multiple-choice multi-dimensional knapsack.
The IHS (Increasing Height Shelf) algorithm is optimal for 2D knapsack (packing squares into a two-dimensional unit size square): when there are at most five square in an optimal packing.
This variation is similar to the Bin Packing Problem. It differs from the Bin Packing Problem in that a subset of items can be selected, whereas, in the Bin Packing Problem, all items have to be packed to certain bins. The concept is that there are multiple knapsacks. This may seem like a trivial change, but it is not equivalent to adding to the capacity of the initial knapsack. This variation is used in many loading and scheduling problems in Operations Research and has a Polynomial-time approximation scheme.
The quadratic knapsack problem maximizes a quadratic objective function subject to binary and linear capacity constraints. The problem was introduced by Gallo, Hammer, and Simeone in 1980, however the first treatment of the problem dates back to Witzgall in 1975.
The subset sum problem is a special case of the decision and 0-1 problems where each kind of item, the weight equals the value: w i = v i {\displaystyle w_{i}=v_{i}} . In the field of cryptography, the term knapsack problem is often used to refer specifically to the subset sum problem. The subset sum problem is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems.
A generalization of subset sum problem is called multiple subset-sum problem, in which multiple bins exist with the same capacity. It has been shown that the generalization does not have an FPTAS.
In the geometric knapsack problem, there is a set of rectangles with different values, and a rectangular knapsack. The goal is to pack the largest possible value into the knapsack.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The knapsack problem is the following problem in combinatorial optimization:",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It derives its name from the problem faced by someone who is constrained by a fixed-size knapsack and must fill it with the most valuable items. The problem often arises in resource allocation where the decision-makers have to choose from a set of non-divisible projects or tasks under a fixed budget or time constraint, respectively.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The knapsack problem has been studied for more than a century, with early works dating as far back as 1897.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Knapsack problems appear in real-world decision-making processes in a wide variety of fields, such as finding the least wasteful way to cut raw materials, selection of investments and portfolios, selection of assets for asset-backed securitization, and generating keys for the Merkle–Hellman and other knapsack cryptosystems.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "One early application of knapsack algorithms was in the construction and scoring of tests in which the test-takers have a choice as to which questions they answer. For small examples, it is a fairly simple process to provide the test-takers with such a choice. For example, if an exam contains 12 questions each worth 10 points, the test-taker need only answer 10 questions to achieve a maximum possible score of 100 points. However, on tests with a heterogeneous distribution of point values, it is more difficult to provide choices. Feuerman and Weiss proposed a system in which students are given a heterogeneous test with a total of 125 possible points. The students are asked to answer all of the questions to the best of their abilities. Of the possible subsets of problems whose total point values add up to 100, a knapsack algorithm would determine which subset gives each student the highest possible score.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "A 1999 study of the Stony Brook University Algorithm Repository showed that, out of 75 algorithmic problems related to the field of combinatorial algorithms and algorithm engineering, the knapsack problem was the 19th most popular and the third most needed after suffix trees and the bin packing problem.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The most common problem being solved is the 0-1 knapsack problem, which restricts the number x i {\\displaystyle x_{i}} of copies of each kind of item to zero or one. Given a set of n {\\displaystyle n} items numbered from 1 up to n {\\displaystyle n} , each with a weight w i {\\displaystyle w_{i}} and a value v i {\\displaystyle v_{i}} , along with a maximum weight capacity W {\\displaystyle W} ,",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Here x i {\\displaystyle x_{i}} represents the number of instances of item i {\\displaystyle i} to include in the knapsack. Informally, the problem is to maximize the sum of the values of the items in the knapsack so that the sum of the weights is less than or equal to the knapsack's capacity.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The bounded knapsack problem (BKP) removes the restriction that there is only one of each item, but restricts the number x i {\\displaystyle x_{i}} of copies of each kind of item to a maximum non-negative integer value c {\\displaystyle c} :",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The unbounded knapsack problem (UKP) places no upper bound on the number of copies of each kind of item and can be formulated as above except that the only restriction on x i {\\displaystyle x_{i}} is that it is a non-negative integer.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "One example of the unbounded knapsack problem is given using the figure shown at the beginning of this article and the text \"if any number of each book is available\" in the caption of that figure.",
"title": "Definition"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "The knapsack problem is interesting from the perspective of computer science for many reasons:",
"title": "Computational complexity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "There is a link between the \"decision\" and \"optimization\" problems in that if there exists a polynomial algorithm that solves the \"decision\" problem, then one can find the maximum value for the optimization problem in polynomial time by applying this algorithm iteratively while increasing the value of k. On the other hand, if an algorithm finds the optimal value of the optimization problem in polynomial time, then the decision problem can be solved in polynomial time by comparing the value of the solution output by this algorithm with the value of k. Thus, both versions of the problem are of similar difficulty.",
"title": "Computational complexity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "One theme in research literature is to identify what the \"hard\" instances of the knapsack problem look like, or viewed another way, to identify what properties of instances in practice might make them more amenable than their worst-case NP-complete behaviour suggests. The goal in finding these \"hard\" instances is for their use in public key cryptography systems, such as the Merkle-Hellman knapsack cryptosystem. More generally, better understanding of the structure of the space of instances of an optimization problem helps to advance the study of the particular problem and can improve algorithm selection.",
"title": "Computational complexity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Furthermore, notable is the fact that the hardness of the knapsack problem depends on the form of the input. If the weights and profits are given as integers, it is weakly NP-complete, while it is strongly NP-complete if the weights and profits are given as rational numbers. However, in the case of rational weights and profits it still admits a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme.",
"title": "Computational complexity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The NP-hardness of the Knapsack problem relates to computational models in which the size of integers matters (such as the Turing machine). In contrast, decision trees count each decision as a single step. Dobkin and Lipton show an 1 2 n 2 {\\displaystyle {1 \\over 2}n^{2}} lower bound on linear decision trees for the knapsack problem, that is, trees where decision nodes test the sign of affine functions. This was generalized to algebraic decision trees by Steele and Yao. If the elements in the problem are real numbers or rationals, the decision-tree lower bound extends to the real random-access machine model with an instruction set that includes addition, subtraction and multiplication of real numbers, as well as comparison and either division or remaindering (\"floor\"). This model covers more algorithms than the algebraic decision-tree model, as it encompasses algorithms that use indexing into tables. However, in this model all program steps are counted, not just decisions. An upper bound for a decision-tree model was given by Meyer auf der Heide who showed that for every n there exists an O(n)-deep linear decision tree that solves the subset-sum problem with n items. Note that this does not imply any upper bound for an algorithm that should solve the problem for any given n.",
"title": "Computational complexity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Several algorithms are available to solve knapsack problems, based on the dynamic programming approach, the branch and bound approach or hybridizations of both approaches.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "The unbounded knapsack problem (UKP) places no restriction on the number of copies of each kind of item. Besides, here we assume that x i > 0 {\\displaystyle x_{i}>0}",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Observe that m [ w ] {\\displaystyle m[w]} has the following properties:",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "1. m [ 0 ] = 0 {\\displaystyle m[0]=0\\,\\!} (the sum of zero items, i.e., the summation of the empty set).",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "2. m [ w ] = max ( v 1 + m [ w − w 1 ] , v 2 + m [ w − w 2 ] , . . . , v n + m [ w − w n ] ) {\\displaystyle m[w]=\\max(v_{1}+m[w-w_{1}],v_{2}+m[w-w_{2}],...,v_{n}+m[w-w_{n}])} , w i ≤ w {\\displaystyle w_{i}\\leq w} , where v i {\\displaystyle v_{i}} is the value of the i {\\displaystyle i} -th kind of item.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "The second property needs to be explained in detail. During the process of the running of this method, how do we get the weight w {\\displaystyle w} ? There are only i {\\displaystyle i} ways and the previous weights are w − w 1 , w − w 2 , . . . , w − w i {\\displaystyle w-w_{1},w-w_{2},...,w-w_{i}} where there are total i {\\displaystyle i} kinds of different item (by saying different, we mean that the weight and the value are not completely the same). If we know each value of these i {\\displaystyle i} items and the related maximum value previously, we just compare them to each other and get the maximum value ultimately and we are done.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "Here the maximum of the empty set is taken to be zero. Tabulating the results from m [ 0 ] {\\displaystyle m[0]} up through m [ W ] {\\displaystyle m[W]} gives the solution. Since the calculation of each m [ w ] {\\displaystyle m[w]} involves examining at most n {\\displaystyle n} items, and there are at most W {\\displaystyle W} values of m [ w ] {\\displaystyle m[w]} to calculate, the running time of the dynamic programming solution is O ( n W ) {\\displaystyle O(nW)} . Dividing w 1 , w 2 , … , w n , W {\\displaystyle w_{1},\\,w_{2},\\,\\ldots ,\\,w_{n},\\,W} by their greatest common divisor is a way to improve the running time.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Even if P≠NP, the O ( n W ) {\\displaystyle O(nW)} complexity does not contradict the fact that the knapsack problem is NP-complete, since W {\\displaystyle W} , unlike n {\\displaystyle n} , is not polynomial in the length of the input to the problem. The length of the W {\\displaystyle W} input to the problem is proportional to the number of bits in W {\\displaystyle W} , log W {\\displaystyle \\log W} , not to W {\\displaystyle W} itself. However, since this runtime is pseudopolynomial, this makes the (decision version of the) knapsack problem a weakly NP-complete problem.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "A similar dynamic programming solution for the 0-1 knapsack problem also runs in pseudo-polynomial time. Assume w 1 , w 2 , … , w n , W {\\displaystyle w_{1},\\,w_{2},\\,\\ldots ,\\,w_{n},\\,W} are strictly positive integers. Define m [ i , w ] {\\displaystyle m[i,w]} to be the maximum value that can be attained with weight less than or equal to w {\\displaystyle w} using items up to i {\\displaystyle i} (first i {\\displaystyle i} items).",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "We can define m [ i , w ] {\\displaystyle m[i,w]} recursively as follows: (Definition A)",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "The solution can then be found by calculating m [ n , W ] {\\displaystyle m[n,W]} . To do this efficiently, we can use a table to store previous computations.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The following is pseudocode for the dynamic program:",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "This solution will therefore run in O ( n W ) {\\displaystyle O(nW)} time and O ( n W ) {\\displaystyle O(nW)} space. (If we only need the value m[n,W], we can modify the code so that the amount of memory required is O(W) which stores the recent two lines of the array \"m\".)",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "However, if we take it a step or two further, we should know that the method will run in the time between O ( n W ) {\\displaystyle O(nW)} and O ( 2 n ) {\\displaystyle O(2^{n})} . From Definition A, we know that there is no need to compute all the weights when the number of items and the items themselves that we chose are fixed. That is to say, the program above computes more than necessary because the weight changes from 0 to W often. From this perspective, we can program this method so that it runs recursively.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "For example, there are 10 different items and the weight limit is 67. So,",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "If you use above method to compute for m ( 10 , 67 ) {\\displaystyle m(10,67)} , you will get this, excluding calls that produce m ( i , j ) = 0 {\\displaystyle m(i,j)=0} :",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Besides, we can break the recursion and convert it into a tree. Then we can cut some leaves and use parallel computing to expedite the running of this method.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "To find the actual subset of items, rather than just their total value, we can run this after running the function above:",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Another algorithm for 0-1 knapsack, discovered in 1974 and sometimes called \"meet-in-the-middle\" due to parallels to a similarly named algorithm in cryptography, is exponential in the number of different items but may be preferable to the DP algorithm when W {\\displaystyle W} is large compared to n. In particular, if the w i {\\displaystyle w_{i}} are nonnegative but not integers, we could still use the dynamic programming algorithm by scaling and rounding (i.e. using fixed-point arithmetic), but if the problem requires d {\\displaystyle d} fractional digits of precision to arrive at the correct answer, W {\\displaystyle W} will need to be scaled by 10 d {\\displaystyle 10^{d}} , and the DP algorithm will require O ( W 10 d ) {\\displaystyle O(W10^{d})} space and O ( n W 10 d ) {\\displaystyle O(nW10^{d})} time.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The algorithm takes O ( 2 n / 2 ) {\\displaystyle O(2^{n/2})} space, and efficient implementations of step 3 (for instance, sorting the subsets of B by weight, discarding subsets of B which weigh more than other subsets of B of greater or equal value, and using binary search to find the best match) result in a runtime of O ( n 2 n / 2 ) {\\displaystyle O(n2^{n/2})} . As with the meet in the middle attack in cryptography, this improves on the O ( n 2 n ) {\\displaystyle O(n2^{n})} runtime of a naive brute force approach (examining all subsets of { 1... n } {\\displaystyle \\{1...n\\}} ), at the cost of using exponential rather than constant space (see also baby-step giant-step). The current state of the art improvement to the meet-in-the-middle algorithm, using insights from Schroeppel and Shamir's Algorithm for Subset Sum, provides as a corollary a randomized algorithm for Knapsack which preserves the O ∗ ( 2 n / 2 ) {\\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/2})} (up to polynomial factors) running time and reduces the space requirements to O ∗ ( 2 0.249999 n ) {\\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{0.249999n})} (see Corollary 1.4). In contrast, the best known deterministic algorithm runs in O ∗ ( 2 n / 2 ) {\\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/2})} time with a slightly worse space complexity of O ∗ ( 2 n / 4 ) {\\displaystyle O^{*}(2^{n/4})} .",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "As for most NP-complete problems, it may be enough to find workable solutions even if they are not optimal. Preferably, however, the approximation comes with a guarantee of the difference between the value of the solution found and the value of the optimal solution.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "As with many useful but computationally complex algorithms, there has been substantial research on creating and analyzing algorithms that approximate a solution. The knapsack problem, though NP-Hard, is one of a collection of algorithms that can still be approximated to any specified degree. This means that the problem has a polynomial time approximation scheme. To be exact, the knapsack problem has a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS).",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "George Dantzig proposed a greedy approximation algorithm to solve the unbounded knapsack problem. His version sorts the items in decreasing order of value per unit of weight, v 1 / w 1 ≥ ⋯ ≥ v n / w n {\\displaystyle v_{1}/w_{1}\\geq \\cdots \\geq v_{n}/w_{n}} . It then proceeds to insert them into the sack, starting with as many copies as possible of the first kind of item until there is no longer space in the sack for more. Provided that there is an unlimited supply of each kind of item, if m {\\displaystyle m} is the maximum value of items that fit into the sack, then the greedy algorithm is guaranteed to achieve at least a value of m / 2 {\\displaystyle m/2} .",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "For the bounded problem, where the supply of each kind of item is limited, the above algorithm may be far from optimal. Nevertheless, a simple modification allows us to solve this case: Assume for simplicity that all items individually fit in the sack ( w i ≤ W {\\displaystyle w_{i}\\leq W} for all i {\\displaystyle i} ). Construct a solution S 1 {\\displaystyle S_{1}} by packing items greedily as long as possible, i.e. S 1 = { 1 , … , k } {\\displaystyle S_{1}=\\left\\{1,\\ldots ,k\\right\\}} where k = max 1 ≤ k ′ ≤ n ∑ i = 1 k ′ w i ≤ W {\\displaystyle k=\\textstyle \\max _{1\\leq k'\\leq n}\\textstyle \\sum _{i=1}^{k'}w_{i}\\leq W} . Furthermore, construct a second solution S 2 = { k + 1 } {\\displaystyle S_{2}=\\left\\{k+1\\right\\}} containing the first item that did not fit. Since S 1 ∪ S 2 {\\displaystyle S_{1}\\cup S_{2}} provides an upper bound for the LP relaxation of the problem, one of the sets must have value at least m / 2 {\\displaystyle m/2} ; we thus return whichever of S 1 {\\displaystyle S_{1}} and S 2 {\\displaystyle S_{2}} has better value to obtain a 1 / 2 {\\displaystyle 1/2} -approximation.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "It can be shown that the average performance converges to the optimal solution in distribution at the error rate n − 1 / 2 {\\displaystyle n^{-1/2}}",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "The fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the knapsack problem takes advantage of the fact that the reason the problem has no known polynomial time solutions is because the profits associated with the items are not restricted. If one rounds off some of the least significant digits of the profit values then they will be bounded by a polynomial and 1/ε where ε is a bound on the correctness of the solution. This restriction then means that an algorithm can find a solution in polynomial time that is correct within a factor of (1-ε) of the optimal solution.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Theorem: The set S ′ {\\displaystyle S'} computed by the algorithm above satisfies p r o f i t ( S ′ ) ≥ ( 1 − ε ) ⋅ p r o f i t ( S ∗ ) {\\displaystyle \\mathrm {profit} (S')\\geq (1-\\varepsilon )\\cdot \\mathrm {profit} (S^{*})} , where S ∗ {\\displaystyle S^{*}} is an optimal solution.",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Solving the unbounded knapsack problem can be made easier by throwing away items which will never be needed. For a given item i {\\displaystyle i} , suppose we could find a set of items J {\\displaystyle J} such that their total weight is less than the weight of i {\\displaystyle i} , and their total value is greater than the value of i {\\displaystyle i} . Then i {\\displaystyle i} cannot appear in the optimal solution, because we could always improve any potential solution containing i {\\displaystyle i} by replacing i {\\displaystyle i} with the set J {\\displaystyle J} . Therefore, we can disregard the i {\\displaystyle i} -th item altogether. In such cases, J {\\displaystyle J} is said to dominate i {\\displaystyle i} . (Note that this does not apply to bounded knapsack problems, since we may have already used up the items in J {\\displaystyle J} .)",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Finding dominance relations allows us to significantly reduce the size of the search space. There are several different types of dominance relations, which all satisfy an inequality of the form:",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "∑ j ∈ J w j x j ≤ α w i {\\displaystyle \\qquad \\sum _{j\\in J}w_{j}\\,x_{j}\\ \\leq \\alpha \\,w_{i}} , and ∑ j ∈ J v j x j ≥ α v i {\\displaystyle \\sum _{j\\in J}v_{j}\\,x_{j}\\ \\geq \\alpha \\,v_{i}\\,} for some x ∈ Z + n {\\displaystyle x\\in Z_{+}^{n}}",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "where α ∈ Z + , J ⊊ N {\\displaystyle \\alpha \\in Z_{+}\\,,J\\subsetneq N} and i ∉ J {\\displaystyle i\\not \\in J} . The vector x {\\displaystyle x} denotes the number of copies of each member of J {\\displaystyle J} .",
"title": "Solving"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "There are many variations of the knapsack problem that have arisen from the vast number of applications of the basic problem. The main variations occur by changing the number of some problem parameter such as the number of items, number of objectives, or even the number of knapsacks.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "This variation changes the goal of the individual filling the knapsack. Instead of one objective, such as maximizing the monetary profit, the objective could have several dimensions. For example, there could be environmental or social concerns as well as economic goals. Problems frequently addressed include portfolio and transportation logistics optimizations.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "As an example, suppose you ran a cruise ship. You have to decide how many famous comedians to hire. This boat can handle no more than one ton of passengers and the entertainers must weigh less than 1000 lbs. Each comedian has a weight, brings in business based on their popularity and asks for a specific salary. In this example, you have multiple objectives. You want, of course, to maximize the popularity of your entertainers while minimizing their salaries. Also, you want to have as many entertainers as possible.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In this variation, the weight of knapsack item i {\\displaystyle i} is given by a D-dimensional vector w i ¯ = ( w i 1 , … , w i D ) {\\displaystyle {\\overline {w_{i}}}=(w_{i1},\\ldots ,w_{iD})} and the knapsack has a D-dimensional capacity vector ( W 1 , … , W D ) {\\displaystyle (W_{1},\\ldots ,W_{D})} . The target is to maximize the sum of the values of the items in the knapsack so that the sum of weights in each dimension d {\\displaystyle d} does not exceed W d {\\displaystyle W_{d}} .",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Multi-dimensional knapsack is computationally harder than knapsack; even for D = 2 {\\displaystyle D=2} , the problem does not have EPTAS unless P = {\\displaystyle =} NP. However, the algorithm in is shown to solve sparse instances efficiently. An instance of multi-dimensional knapsack is sparse if there is a set J = { 1 , 2 , … , m } {\\displaystyle J=\\{1,2,\\ldots ,m\\}} for m < D {\\displaystyle m<D} such that for every knapsack item i {\\displaystyle i} , ∃ z > m {\\displaystyle \\exists z>m} such that ∀ j ∈ J ∪ { z } , w i j ≥ 0 {\\displaystyle \\forall j\\in J\\cup \\{z\\},\\ w_{ij}\\geq 0} and ∀ y ∉ J ∪ { z } , w i y = 0 {\\displaystyle \\forall y\\notin J\\cup \\{z\\},w_{iy}=0} . Such instances occur, for example, when scheduling packets in a wireless network with relay nodes. The algorithm from also solves sparse instances of the multiple choice variant, multiple-choice multi-dimensional knapsack.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "The IHS (Increasing Height Shelf) algorithm is optimal for 2D knapsack (packing squares into a two-dimensional unit size square): when there are at most five square in an optimal packing.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "This variation is similar to the Bin Packing Problem. It differs from the Bin Packing Problem in that a subset of items can be selected, whereas, in the Bin Packing Problem, all items have to be packed to certain bins. The concept is that there are multiple knapsacks. This may seem like a trivial change, but it is not equivalent to adding to the capacity of the initial knapsack. This variation is used in many loading and scheduling problems in Operations Research and has a Polynomial-time approximation scheme.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The quadratic knapsack problem maximizes a quadratic objective function subject to binary and linear capacity constraints. The problem was introduced by Gallo, Hammer, and Simeone in 1980, however the first treatment of the problem dates back to Witzgall in 1975.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "The subset sum problem is a special case of the decision and 0-1 problems where each kind of item, the weight equals the value: w i = v i {\\displaystyle w_{i}=v_{i}} . In the field of cryptography, the term knapsack problem is often used to refer specifically to the subset sum problem. The subset sum problem is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "A generalization of subset sum problem is called multiple subset-sum problem, in which multiple bins exist with the same capacity. It has been shown that the generalization does not have an FPTAS.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "In the geometric knapsack problem, there is a set of rectangles with different values, and a rectangular knapsack. The goal is to pack the largest possible value into the knapsack.",
"title": "Variations"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
The knapsack problem is the following problem in combinatorial optimization: It derives its name from the problem faced by someone who is constrained by a fixed-size knapsack and must fill it with the most valuable items. The problem often arises in resource allocation where the decision-makers have to choose from a set of non-divisible projects or tasks under a fixed budget or time constraint, respectively. The knapsack problem has been studied for more than a century, with early works dating as far back as 1897.
|
2001-10-12T11:39:39Z
|
2023-11-30T04:59:02Z
|
[
"Template:Cite book",
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"Template:Annotated link",
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem
|
16,976 |
Kernite
|
Kernite, also known as rasorite, is a hydrated sodium borate hydroxide mineral with formula Na2B4O6(OH)2·3H2O. It is a colorless to white mineral crystallizing in the monoclinic crystal system typically occurring as prismatic to acicular crystals or granular masses. It is relatively soft with Mohs hardness of 2.5 to 3 and light with a specific gravity of 1.91. It exhibits perfect cleavage and a brittle fracture.
Kernite is soluble in cold water and alters to tincalconite when it dehydrates. It undergoes a non-reversible alteration to metakernite (Na2B4O7·5H2O) when heated to above 100 °C.
The mineral occurs in sedimentary evaporite deposits in arid regions.
Kernite was discovered in 1926 in eastern Kern County, in Southern California, and later renamed after the county. The location was the US Borax Mine at Boron in the western Mojave Desert. This type material is stored at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.
The Kern County mine was the only known source of the mineral for a period of time. More recently, kernite is mined in Argentina and Turkey.
The largest documented, single crystal of kernite measured 2.44 x 0.9 x 0.9 m and weighed ~3.8 tons.
Kernite is used to produce borax which can be used in a variety of soaps.
Media related to Kernite at Wikimedia Commons
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kernite, also known as rasorite, is a hydrated sodium borate hydroxide mineral with formula Na2B4O6(OH)2·3H2O. It is a colorless to white mineral crystallizing in the monoclinic crystal system typically occurring as prismatic to acicular crystals or granular masses. It is relatively soft with Mohs hardness of 2.5 to 3 and light with a specific gravity of 1.91. It exhibits perfect cleavage and a brittle fracture.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kernite is soluble in cold water and alters to tincalconite when it dehydrates. It undergoes a non-reversible alteration to metakernite (Na2B4O7·5H2O) when heated to above 100 °C.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The mineral occurs in sedimentary evaporite deposits in arid regions.",
"title": "Occurrence and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Kernite was discovered in 1926 in eastern Kern County, in Southern California, and later renamed after the county. The location was the US Borax Mine at Boron in the western Mojave Desert. This type material is stored at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.",
"title": "Occurrence and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The Kern County mine was the only known source of the mineral for a period of time. More recently, kernite is mined in Argentina and Turkey.",
"title": "Occurrence and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The largest documented, single crystal of kernite measured 2.44 x 0.9 x 0.9 m and weighed ~3.8 tons.",
"title": "Occurrence and history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kernite is used to produce borax which can be used in a variety of soaps.",
"title": "Uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Media related to Kernite at Wikimedia Commons",
"title": "References"
}
] |
Kernite, also known as rasorite, is a hydrated sodium borate hydroxide mineral with formula Na2B4O6(OH)2·3H2O. It is a colorless to white mineral crystallizing in the monoclinic crystal system typically occurring as prismatic to acicular crystals or granular masses. It is relatively soft with Mohs hardness of 2.5 to 3 and light with a specific gravity of 1.91. It exhibits perfect cleavage and a brittle fracture. Kernite is soluble in cold water and alters to tincalconite when it dehydrates. It undergoes a non-reversible alteration to metakernite (Na2B4O7·5H2O) when heated to above 100 °C.
|
2023-05-08T06:01:47Z
|
[
"Template:Infobox mineral",
"Template:Chem",
"Template:Citation needed",
"Template:Reflist",
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"Template:-"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernite
|
|
16,978 |
Ketoprofen
|
Ketoprofen is one of the propionic acid class of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) with analgesic and antipyretic effects. It acts by inhibiting the body's production of prostaglandin.
It was patented in 1967 and approved for medical use in 1980.
Ketoprofen is generally prescribed for arthritis-related inflammatory pains or severe toothaches that result in the inflammation of the gums.
Ketoprofen topical patches are being used for treatment of musculoskeletal pain.
Ketoprofen can also be used for treatment of some pain, especially nerve pain such as sciatica, postherpetic neuralgia and referred pain for radiculopathy, in the form of a cream, ointment, liquid, spray, or gel, which may also contain ketamine and lidocaine, along with other agents which may be useful, such as cyclobenzaprine, amitriptyline, acyclovir, gabapentin, orphenadrine and other drugs used as NSAIDs or adjuvant, atypical or potentiators for pain treatment.
Trials are going on for using this drug along with ibuprofen for management of lymphedema. Animal trial and some human trials have shown significant improvement over placebo control. Dr Stanley G Rockson, of Stanford University is leading these researches.
A 2013 systematic review indicated "The efficacy of orally administered ketoprofen in relieving moderate-severe pain and improving functional status and general condition was significantly better than that of ibuprofen and/or diclofenac." A 2017 Cochrane systematic review investigating ketoprofen as a single-dose by mouth in acute, moderate-to-severe postoperative pain concluded that its efficacy is equivalent to drugs such as ibuprofen and diclofenac.
There is evidence supporting topical ketoprofen for osteoarthritis but not other chronic musculoskeletal pain.
In October 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required the drug label to be updated for all nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications to describe the risk of kidney problems in fetuses that result in low amniotic fluid. They recommend avoiding NSAIDs in pregnant women at 20 weeks or later in pregnancy.
Ketoprofen undergoes metabolism in the liver via conjugation with glucuronic acid (glucuronidation) by UGT enzymes, hydroxylation of the benzoyl ring by the CYP3A4 and CYP2C9 enzymes, and reduction of its ketone moiety (a carbonyl functional group, i.e. with carbon-oxygen double bond) by carbonyl reducing enzymes (CREs). Ketoprofen is used for its antipyretic, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory properties by inhibiting cyclooxygenase-1 and -2 (COX-1 and COX-2) enzymes reversibly, which decreases production of proinflammatory prostaglandin precursors.
The patches have been shown to provide rapid and sustained delivery to underlying tissues without significantly increasing levels of drug concentration in the blood when compared to the traditional oral administration.
Ketoprofen has one stereogenic center in the side chain and hence exists as mirror-image twins. Majority of the profens are marketed as racemic mixtures. For most of the NSAIDs the pharmacological activity resides in the (S)-enantiomers with their (R)-enantiomer virtually inactive. An interesting observation about most profens including ketoprofen is that they undergo unidirectional metabolic inversion, chiral inversion, of the (R)- acid to its (S)-mirror-image version with no other change in the molecule. There have been concerns raised that Ketoprofen can break down into the parent Benzophenone molecule in skin exposed to strong summer or tropical UV light and this could pose a theoretical cancer risk. Given such a risk it is better to use other pain killers in such circumstances.
The earliest report of therapeutic use in humans is in 1972.
Brand names in Australia include Orudis and Oruvail. It is available in Japan in a transdermal patch Mohrus Tape, made by Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical. It is available in the UK as Ketoflam and Oruvail, in Ireland as Fastum Gel, in Estonia as Keto, Ketonal, and Fastum Gel, in Finland as Ketorin, Keto, Ketomex, and Orudis; in France as Profénid, Bi-Profénid, Toprec, and Ketum; in Italy as Ketodol, Fastum Gel, Lasonil, Orudis and Oki; in Poland as Ketonal, Ketonal active, Ketolek, in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia as Knavon and Ketonal; in Romania as Ketonal and Fastum Gel; in Mexico as Arthril; in Norway as Zon and Orudis; in Russia as ОКИ (OKI), Fastum Gel and Ketonal; in Spain as Actron and Fastum Gel; in Albania as Oki and Fastum Gel and in Venezuela as Ketoprofeno as an injectable solution of 100 mg and 150 mg capsules.
In some countries, the optically pure (S)-enantiomer (dexketoprofen) is available; its trometamol salt is said to be particularly rapidly reabsorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, having a rapid onset of effects.
Ketoprofen is a common NSAID, antipyretic, and analgesic used in horses and other equines. It is most commonly used for musculoskeletal pain, joint problems, and soft tissue injury, as well as laminitis. It is also used to control fevers and prevent endotoxemia. It is also used as a mild painkiller in smaller animals, generally following surgical procedures.
In horses, it is given at a dose of 2.2 mg/kg/day. Studies have shown that it does not inhibit 5-lipoxygenase and leukotriene B4, as originally claimed. It is therefore not considered superior to phenylbutazone as previously believed, although clinical signs of lameness are reduced with its use. In fact, phenylbutazone was shown superior to ketoprofen in cases of experimentally-induced synovitis when both drugs were used at labeled dosages.
Experiments have found ketoprofen, like diclofenac, is a veterinary drug causing lethal effects in red-headed vultures. Vultures feeding on the carcasses of recently treated livestock develop acute kidney failure within days of exposure.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Ketoprofen is one of the propionic acid class of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) with analgesic and antipyretic effects. It acts by inhibiting the body's production of prostaglandin.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "It was patented in 1967 and approved for medical use in 1980.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Ketoprofen is generally prescribed for arthritis-related inflammatory pains or severe toothaches that result in the inflammation of the gums.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Ketoprofen topical patches are being used for treatment of musculoskeletal pain.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Ketoprofen can also be used for treatment of some pain, especially nerve pain such as sciatica, postherpetic neuralgia and referred pain for radiculopathy, in the form of a cream, ointment, liquid, spray, or gel, which may also contain ketamine and lidocaine, along with other agents which may be useful, such as cyclobenzaprine, amitriptyline, acyclovir, gabapentin, orphenadrine and other drugs used as NSAIDs or adjuvant, atypical or potentiators for pain treatment.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Trials are going on for using this drug along with ibuprofen for management of lymphedema. Animal trial and some human trials have shown significant improvement over placebo control. Dr Stanley G Rockson, of Stanford University is leading these researches.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A 2013 systematic review indicated \"The efficacy of orally administered ketoprofen in relieving moderate-severe pain and improving functional status and general condition was significantly better than that of ibuprofen and/or diclofenac.\" A 2017 Cochrane systematic review investigating ketoprofen as a single-dose by mouth in acute, moderate-to-severe postoperative pain concluded that its efficacy is equivalent to drugs such as ibuprofen and diclofenac.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "There is evidence supporting topical ketoprofen for osteoarthritis but not other chronic musculoskeletal pain.",
"title": "Medical uses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In October 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) required the drug label to be updated for all nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medications to describe the risk of kidney problems in fetuses that result in low amniotic fluid. They recommend avoiding NSAIDs in pregnant women at 20 weeks or later in pregnancy.",
"title": "Adverse effects"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Ketoprofen undergoes metabolism in the liver via conjugation with glucuronic acid (glucuronidation) by UGT enzymes, hydroxylation of the benzoyl ring by the CYP3A4 and CYP2C9 enzymes, and reduction of its ketone moiety (a carbonyl functional group, i.e. with carbon-oxygen double bond) by carbonyl reducing enzymes (CREs). Ketoprofen is used for its antipyretic, analgesic, and anti-inflammatory properties by inhibiting cyclooxygenase-1 and -2 (COX-1 and COX-2) enzymes reversibly, which decreases production of proinflammatory prostaglandin precursors.",
"title": "Mechanism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "The patches have been shown to provide rapid and sustained delivery to underlying tissues without significantly increasing levels of drug concentration in the blood when compared to the traditional oral administration.",
"title": "Mechanism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Ketoprofen has one stereogenic center in the side chain and hence exists as mirror-image twins. Majority of the profens are marketed as racemic mixtures. For most of the NSAIDs the pharmacological activity resides in the (S)-enantiomers with their (R)-enantiomer virtually inactive. An interesting observation about most profens including ketoprofen is that they undergo unidirectional metabolic inversion, chiral inversion, of the (R)- acid to its (S)-mirror-image version with no other change in the molecule. There have been concerns raised that Ketoprofen can break down into the parent Benzophenone molecule in skin exposed to strong summer or tropical UV light and this could pose a theoretical cancer risk. Given such a risk it is better to use other pain killers in such circumstances.",
"title": "Mechanism"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "The earliest report of therapeutic use in humans is in 1972.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Brand names in Australia include Orudis and Oruvail. It is available in Japan in a transdermal patch Mohrus Tape, made by Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical. It is available in the UK as Ketoflam and Oruvail, in Ireland as Fastum Gel, in Estonia as Keto, Ketonal, and Fastum Gel, in Finland as Ketorin, Keto, Ketomex, and Orudis; in France as Profénid, Bi-Profénid, Toprec, and Ketum; in Italy as Ketodol, Fastum Gel, Lasonil, Orudis and Oki; in Poland as Ketonal, Ketonal active, Ketolek, in Serbia, Slovenia and Croatia as Knavon and Ketonal; in Romania as Ketonal and Fastum Gel; in Mexico as Arthril; in Norway as Zon and Orudis; in Russia as ОКИ (OKI), Fastum Gel and Ketonal; in Spain as Actron and Fastum Gel; in Albania as Oki and Fastum Gel and in Venezuela as Ketoprofeno as an injectable solution of 100 mg and 150 mg capsules.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In some countries, the optically pure (S)-enantiomer (dexketoprofen) is available; its trometamol salt is said to be particularly rapidly reabsorbed from the gastrointestinal tract, having a rapid onset of effects.",
"title": "Society and culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Ketoprofen is a common NSAID, antipyretic, and analgesic used in horses and other equines. It is most commonly used for musculoskeletal pain, joint problems, and soft tissue injury, as well as laminitis. It is also used to control fevers and prevent endotoxemia. It is also used as a mild painkiller in smaller animals, generally following surgical procedures.",
"title": "Veterinary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "In horses, it is given at a dose of 2.2 mg/kg/day. Studies have shown that it does not inhibit 5-lipoxygenase and leukotriene B4, as originally claimed. It is therefore not considered superior to phenylbutazone as previously believed, although clinical signs of lameness are reduced with its use. In fact, phenylbutazone was shown superior to ketoprofen in cases of experimentally-induced synovitis when both drugs were used at labeled dosages.",
"title": "Veterinary medicine"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Experiments have found ketoprofen, like diclofenac, is a veterinary drug causing lethal effects in red-headed vultures. Vultures feeding on the carcasses of recently treated livestock develop acute kidney failure within days of exposure.",
"title": "Veterinary medicine"
}
] |
Ketoprofen is one of the propionic acid class of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) with analgesic and antipyretic effects. It acts by inhibiting the body's production of prostaglandin. It was patented in 1967 and approved for medical use in 1980.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-26T18:46:47Z
|
[
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] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketoprofen
|
16,980 |
KY
|
KY or Ky may refer to:
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "KY or Ky may refer to:",
"title": ""
}
] |
KY or Ky may refer to:
|
2022-11-02T01:50:10Z
|
[
"Template:Lang",
"Template:Disambiguation",
"Template:Wiktionary",
"Template:TOC right"
] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KY
|
|
16,984 |
Korea Institute for Advanced Study
|
The Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) is an advanced research institute in South Korea. It is located on a 30-acre (12 ha) campus in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul.
KIAS was founded in 1996, aiming to become a world leading research institute where international elite scholars gather and dedicate to fundamental research in basic sciences. Currently, there are three schools in the institute: mathematics, physics, and computational sciences. As of 2016, the institute has 3 distinguished professors, 26 professors, and 133 research fellows.
As its name suggests, the institute was modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. KIAS is funded by the government and is a subordinate institute of KAIST.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) is an advanced research institute in South Korea. It is located on a 30-acre (12 ha) campus in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "KIAS was founded in 1996, aiming to become a world leading research institute where international elite scholars gather and dedicate to fundamental research in basic sciences. Currently, there are three schools in the institute: mathematics, physics, and computational sciences. As of 2016, the institute has 3 distinguished professors, 26 professors, and 133 research fellows.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "As its name suggests, the institute was modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. KIAS is funded by the government and is a subordinate institute of KAIST.",
"title": ""
}
] |
The Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) is an advanced research institute in South Korea. It is located on a 30-acre (12 ha) campus in Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul. KIAS was founded in 1996, aiming to become a world leading research institute where international elite scholars gather and dedicate to fundamental research in basic sciences. Currently, there are three schools in the institute: mathematics, physics, and computational sciences. As of 2016, the institute has 3 distinguished professors, 26 professors, and 133 research fellows. As its name suggests, the institute was modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. KIAS is funded by the government and is a subordinate institute of KAIST.
|
2002-02-25T15:43:11Z
|
2023-12-15T17:03:48Z
|
[
"Template:Distinguish",
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] |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korea_Institute_for_Advanced_Study
|
16,985 |
Kabuki
|
Kabuki (歌舞伎, かぶき) is a classical form of Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers.
Kabuki is thought to have originated in the early Edo period, when the art's founder, Izumo no Okuni, formed a female dance troupe that performed dances and light sketches in Kyoto. The art form later developed into its present all-male theatrical form after women were banned from performing in kabuki theatre in 1629. Kabuki developed throughout the late 17th century and reached its zenith in the mid-18th century.
In 2005, kabuki theatre was proclaimed by UNESCO as an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In 2008, it was inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The individual kanji that make up the word kabuki can be read as 'sing' (歌), 'dance' (舞), and 'skill' (伎). Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as 'the art of singing and dancing'. These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology. The kanji of 'skill' generally refers to a performer in kabuki theatre.
Since the word kabuki is believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning 'to lean' or 'to be out of the ordinary', the word kabuki can also be interpreted as 'avant-garde' or 'bizarre' theatre. The expression kabukimono (歌舞伎者) referred originally to those who were bizarrely dressed. It is often translated into English as 'strange things' or 'the crazy ones', and referred to the style of dress worn by gangs of samurai.
The history of kabuki began in 1603 when Izumo no Okuni, possibly a miko of Izumo-taisha, began performing with a troupe of female dancers a new style of dance drama, on a makeshift stage in the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto, at the very beginning of the Edo period, and Japan's rule by the Tokugawa shogunate, enforced by Tokugawa Ieyasu.
In the earliest forms of kabuki, female performers played both men and women in comic playlets about ordinary life. It did not take long for the style to become popular, and Okuni was asked to perform before the Imperial Court. In the wake of such success, rival troupes quickly formed, and kabuki was born as ensemble dance and drama performed by women.
Much of the appeal of kabuki in this era was due to the ribald, suggestive themes featured by many troupes; this appeal was further augmented by the fact that many performers were also involved in prostitution. For this reason, kabuki was also known as 'prostitute kabuki' (遊女歌舞妓) during this period.
Kabuki became a common form of entertainment in the red-light districts of Japan, especially in Yoshiwara, the registered red-light district in Edo. The widespread appeal of kabuki often meant that a diverse crowd of different social classes gathered to watch performances, a unique occurrence that happened nowhere else in the city of Edo. Kabuki theatres became well known as a place to both see and be seen in terms of fashion and style, as the audience—commonly comprising a number of socially low but economically wealthy merchants—typically used a performance as a way to feature the fashion trends.
As an art-form, kabuki also provided inventive new forms of entertainment, featuring new musical styles played on the shamisen, clothes and fashion often dramatic in appearance, famous actors and stories often intended to mirror current events. Performances typically lasted from morning until sunset, with surrounding teahouses providing meals, refreshments and place to socialise. The area surrounding kabuki theatres also featured a number of shops selling kabuki souvenirs.
Despite its popularity, the ruling shogunate held unfavorable views of kabuki performances. The crowd at a kabuki performance often mixed different social classes, and the social peacocking of the merchant classes, who controlled much of Japan's economy at the time, were perceived to have encroached upon the standing of the samurai classes, both in appearance and often wealth. In an effort to clamp down on kabuki's popularity, women's kabuki, known as onna-kabuki, was banned in 1629 for being too erotic. Following this ban, young boys began performing in wakashū-kabuki, which was also soon banned. Kabuki switched to adult male actors, called yaro-kabuki, in the mid-1600s. Adult male actors, however, continued to play both female and male characters, and kabuki retained its popularity, remaining a key element of the Edo period urban life-style.
Although kabuki was performed widely across Japan, the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za theatres became the most widely known and popular kabuki theatres, where some of the most successful kabuki performances were and still are held.
During the time period of 1628–1673, the modern version of all-male kabuki actors, a style of kabuki known as yarō-kabuki (lit., "young man kabuki"), was established, following the ban on women and young boys. Cross-dressing male actors, known as "onnagata" (lit., "woman role") or "oyama" took over previously female- or wakashu-acted roles. Young (adolescent) men were still preferred for women's roles due to their less obviously masculine appearance and the higher pitch of their voices. The roles of adolescent men in kabuki, known as wakashu, were also played by young men, often selected for their attractiveness; this became a common practice, and wakashu were often presented in an erotic context.
The focus of kabuki performances also increasingly began to emphasise drama alongside dance. However, the ribald nature of kabuki performances continued, with male actors also engaging in sex work for both female and male customers. Audiences frequently became rowdy, and brawls occasionally broke out, sometimes over the favors of a particularly popular or handsome actor, leading the shogunate to ban first onnagata and then wakashū roles for a short period of time; both bans were rescinded by 1652.
During the Genroku period, kabuki thrived, with the structure of kabuki plays formalising into the structure they are performed in today, alongside many other elements which eventually came to be recognised as a key aspect of kabuki tradition, such as conventional character tropes. Kabuki theater and ningyō jōruri, an elaborate form of puppet theater later known as bunraku, became closely associated with each other, mutually influencing the other's further development.
The famous playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, one of the first professional kabuki playwrights, produced several influential works during this time, though the piece usually acknowledged as his most significant, Sonezaki Shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), was originally written for bunraku. Like many bunraku plays, it was adapted for kabuki, eventually becoming popular enough to reportedly inspire a number of real-life "copycat" suicides, and leading to a government ban on shinju mono (plays about love suicides) in 1723.
Also during the Genroku period was the development of the mie style of posing, credited to kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō I, alongside the development of the mask-like kumadori makeup worn by kabuki actors in some plays.
In the mid-18th century, kabuki fell out of favor for a time, with bunraku taking its place as the premier form of stage entertainment among the lower social classes. This occurred partly because of the emergence of several skilled bunraku playwrights in that time. Little of note would occur in the further development of kabuki until the end of the century, when it began to reemerge in popularity.
In the 1840s, repeated periods of drought led to a series of fires affecting Edo, with kabuki theatres—traditionally made of wood—frequently burning down, forcing many to relocate. When the area that housed the Nakamura-za was completely destroyed in 1841, the shōgun refused to allow the theatre to be rebuilt, saying that it was against fire code.
The shogunate, mostly disapproving of the socialisation and trade that occurred in kabuki theatres between merchants, actors and prostitutes, took advantage of the fire crisis in the following year, forcing the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za out of the city limits and into Asakusa, a northern suburb of Edo. This was part of the larger Tenpō Reforms that the shogunate instituted starting in 1842 to restrict the overindulgence of pleasures. Actors, stagehands, and others associated with the performances were also forced to move as a result of the death of their livelihood; despite the move of everyone involved in kabuki performance, and many in the surrounding areas, to the new location of the theatres, the inconvenience of the distance led to a reduction in attendance. These factors, along with strict regulations, pushed much of kabuki "underground" in Edo, with performances changing locations to avoid the authorities.
The theatres' new location was called Saruwaka-chō, or Saruwaka-machi; the last thirty years of the Tokugawa shogunate's rule is often referred to as the "Saruwaka-machi period", and is well known for having produced some of the most exaggerated kabuki in Japanese history.
Saruwaka-machi became the new theatre district for the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za theatres. The district was located on the main street of Asakusa, which ran through the middle of the small city. The street was renamed after Saruwaka Kanzaburo, who initiated Edo kabuki in the Nakamura-za in 1624.
European artists began noticing Japanese theatrical performances and artwork, and many artists, such as Claude Monet, were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. This Western interest prompted Japanese artists to increase their depictions of daily life, including the depiction of theatres, brothels, main streets and so on. One artist, Utagawa Hiroshige, produced a series of prints based on Saruwaka from the Saruwaka-machi period in Asakusa.
Despite the revival of kabuki in another location, the relocation diminished the tradition's most abundant inspirations for costuming, make-up, and storylines. Ichikawa Kodanji IV was considered one of the most active and successful actors during the Saruwaka-machi period. Deemed unattractive, he mainly performed buyō, or dancing, in dramas written by Kawatake Mokuami, who also wrote during the Meiji era to follow. Kawatake Mokuami commonly wrote plays that depicted the common lives of the people of Edo. He introduced shichigo-cho (seven-and-five syllable meter) dialogue and music such as kiyomoto. His kabuki performances became quite popular once the Saruwaka-machi period ended and theatre returned to Edo; many of his works are still performed.
In 1868, the Tokugawa ceased to exist, with the restoration of the Emperor. Emperor Meiji was restored to power and moved from Kyoto to the new capital of Edo, or Tokyo, beginning the Meiji period. Kabuki once again returned to the pleasure quarters of Edo, and throughout the Meiji period became increasingly more radical, as modern styles of kabuki plays and performances emerged. Playwrights experimented with the introduction of new genres to kabuki, and introduced twists on traditional stories.
Beginning in 1868, enormous cultural changes, such as the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the elimination of the samurai class, and the opening of Japan to the West, helped to spark kabuki's re-emergence. Both actors and playwrights strove to improve the reputation of kabuki in the face of new foreign influence and amongst the upper classes, partially through adapting traditional styles to modern tastes. This endeavour would prove successful, with the Emperor sponsoring a kabuki performance on 21 April 1887.
After World War II, the occupying forces briefly banned kabuki, which had formed a strong base of support for Japan's war efforts since 1931. This ban was in conjunction with broader restrictions on media and art forms that the American military occupation instituted after WWII. However, by 1947 the ban on kabuki was rescinded, but censorship rules lingered.
The ensuing period of occupation following World War II posited a difficult time for kabuki; besides the war's physical impact and devastation upon the country, some schools of thought chose to reject both the styles and artforms of pre-war Japan, kabuki amongst them. Director Tetsuji Takechi's popular and innovative productions of kabuki classics at this time are credited with sparking new interest in kabuki in the Kansai region. Of the many popular young stars who performed with the Takechi Kabuki, Nakamura Ganjiro III (b. 1931) was the leading figure, first known as Nakamura Senjaku before taking his current name. It was this period of kabuki in Osaka that became known as the "Age of Senjaku" in his honor.
Today, kabuki is the most popular of the traditional styles of Japanese drama, with its star actors often appearing in television or film roles. Well-known onnagata actor Bandō Tamasaburō V has appeared in several non-kabuki plays and movies, often in the role of a woman.
Kabuki also appears in works of Japanese popular culture such as anime. In addition to the handful of major theatres in Tokyo and Kyoto, there are many smaller theatres in Osaka and throughout the countryside. The Ōshika Kabuki (大鹿歌舞伎) troupe, based in Ōshika, Nagano Prefecture, is one example.
Some local kabuki troupes today use female actors in onnagata roles. The Ichikawa Shōjo Kabuki Gekidan, an all-female troupe, debuted in 1953 to significant acclaim, though the majority of kabuki troupes have remained entirely-male.
The introduction of earphone guides in 1975, including an English version in 1982, helped broaden the artform's appeal. As a result, in 1991 the Kabuki-za, one of Tokyo's best known kabuki theaters, began year-round performances and, in 2005, began marketing kabuki cinema films. Kabuki troupes regularly tour Asia, Europe and America, and there have been several kabuki-themed productions of Western plays such as those of Shakespeare. Western playwrights and novelists have also experimented with kabuki themes, an example of which is Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi (2004). Writer Yukio Mishima pioneered and popularised the use of kabuki in modern settings and revived other traditional arts, such as Noh, adapting them to modern contexts. There have even been kabuki troupes established in countries outside Japan. For instance, in Australia, the Za Kabuki troupe at the Australian National University has performed a kabuki drama each year since 1976, the longest regular kabuki performance outside Japan.
In November 2002, a statue was erected in honor of kabuki's founder, Izumo no Okuni and to commemorate 400 years of kabuki's existence. Diagonally across from the Minami-za, the last remaining kabuki theater in Kyoto, it stands at the east end of a bridge (Shijō Ōhashi) crossing the Kamo River in Kyoto.
Kabuki was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in 2005.
While still maintaining most of the historical practices of kabuki, Ichikawa En-ō (市川猿翁) aimed to broaden its appeal by creating a new genre of kabuki productions called "Super Kabuki" (スーパー歌舞伎). With Yamato Takeru (ヤマトタケル) as the first Super Kabuki production to premiere in 1986, remakes of traditional plays and new contemporary creations have been brought to local theaters throughout the country, including anime-based productions such as Naruto or One Piece starting from 2014.
Super Kabuki has sparked controversy within the Japanese population regarding the extent of modification of the traditional art form. Some say that it has lost its 400-year history, while others consider the adaptations necessary for contemporary relevance. Regardless, since incorporating more advanced technology in the new stage sets, costumes, and lighting, Super Kabuki has regained interest from the young demographic.
In addition, Square Enix announced a Super Kabuki adaptation of Final Fantasy X collaborating with Tokyo Broadcasting System in 2022. Entitled Kinoshita Group presents New Kabuki Final Fantasy X and part of celebrations of the Final Fantasy franchise's 35th anniversary, it is scheduled to be performed at the IHI Stage Around Tokyo from March 4th to April 12th, 2023.
The kabuki stage features a projection called a hanamichi (花道, "flower path"), a walkway which extends into the audience and via which dramatic entrances and exits are made. Okuni also performed on a hanamichi stage with her entourage. The stage is used not only as a walkway or path to get to and from the main stage, but important scenes are also played on the stage.
Kabuki stages and theaters have steadily become more technologically sophisticated, and innovations including revolving stages and trap doors were introduced during the 18th century. A driving force has been the desire to manifest one frequent theme of kabuki theater, that of the sudden, dramatic revelation or transformation. A number of stage tricks, including actors' rapid appearance and disappearance, employ these innovations. The term keren (外連), often translated as "playing to the gallery", is sometimes used as a catch-all for these tricks. The hanamichi, and several innovations including revolving stage, seri and chunori have all contributed to kabuki. The hanamichi creates depth and both seri and chunori provide a vertical dimension.
Mawari-butai (revolving stage) developed in the Kyōhō era (1716–1735). The trick was originally accomplished by the on-stage pushing of a round, wheeled platform. Later a circular platform was embedded in the stage with wheels beneath it facilitating movement. The kuraten ("darkened revolve") technique involves lowering the stage lights during this transition. More commonly the lights are left on for akaten ("lighted revolve"), sometimes simultaneously performing the transitioning scenes for dramatic effect. This stage was first built in Japan in the early 18th century.
Seri refers to the stage "traps" that have been commonly employed in kabuki since the middle of the 18th century. These traps raise and lower actors or sets to the stage. Seridashi or seriage refers to trap(s) moving upward and serisage or serioroshi to traps descending. This technique is often used to lift an entire scene at once.
Chūnori (riding in mid-air) is a technique, which appeared toward the middle of the 19th century, by which an actor's costume is attached to wires and he is made to "fly" over the stage or certain parts of the auditorium. This is similar to the wire trick in the stage musical Peter Pan, in which Peter launches himself into the air. It is still one of the most popular keren (visual tricks) in kabuki today; major kabuki theaters, such as the National Theatre, Kabuki-za and Minami-za, are all equipped with chūnori installations.
Scenery changes are sometimes made mid-scene, while the actors remain on stage and the curtain stays open. This is sometimes accomplished by using a Hiki Dōgu, or "small wagon stage". This technique originated at the beginning of the 18th century, where scenery or actors move on or off stage on a wheeled platform. Also common are stagehands rushing onto the stage adding and removing props, backdrops and other scenery; these kuroko (黒子) are always dressed entirely in black and are traditionally considered invisible. Stagehands also assist in a variety of quick costume changes known as hayagawari ("quick change technique"). When a character's true nature is suddenly revealed, the devices of hikinuki and bukkaeri are often used. This involves layering one costume over another and having a stagehand pull the outer one off in front of the audience.
The curtain that shields the stage before the performance and during the breaks is in the traditional colours of black, red and green, in various order, or white instead of green, vertical stripes. The curtain consists of one piece and is pulled back to one side by a staff member by hand.
An additional outer curtain called doncho was not introduced until the Meiji era following the introduction of western influence. These are more ornate in their appearance and are woven. They depict the season in which the performance is taking place, often designed by renowned Nihonga artists.
Since feudal laws in 17th century Japan prohibited replicating the looks of samurai or nobility and the use of luxurious fabrics, the kabuki costumes were groundbreaking new designs to the general public, even setting trends that still exist today.
Although the earliest kabuki costumes have not been preserved, separate otoko and onnagata kabuki costumes today are made based on written records called ukiyo-e and in collaboration with those whose families have been in the kabuki industry for generations. The kimono the actors wear for their costumes are typically made with vibrant colors and multiple layers. Both otoko and onnagata wear hakama - pleated trousers – in some plays, and both use padding underneath their costumes to create the correct body shape for the outfit.
Kabuki makeup provides an element of style easily recognizable even by those unfamiliar with the art form. Rice powder is used to create the white oshiroi base for the characteristic stage makeup, and kumadori enhances or exaggerates facial lines to produce dramatic animal or supernatural masks. The color of the kumadori is an expression of the character's nature: red lines are used to indicate passion, heroism, righteousness, and other positive traits; blue or black, villainy, jealousy, and other negative traits; green, the supernatural; and purple, nobility.
Another special feature of kabuki costumes is the katsura, or the wig. Each actor has a different wig made for every role, constructed from a thin base of hand-beaten copper custom-made to fit the actor perfectly, and each wig is usually styled in a traditional manner. The hair used in the wigs is typically real human hair hand-sewn onto a habotai base, though some styles of wig require yak hair or horse hair.
The three main categories of kabuki play are jidaimono (時代物, historical or pre-Sengoku period stories), sewamono (世話物, "domestic" or post-Sengoku period stories), and shosagoto (所作事, "dance pieces").
Jidaimono, or history plays, are set within the context of major events in Japanese history. Strict censorship laws during the Edo period prohibited the representation of contemporary events and particularly prohibited criticising the shogunate or casting it in a bad light, although enforcement varied greatly over the years. Many shows were set in the context of the Genpei War of the 1180s, the Nanboku-chō Wars of the 1330s, or other historical events. Frustrating the censors, many shows used these historical settings as metaphors for contemporary events. Kanadehon Chūshingura, one of the most famous plays in the kabuki repertoire, serves as an excellent example; it is ostensibly set in the 1330s, though it actually depicts the contemporary (18th century) affair of the revenge of the 47 rōnin.
Unlike jidaimono, which generally focused upon the samurai class, sewamono focused primarily upon commoners, namely townspeople and peasants. Often referred to as "domestic plays" in English, sewamono generally related to themes of family drama and romance. Some of the most famous sewamono are the love suicide plays, adapted from works by the bunraku playwright Chikamatsu; these center on romantic couples who cannot be together in life due to various circumstances and who therefore decide to be together in death instead. Many if not most sewamono contain significant elements of this theme of societal pressures and limitations.
Shosagoto pieces place their emphasis on dance, which may be performed with or without dialogue, where dance can be used to convey emotion, character and plot. Quick costume change techniques may sometimes be employed in such pieces. Notable examples include Musume Dōjōji and Renjishi. Nagauta musicians may be seated in rows on stepped platforms behind the dancers.
Important elements of kabuki include the mie (見得), in which the actor holds a picturesque pose to establish his character. At this point his house name (yagō (屋号)) is sometimes heard in loud shout (kakegoe (掛け声)) from an expert audience member, serving both to express and enhance the audience's appreciation of the actor's achievement. An even greater compliment can be paid by shouting the name of the actor's father.
The main actor has to convey a wide variety of emotions between a fallen, drunkard person and someone who in reality is quite different since he is only faking his weakness, such as the character of Yuranosuke in Chūshingura. This is called hara-gei or "belly acting", which means he has to perform from within to change characters. It is technically difficult to perform and takes a long time to learn, but once mastered the audience takes up on the actor's emotion.
Emotions are also expressed through the colours of the costumes, a key element in kabuki. Gaudy and strong colours can convey foolish or joyful emotions, whereas severe or muted colours convey seriousness and focus.
Kabuki, like other forms of drama traditionally performed in Japan, was—and sometimes still is—performed in full-day programmes, with one play comprising a number of acts spanning the entire day. However, these plays—particularly sewamono—were commonly sequenced with acts from other plays in order to produce a full-day programme, as the individual acts in a kabuki play commonly functioned as stand-alone performances in and of themselves. Sewamono plays, in contrast, were generally not sequenced with acts from other plays, and genuinely would take the entire day to perform.
The structure of a full-day performance was derived largely from the conventions of both bunraku and Noh theatre. Chief amongst these was the concept of jo-ha-kyū (序破急), a pacing convention in theatre stating that the action of a play should start slow, speed up, and end quickly. The concept, elaborated on at length by master Noh playwright Zeami, governs not only the actions of the actors, but also the structure of the play, as well as the structure of scenes and plays within a day-long programme.
Nearly every full-length play occupies five acts. The first corresponds to jo, an auspicious and slow opening which introduces the audience to the characters and the plot. The next three acts correspond to ha, where events speed up, culminating almost always in a great moment of drama or tragedy in the third act, and possibly a battle in the second or fourth acts. The final act, corresponding to kyū, is almost always short, providing a quick and satisfying conclusion.
While many plays were written solely for kabuki, many others were taken from jōruri plays, Noh plays, folklore, or other performing traditions such as the oral tradition of the Tale of the Heike. While jōruri plays tend to have serious, emotionally dramatic, and organised plots, plays written specifically for kabuki generally have looser, more humorous plots.
One crucial difference between jōruri and kabuki is a difference in storytelling focus; whereas jōruri focuses on the story and on the chanter who recites it, kabuki has a greater focus on the actors themselves. A jōruri play may sacrifice the details of sets, puppets, or action in favor of the chanter, while kabuki is known to sacrifice drama and even the plot to highlight an actor's talents. It was not uncommon in kabuki to insert or remove individual scenes from a day's schedule in order to cater to an individual actor—either scenes he was famed for, or that featured him, would be inserted into a program without regard to plot continuity. Certain plays were also performed uncommonly as they required an actor to be proficient in a number of instruments, which would be played live onstage, a skill that few actors possessed.
Kabuki traditions in Edo and the Kyoto-Osaka region (Kamigata) differed; throughout the Edo period, Edo kabuki was defined by its extravagance, both in the appearance of its actors, their costumes, stage tricks and bold mie poses. In contrast, Kamigata kabuki focused on natural and realistic styles of acting. Only towards the end of the Edo period did the two styles begin to merge to any significant degree. Before this time, actors from different regions often failed to adjust their acting styles when performing elsewhere, leading to unsuccessful performance tours outside of their usual region of performance.
While there are many famous plays known today, many of the most famous were written in the mid-Edo period, and were originally written for bunraku theatre.
Every kabuki actor has a stage name, which is different from the name they were born with. These stage names, most often those of the actor's father, grandfather, or teacher, are passed down between generations of actors' lineages, and hold great honor and importance. Many names are associated with certain roles or acting styles, and the new possessor of each name must live up to these expectations; there is the feeling almost of the actor not only taking a name, but embodying the spirit, style, or skill of each actor to previously hold that name. Many actors will go through at least three names over the course of their career.
Shūmei (襲名, "name succession") are grand naming ceremonies held in kabuki theatres in front of the audience. Most often, a number of actors will participate in a single ceremony, taking on new stage-names. Their participation in a shūmei represents their passage into a new chapter of their performing careers.
Kabuki actors are typically part of a school of acting, or are associated with a particular theatre.
Since its beginning, kabuki has remained a significant piece of Japanese culture. The stories and actors have been recreated in many different art forms, including woodblock prints, books, magazines, oral storytelling, photography in later years, and others. Additionally, kabuki was and continues to be influenced by the books and stories circulating in Japan. In one such instance, the widely popular book Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, or Eight Dogs, was acted out in various episodes on the kabuki stage.
One important way the laboring class was able to enjoy kabuki performances outside of the stage was through home-brewed shows called Noson kabuki (の村歌舞伎, "village kabuki"). Also referred to as "amateur kabuki", these performances took place at the local level across Japan, but were most commonly held in the Gifu and Aichi prefectures. In Gifu Prefecture specifically, noson kabuki was a prominent feature of the annual autumn festival, with children's reenactments of kabuki performances taking place at Murakuni shrine for over 300 years.
Closer to the cultural epicenter of kabuki in Edo (later Tokyo), commoners had other methods to enjoy performances without attending the shows. Bunraku (文楽, puppet theatre) was a type of performance shorter in length and more affordable to the common class than kabuki. Bunraku performances were often based on plots used in kabuki, and the two styles shared common themes. Kabuki shinpō (歌舞伎新報, "Kabuki news") was another popular medium for kabuki consumption among commoners and elites alike. During the course of its publication, this magazine allowed those unable to attend performances to enjoy the liveliness of kabuki culture.
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[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kabuki (歌舞伎, かぶき) is a classical form of Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kabuki is thought to have originated in the early Edo period, when the art's founder, Izumo no Okuni, formed a female dance troupe that performed dances and light sketches in Kyoto. The art form later developed into its present all-male theatrical form after women were banned from performing in kabuki theatre in 1629. Kabuki developed throughout the late 17th century and reached its zenith in the mid-18th century.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "In 2005, kabuki theatre was proclaimed by UNESCO as an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In 2008, it was inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The individual kanji that make up the word kabuki can be read as 'sing' (歌), 'dance' (舞), and 'skill' (伎). Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as 'the art of singing and dancing'. These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology. The kanji of 'skill' generally refers to a performer in kabuki theatre.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Since the word kabuki is believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning 'to lean' or 'to be out of the ordinary', the word kabuki can also be interpreted as 'avant-garde' or 'bizarre' theatre. The expression kabukimono (歌舞伎者) referred originally to those who were bizarrely dressed. It is often translated into English as 'strange things' or 'the crazy ones', and referred to the style of dress worn by gangs of samurai.",
"title": "Etymology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The history of kabuki began in 1603 when Izumo no Okuni, possibly a miko of Izumo-taisha, began performing with a troupe of female dancers a new style of dance drama, on a makeshift stage in the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto, at the very beginning of the Edo period, and Japan's rule by the Tokugawa shogunate, enforced by Tokugawa Ieyasu.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "In the earliest forms of kabuki, female performers played both men and women in comic playlets about ordinary life. It did not take long for the style to become popular, and Okuni was asked to perform before the Imperial Court. In the wake of such success, rival troupes quickly formed, and kabuki was born as ensemble dance and drama performed by women.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Much of the appeal of kabuki in this era was due to the ribald, suggestive themes featured by many troupes; this appeal was further augmented by the fact that many performers were also involved in prostitution. For this reason, kabuki was also known as 'prostitute kabuki' (遊女歌舞妓) during this period.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "Kabuki became a common form of entertainment in the red-light districts of Japan, especially in Yoshiwara, the registered red-light district in Edo. The widespread appeal of kabuki often meant that a diverse crowd of different social classes gathered to watch performances, a unique occurrence that happened nowhere else in the city of Edo. Kabuki theatres became well known as a place to both see and be seen in terms of fashion and style, as the audience—commonly comprising a number of socially low but economically wealthy merchants—typically used a performance as a way to feature the fashion trends.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "As an art-form, kabuki also provided inventive new forms of entertainment, featuring new musical styles played on the shamisen, clothes and fashion often dramatic in appearance, famous actors and stories often intended to mirror current events. Performances typically lasted from morning until sunset, with surrounding teahouses providing meals, refreshments and place to socialise. The area surrounding kabuki theatres also featured a number of shops selling kabuki souvenirs.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Despite its popularity, the ruling shogunate held unfavorable views of kabuki performances. The crowd at a kabuki performance often mixed different social classes, and the social peacocking of the merchant classes, who controlled much of Japan's economy at the time, were perceived to have encroached upon the standing of the samurai classes, both in appearance and often wealth. In an effort to clamp down on kabuki's popularity, women's kabuki, known as onna-kabuki, was banned in 1629 for being too erotic. Following this ban, young boys began performing in wakashū-kabuki, which was also soon banned. Kabuki switched to adult male actors, called yaro-kabuki, in the mid-1600s. Adult male actors, however, continued to play both female and male characters, and kabuki retained its popularity, remaining a key element of the Edo period urban life-style.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Although kabuki was performed widely across Japan, the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za theatres became the most widely known and popular kabuki theatres, where some of the most successful kabuki performances were and still are held.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "During the time period of 1628–1673, the modern version of all-male kabuki actors, a style of kabuki known as yarō-kabuki (lit., \"young man kabuki\"), was established, following the ban on women and young boys. Cross-dressing male actors, known as \"onnagata\" (lit., \"woman role\") or \"oyama\" took over previously female- or wakashu-acted roles. Young (adolescent) men were still preferred for women's roles due to their less obviously masculine appearance and the higher pitch of their voices. The roles of adolescent men in kabuki, known as wakashu, were also played by young men, often selected for their attractiveness; this became a common practice, and wakashu were often presented in an erotic context.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "The focus of kabuki performances also increasingly began to emphasise drama alongside dance. However, the ribald nature of kabuki performances continued, with male actors also engaging in sex work for both female and male customers. Audiences frequently became rowdy, and brawls occasionally broke out, sometimes over the favors of a particularly popular or handsome actor, leading the shogunate to ban first onnagata and then wakashū roles for a short period of time; both bans were rescinded by 1652.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "During the Genroku period, kabuki thrived, with the structure of kabuki plays formalising into the structure they are performed in today, alongside many other elements which eventually came to be recognised as a key aspect of kabuki tradition, such as conventional character tropes. Kabuki theater and ningyō jōruri, an elaborate form of puppet theater later known as bunraku, became closely associated with each other, mutually influencing the other's further development.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "The famous playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, one of the first professional kabuki playwrights, produced several influential works during this time, though the piece usually acknowledged as his most significant, Sonezaki Shinjū (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki), was originally written for bunraku. Like many bunraku plays, it was adapted for kabuki, eventually becoming popular enough to reportedly inspire a number of real-life \"copycat\" suicides, and leading to a government ban on shinju mono (plays about love suicides) in 1723.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Also during the Genroku period was the development of the mie style of posing, credited to kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō I, alongside the development of the mask-like kumadori makeup worn by kabuki actors in some plays.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In the mid-18th century, kabuki fell out of favor for a time, with bunraku taking its place as the premier form of stage entertainment among the lower social classes. This occurred partly because of the emergence of several skilled bunraku playwrights in that time. Little of note would occur in the further development of kabuki until the end of the century, when it began to reemerge in popularity.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "In the 1840s, repeated periods of drought led to a series of fires affecting Edo, with kabuki theatres—traditionally made of wood—frequently burning down, forcing many to relocate. When the area that housed the Nakamura-za was completely destroyed in 1841, the shōgun refused to allow the theatre to be rebuilt, saying that it was against fire code.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The shogunate, mostly disapproving of the socialisation and trade that occurred in kabuki theatres between merchants, actors and prostitutes, took advantage of the fire crisis in the following year, forcing the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za out of the city limits and into Asakusa, a northern suburb of Edo. This was part of the larger Tenpō Reforms that the shogunate instituted starting in 1842 to restrict the overindulgence of pleasures. Actors, stagehands, and others associated with the performances were also forced to move as a result of the death of their livelihood; despite the move of everyone involved in kabuki performance, and many in the surrounding areas, to the new location of the theatres, the inconvenience of the distance led to a reduction in attendance. These factors, along with strict regulations, pushed much of kabuki \"underground\" in Edo, with performances changing locations to avoid the authorities.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The theatres' new location was called Saruwaka-chō, or Saruwaka-machi; the last thirty years of the Tokugawa shogunate's rule is often referred to as the \"Saruwaka-machi period\", and is well known for having produced some of the most exaggerated kabuki in Japanese history.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Saruwaka-machi became the new theatre district for the Nakamura-za, Ichimura-za and Kawarazaki-za theatres. The district was located on the main street of Asakusa, which ran through the middle of the small city. The street was renamed after Saruwaka Kanzaburo, who initiated Edo kabuki in the Nakamura-za in 1624.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "European artists began noticing Japanese theatrical performances and artwork, and many artists, such as Claude Monet, were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints. This Western interest prompted Japanese artists to increase their depictions of daily life, including the depiction of theatres, brothels, main streets and so on. One artist, Utagawa Hiroshige, produced a series of prints based on Saruwaka from the Saruwaka-machi period in Asakusa.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Despite the revival of kabuki in another location, the relocation diminished the tradition's most abundant inspirations for costuming, make-up, and storylines. Ichikawa Kodanji IV was considered one of the most active and successful actors during the Saruwaka-machi period. Deemed unattractive, he mainly performed buyō, or dancing, in dramas written by Kawatake Mokuami, who also wrote during the Meiji era to follow. Kawatake Mokuami commonly wrote plays that depicted the common lives of the people of Edo. He introduced shichigo-cho (seven-and-five syllable meter) dialogue and music such as kiyomoto. His kabuki performances became quite popular once the Saruwaka-machi period ended and theatre returned to Edo; many of his works are still performed.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "In 1868, the Tokugawa ceased to exist, with the restoration of the Emperor. Emperor Meiji was restored to power and moved from Kyoto to the new capital of Edo, or Tokyo, beginning the Meiji period. Kabuki once again returned to the pleasure quarters of Edo, and throughout the Meiji period became increasingly more radical, as modern styles of kabuki plays and performances emerged. Playwrights experimented with the introduction of new genres to kabuki, and introduced twists on traditional stories.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Beginning in 1868, enormous cultural changes, such as the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, the elimination of the samurai class, and the opening of Japan to the West, helped to spark kabuki's re-emergence. Both actors and playwrights strove to improve the reputation of kabuki in the face of new foreign influence and amongst the upper classes, partially through adapting traditional styles to modern tastes. This endeavour would prove successful, with the Emperor sponsoring a kabuki performance on 21 April 1887.",
"title": "Post-Meiji period kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "After World War II, the occupying forces briefly banned kabuki, which had formed a strong base of support for Japan's war efforts since 1931. This ban was in conjunction with broader restrictions on media and art forms that the American military occupation instituted after WWII. However, by 1947 the ban on kabuki was rescinded, but censorship rules lingered.",
"title": "Post-Meiji period kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The ensuing period of occupation following World War II posited a difficult time for kabuki; besides the war's physical impact and devastation upon the country, some schools of thought chose to reject both the styles and artforms of pre-war Japan, kabuki amongst them. Director Tetsuji Takechi's popular and innovative productions of kabuki classics at this time are credited with sparking new interest in kabuki in the Kansai region. Of the many popular young stars who performed with the Takechi Kabuki, Nakamura Ganjiro III (b. 1931) was the leading figure, first known as Nakamura Senjaku before taking his current name. It was this period of kabuki in Osaka that became known as the \"Age of Senjaku\" in his honor.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Today, kabuki is the most popular of the traditional styles of Japanese drama, with its star actors often appearing in television or film roles. Well-known onnagata actor Bandō Tamasaburō V has appeared in several non-kabuki plays and movies, often in the role of a woman.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Kabuki also appears in works of Japanese popular culture such as anime. In addition to the handful of major theatres in Tokyo and Kyoto, there are many smaller theatres in Osaka and throughout the countryside. The Ōshika Kabuki (大鹿歌舞伎) troupe, based in Ōshika, Nagano Prefecture, is one example.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Some local kabuki troupes today use female actors in onnagata roles. The Ichikawa Shōjo Kabuki Gekidan, an all-female troupe, debuted in 1953 to significant acclaim, though the majority of kabuki troupes have remained entirely-male.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "The introduction of earphone guides in 1975, including an English version in 1982, helped broaden the artform's appeal. As a result, in 1991 the Kabuki-za, one of Tokyo's best known kabuki theaters, began year-round performances and, in 2005, began marketing kabuki cinema films. Kabuki troupes regularly tour Asia, Europe and America, and there have been several kabuki-themed productions of Western plays such as those of Shakespeare. Western playwrights and novelists have also experimented with kabuki themes, an example of which is Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi (2004). Writer Yukio Mishima pioneered and popularised the use of kabuki in modern settings and revived other traditional arts, such as Noh, adapting them to modern contexts. There have even been kabuki troupes established in countries outside Japan. For instance, in Australia, the Za Kabuki troupe at the Australian National University has performed a kabuki drama each year since 1976, the longest regular kabuki performance outside Japan.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "In November 2002, a statue was erected in honor of kabuki's founder, Izumo no Okuni and to commemorate 400 years of kabuki's existence. Diagonally across from the Minami-za, the last remaining kabuki theater in Kyoto, it stands at the east end of a bridge (Shijō Ōhashi) crossing the Kamo River in Kyoto.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "Kabuki was inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists in 2005.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "While still maintaining most of the historical practices of kabuki, Ichikawa En-ō (市川猿翁) aimed to broaden its appeal by creating a new genre of kabuki productions called \"Super Kabuki\" (スーパー歌舞伎). With Yamato Takeru (ヤマトタケル) as the first Super Kabuki production to premiere in 1986, remakes of traditional plays and new contemporary creations have been brought to local theaters throughout the country, including anime-based productions such as Naruto or One Piece starting from 2014.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Super Kabuki has sparked controversy within the Japanese population regarding the extent of modification of the traditional art form. Some say that it has lost its 400-year history, while others consider the adaptations necessary for contemporary relevance. Regardless, since incorporating more advanced technology in the new stage sets, costumes, and lighting, Super Kabuki has regained interest from the young demographic.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In addition, Square Enix announced a Super Kabuki adaptation of Final Fantasy X collaborating with Tokyo Broadcasting System in 2022. Entitled Kinoshita Group presents New Kabuki Final Fantasy X and part of celebrations of the Final Fantasy franchise's 35th anniversary, it is scheduled to be performed at the IHI Stage Around Tokyo from March 4th to April 12th, 2023.",
"title": "Post-war to modern day kabuki"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The kabuki stage features a projection called a hanamichi (花道, \"flower path\"), a walkway which extends into the audience and via which dramatic entrances and exits are made. Okuni also performed on a hanamichi stage with her entourage. The stage is used not only as a walkway or path to get to and from the main stage, but important scenes are also played on the stage.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Kabuki stages and theaters have steadily become more technologically sophisticated, and innovations including revolving stages and trap doors were introduced during the 18th century. A driving force has been the desire to manifest one frequent theme of kabuki theater, that of the sudden, dramatic revelation or transformation. A number of stage tricks, including actors' rapid appearance and disappearance, employ these innovations. The term keren (外連), often translated as \"playing to the gallery\", is sometimes used as a catch-all for these tricks. The hanamichi, and several innovations including revolving stage, seri and chunori have all contributed to kabuki. The hanamichi creates depth and both seri and chunori provide a vertical dimension.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Mawari-butai (revolving stage) developed in the Kyōhō era (1716–1735). The trick was originally accomplished by the on-stage pushing of a round, wheeled platform. Later a circular platform was embedded in the stage with wheels beneath it facilitating movement. The kuraten (\"darkened revolve\") technique involves lowering the stage lights during this transition. More commonly the lights are left on for akaten (\"lighted revolve\"), sometimes simultaneously performing the transitioning scenes for dramatic effect. This stage was first built in Japan in the early 18th century.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Seri refers to the stage \"traps\" that have been commonly employed in kabuki since the middle of the 18th century. These traps raise and lower actors or sets to the stage. Seridashi or seriage refers to trap(s) moving upward and serisage or serioroshi to traps descending. This technique is often used to lift an entire scene at once.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Chūnori (riding in mid-air) is a technique, which appeared toward the middle of the 19th century, by which an actor's costume is attached to wires and he is made to \"fly\" over the stage or certain parts of the auditorium. This is similar to the wire trick in the stage musical Peter Pan, in which Peter launches himself into the air. It is still one of the most popular keren (visual tricks) in kabuki today; major kabuki theaters, such as the National Theatre, Kabuki-za and Minami-za, are all equipped with chūnori installations.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Scenery changes are sometimes made mid-scene, while the actors remain on stage and the curtain stays open. This is sometimes accomplished by using a Hiki Dōgu, or \"small wagon stage\". This technique originated at the beginning of the 18th century, where scenery or actors move on or off stage on a wheeled platform. Also common are stagehands rushing onto the stage adding and removing props, backdrops and other scenery; these kuroko (黒子) are always dressed entirely in black and are traditionally considered invisible. Stagehands also assist in a variety of quick costume changes known as hayagawari (\"quick change technique\"). When a character's true nature is suddenly revealed, the devices of hikinuki and bukkaeri are often used. This involves layering one costume over another and having a stagehand pull the outer one off in front of the audience.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "The curtain that shields the stage before the performance and during the breaks is in the traditional colours of black, red and green, in various order, or white instead of green, vertical stripes. The curtain consists of one piece and is pulled back to one side by a staff member by hand.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "An additional outer curtain called doncho was not introduced until the Meiji era following the introduction of western influence. These are more ornate in their appearance and are woven. They depict the season in which the performance is taking place, often designed by renowned Nihonga artists.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Since feudal laws in 17th century Japan prohibited replicating the looks of samurai or nobility and the use of luxurious fabrics, the kabuki costumes were groundbreaking new designs to the general public, even setting trends that still exist today.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Although the earliest kabuki costumes have not been preserved, separate otoko and onnagata kabuki costumes today are made based on written records called ukiyo-e and in collaboration with those whose families have been in the kabuki industry for generations. The kimono the actors wear for their costumes are typically made with vibrant colors and multiple layers. Both otoko and onnagata wear hakama - pleated trousers – in some plays, and both use padding underneath their costumes to create the correct body shape for the outfit.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Kabuki makeup provides an element of style easily recognizable even by those unfamiliar with the art form. Rice powder is used to create the white oshiroi base for the characteristic stage makeup, and kumadori enhances or exaggerates facial lines to produce dramatic animal or supernatural masks. The color of the kumadori is an expression of the character's nature: red lines are used to indicate passion, heroism, righteousness, and other positive traits; blue or black, villainy, jealousy, and other negative traits; green, the supernatural; and purple, nobility.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Another special feature of kabuki costumes is the katsura, or the wig. Each actor has a different wig made for every role, constructed from a thin base of hand-beaten copper custom-made to fit the actor perfectly, and each wig is usually styled in a traditional manner. The hair used in the wigs is typically real human hair hand-sewn onto a habotai base, though some styles of wig require yak hair or horse hair.",
"title": "Elements"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "The three main categories of kabuki play are jidaimono (時代物, historical or pre-Sengoku period stories), sewamono (世話物, \"domestic\" or post-Sengoku period stories), and shosagoto (所作事, \"dance pieces\").",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Jidaimono, or history plays, are set within the context of major events in Japanese history. Strict censorship laws during the Edo period prohibited the representation of contemporary events and particularly prohibited criticising the shogunate or casting it in a bad light, although enforcement varied greatly over the years. Many shows were set in the context of the Genpei War of the 1180s, the Nanboku-chō Wars of the 1330s, or other historical events. Frustrating the censors, many shows used these historical settings as metaphors for contemporary events. Kanadehon Chūshingura, one of the most famous plays in the kabuki repertoire, serves as an excellent example; it is ostensibly set in the 1330s, though it actually depicts the contemporary (18th century) affair of the revenge of the 47 rōnin.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Unlike jidaimono, which generally focused upon the samurai class, sewamono focused primarily upon commoners, namely townspeople and peasants. Often referred to as \"domestic plays\" in English, sewamono generally related to themes of family drama and romance. Some of the most famous sewamono are the love suicide plays, adapted from works by the bunraku playwright Chikamatsu; these center on romantic couples who cannot be together in life due to various circumstances and who therefore decide to be together in death instead. Many if not most sewamono contain significant elements of this theme of societal pressures and limitations.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Shosagoto pieces place their emphasis on dance, which may be performed with or without dialogue, where dance can be used to convey emotion, character and plot. Quick costume change techniques may sometimes be employed in such pieces. Notable examples include Musume Dōjōji and Renjishi. Nagauta musicians may be seated in rows on stepped platforms behind the dancers.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Important elements of kabuki include the mie (見得), in which the actor holds a picturesque pose to establish his character. At this point his house name (yagō (屋号)) is sometimes heard in loud shout (kakegoe (掛け声)) from an expert audience member, serving both to express and enhance the audience's appreciation of the actor's achievement. An even greater compliment can be paid by shouting the name of the actor's father.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "The main actor has to convey a wide variety of emotions between a fallen, drunkard person and someone who in reality is quite different since he is only faking his weakness, such as the character of Yuranosuke in Chūshingura. This is called hara-gei or \"belly acting\", which means he has to perform from within to change characters. It is technically difficult to perform and takes a long time to learn, but once mastered the audience takes up on the actor's emotion.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Emotions are also expressed through the colours of the costumes, a key element in kabuki. Gaudy and strong colours can convey foolish or joyful emotions, whereas severe or muted colours convey seriousness and focus.",
"title": "Performance"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Kabuki, like other forms of drama traditionally performed in Japan, was—and sometimes still is—performed in full-day programmes, with one play comprising a number of acts spanning the entire day. However, these plays—particularly sewamono—were commonly sequenced with acts from other plays in order to produce a full-day programme, as the individual acts in a kabuki play commonly functioned as stand-alone performances in and of themselves. Sewamono plays, in contrast, were generally not sequenced with acts from other plays, and genuinely would take the entire day to perform.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "The structure of a full-day performance was derived largely from the conventions of both bunraku and Noh theatre. Chief amongst these was the concept of jo-ha-kyū (序破急), a pacing convention in theatre stating that the action of a play should start slow, speed up, and end quickly. The concept, elaborated on at length by master Noh playwright Zeami, governs not only the actions of the actors, but also the structure of the play, as well as the structure of scenes and plays within a day-long programme.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Nearly every full-length play occupies five acts. The first corresponds to jo, an auspicious and slow opening which introduces the audience to the characters and the plot. The next three acts correspond to ha, where events speed up, culminating almost always in a great moment of drama or tragedy in the third act, and possibly a battle in the second or fourth acts. The final act, corresponding to kyū, is almost always short, providing a quick and satisfying conclusion.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "While many plays were written solely for kabuki, many others were taken from jōruri plays, Noh plays, folklore, or other performing traditions such as the oral tradition of the Tale of the Heike. While jōruri plays tend to have serious, emotionally dramatic, and organised plots, plays written specifically for kabuki generally have looser, more humorous plots.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "One crucial difference between jōruri and kabuki is a difference in storytelling focus; whereas jōruri focuses on the story and on the chanter who recites it, kabuki has a greater focus on the actors themselves. A jōruri play may sacrifice the details of sets, puppets, or action in favor of the chanter, while kabuki is known to sacrifice drama and even the plot to highlight an actor's talents. It was not uncommon in kabuki to insert or remove individual scenes from a day's schedule in order to cater to an individual actor—either scenes he was famed for, or that featured him, would be inserted into a program without regard to plot continuity. Certain plays were also performed uncommonly as they required an actor to be proficient in a number of instruments, which would be played live onstage, a skill that few actors possessed.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "Kabuki traditions in Edo and the Kyoto-Osaka region (Kamigata) differed; throughout the Edo period, Edo kabuki was defined by its extravagance, both in the appearance of its actors, their costumes, stage tricks and bold mie poses. In contrast, Kamigata kabuki focused on natural and realistic styles of acting. Only towards the end of the Edo period did the two styles begin to merge to any significant degree. Before this time, actors from different regions often failed to adjust their acting styles when performing elsewhere, leading to unsuccessful performance tours outside of their usual region of performance.",
"title": "Play structure and performance style"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "While there are many famous plays known today, many of the most famous were written in the mid-Edo period, and were originally written for bunraku theatre.",
"title": "Famous plays"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "Every kabuki actor has a stage name, which is different from the name they were born with. These stage names, most often those of the actor's father, grandfather, or teacher, are passed down between generations of actors' lineages, and hold great honor and importance. Many names are associated with certain roles or acting styles, and the new possessor of each name must live up to these expectations; there is the feeling almost of the actor not only taking a name, but embodying the spirit, style, or skill of each actor to previously hold that name. Many actors will go through at least three names over the course of their career.",
"title": "Actors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "Shūmei (襲名, \"name succession\") are grand naming ceremonies held in kabuki theatres in front of the audience. Most often, a number of actors will participate in a single ceremony, taking on new stage-names. Their participation in a shūmei represents their passage into a new chapter of their performing careers.",
"title": "Actors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "Kabuki actors are typically part of a school of acting, or are associated with a particular theatre.",
"title": "Actors"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "Since its beginning, kabuki has remained a significant piece of Japanese culture. The stories and actors have been recreated in many different art forms, including woodblock prints, books, magazines, oral storytelling, photography in later years, and others. Additionally, kabuki was and continues to be influenced by the books and stories circulating in Japan. In one such instance, the widely popular book Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, or Eight Dogs, was acted out in various episodes on the kabuki stage.",
"title": "Influence of kabuki on other art forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "One important way the laboring class was able to enjoy kabuki performances outside of the stage was through home-brewed shows called Noson kabuki (の村歌舞伎, \"village kabuki\"). Also referred to as \"amateur kabuki\", these performances took place at the local level across Japan, but were most commonly held in the Gifu and Aichi prefectures. In Gifu Prefecture specifically, noson kabuki was a prominent feature of the annual autumn festival, with children's reenactments of kabuki performances taking place at Murakuni shrine for over 300 years.",
"title": "Influence of kabuki on other art forms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Closer to the cultural epicenter of kabuki in Edo (later Tokyo), commoners had other methods to enjoy performances without attending the shows. Bunraku (文楽, puppet theatre) was a type of performance shorter in length and more affordable to the common class than kabuki. Bunraku performances were often based on plots used in kabuki, and the two styles shared common themes. Kabuki shinpō (歌舞伎新報, \"Kabuki news\") was another popular medium for kabuki consumption among commoners and elites alike. During the course of its publication, this magazine allowed those unable to attend performances to enjoy the liveliness of kabuki culture.",
"title": "Influence of kabuki on other art forms"
}
] |
Kabuki is a classical form of Japanese theatre, mixing dramatic performance with traditional dance. Kabuki theatre is known for its heavily stylised performances, its glamorous, highly decorated costumes, and for the elaborate kumadori make-up worn by some of its performers. Kabuki is thought to have originated in the early Edo period, when the art's founder, Izumo no Okuni, formed a female dance troupe that performed dances and light sketches in Kyoto. The art form later developed into its present all-male theatrical form after women were banned from performing in kabuki theatre in 1629. Kabuki developed throughout the late 17th century and reached its zenith in the mid-18th century. In 2005, kabuki theatre was proclaimed by UNESCO as an intangible heritage possessing outstanding universal value. In 2008, it was inscribed in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
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2001-10-12T21:07:15Z
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2023-11-12T18:01:43Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabuki
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Kent State University
|
Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio located in Ashtabula, Burton, East Liverpool, Jackson Township, New Philadelphia, Salem, and Warren, along with additional regional and international facilities in Cleveland, Independence, and Twinsburg, Ohio; New York City; and Florence, Italy.
The university was established in 1910 as a normal school. The first classes were held in 1912 at various locations and in temporary buildings in Kent and the first buildings of the original campus opened the following year. Since that time the university has grown to include many additional baccalaureate and graduate programs of study in the arts and sciences, research opportunities, as well as over 1,000 acres (405 ha) and 119 buildings on the Kent campus. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the university was known internationally for its student activism in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, due mainly to the Kent State shootings in 1970.
As of 2022, Kent State was the third-largest university in Ohio with an enrollment of over 34,000 students in the eight-campus system and over 25,000 students at the main campus in Kent. Kent State offers over 300 degree programs, among them 250 baccalaureate, 40 associate, 50 master's, and 23 doctoral programs of study, which include such notable programs as nursing, business, history, library science, aeronautics, journalism, architecture, fashion design and the Liquid Crystal Institute. It is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education among "R1: Doctoral Universities – very high research activity".
Kent State University was established in 1910 as an institution for training public school teachers. It was part of the Lowry Bill, which also created a sister school in Bowling Green, Ohio – now known as Bowling Green State University. It was initially known under the working name of the Ohio State Normal College At Kent, but was named Kent State Normal School in 1911 in honor of William S. Kent (son of Kent, Ohio, namesake Marvin Kent), who donated the 53 acres (21 ha) used for the original campus. The first president was John Edward McGilvrey, who served from 1912 to 1926. McGilvrey had an ambitious vision for the school as a large university, instructing architect George F. Hammond, who designed the original campus buildings, to produce a master plan. Classes began in 1912 before any buildings had been completed at the campus in Kent. These classes were held at extension centers in 25 cities around the region. By May 1913, classes were being held on the campus in Kent with the opening of Merrill Hall. The school graduated 34 students in its first commencement on July 29, 1914. In 1915, the school was renamed Kent State Normal College due to the addition of four-year degrees. By then additional buildings had been added or were under construction. Kent State's enrollment growth was particularly notable during its summer terms. In 1924, the school's registration for summer classes was the largest of any teacher-training school in the United States. In 1929, the state of Ohio changed the name to Kent State College as it allowed the school to establish a college of arts and sciences.
McGilvrey's vision for Kent was not shared by many others outside the school, particularly at the state level and at other state schools. His efforts to have the state funding formula changed created opposition, particularly from Ohio State University and its president William Oxley Thompson. This resulted in a 1923 "credit war" where Ohio State refused Kent transfer credits and spread to several other schools taking similar action. It was this development – along with several other factors – which led to the firing of McGilvrey in January 1926. McGilvrey was succeeded first by David Allen Anderson (1926–1928) and James Ozro Engleman from 1928 to 1938, though he continued to be involved with the school for several years as president emeritus and as head of alumni relations from 1934 to 1945. He was present in Columbus on May 17, 1935, when Kent native Governor Martin L. Davey signed a bill that allowed Kent State and Bowling Green to add schools of business administration and graduate programs, giving them each university status; the college's name was thus changed to Kent State University.
From 1944 to 1963, the university was led by President George Bowman. During his tenure, the student senate, faculty senate and graduate council were organized. Although it had served Stark County from the 1920s, in 1946, the university's first regional campus, the Stark Campus, was established in Canton, Ohio. In the fall of 1947, Bowman appointed Oscar W. Ritchie as a full-time faculty member. Ritchie's appointment to the faculty made him the first African American to serve on the faculty at Kent State and also made him the first African American professor to serve on the faculty of any state university in Ohio. In 1977, the former Student Union, which had been built in 1949, was rededicated as Oscar Ritchie Hall in his honor. Recently renovated, Oscar Ritchie Hall currently houses the department of Pan-African Studies the Center of Pan-African Culture, the Henry Dumas Library, the Institute for African American Affairs, the Garrett Morgan Computer Lab and the African Community Theatre.
The 1950s and 1960s saw continued growth in both enrollment and in the physical size of the campus. Several new dorms and academic buildings were built during this time, including the establishment of additional regional campuses in Warren (1954), Ashtabula (1957), New Philadelphia (1962), Salem (1962), Burton (1964), and East Liverpool, Ohio (1965). In 1961, grounds superintendent Larry Wooddell and Biff Staples of the Davey Tree Expert Company released ten cages of black squirrels obtained from Victoria Park in London, Ontario, Canada, onto the Kent State campus. By 1964 their estimated population was around 150 and today they have spread in and around Kent and have become unofficial mascots of both the city and university. Since 1981, the annual Black Squirrel Festival is held every fall on campus.
In 1965, chemistry professor Glenn H. Brown established the Liquid Crystal Institute, a world leader in the research and development of the multibillion-dollar liquid crystal industry. James Fergason invented and patented the basic TN LCD in 1969 and ten liquid crystal companies have been spun off from the institute.
In 1967, Kent State became the first university to run an independent, student-operated Campus Bus Service. It was unique in that it provided jobs for students, receiving funding from student fees rather than bus fares. Campus Bus Service was the largest such operation in the country until it merged with the Portage Area Regional Transportation Authority in 2004. 1969 saw the opening of a new Memorial Stadium on the far eastern edge of campus and the closure and dismantling of the old Memorial Stadium.
Kent State gained international attention on May 4, 1970, when an Ohio Army National Guard unit fired at students during an anti-war protest on campus, killing four and wounding nine. The Guard had been called into Kent after several protests in and around campus had become violent, including a riot in downtown Kent and the burning of the ROTC building. The main cause of the protests was the United States' invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The shootings caused an immediate closure of the campus with students and faculty given just 60 minutes to pack belongings. Around the country, many college campuses canceled classes or closed for fear of similar violent protests. In Kent, schools were closed and the National Guard restricted entry into the city limits, patrolling the area until May 8. With the campus closed, faculty members came up with a variety of solutions—including holding classes in their homes, at public buildings and places, via telephone, or through the mail—to allow their students to complete the term, which was only a few weeks away at the time.
In 1971, the university established the Center for Peaceful Change, now known as the Center for Applied Conflict Management, as a "living memorial" to the students who had died. It offers degree programs in Peace and Conflict Studies and Conflict Resolution and is one of the earliest such programs in the United States.
In response to, and protest of, the Kent State shootings, Neil Young wrote the song "Ohio" which was performed by the folk rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In remembrance of the tragedy, a group of professors and students created a website that features a map with oral histories and eyewitness accounts of the event.
Also in 1970, the university opened its 12-story library, moving from the previous home of Rockwell Hall to the tallest building in Portage County. Dedicated in 1971, the library became a member of the Association of Research Libraries in 1973. Kent State joined with the University of Akron and Youngstown State University in establishing the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in 1973. It was the world's first medical consortium. Today it includes a college of pharmacy and Cleveland State University as an additional consortium member.
Kent State was again in the national spotlight in 1977 when construction was set to begin on the Memorial Gym Annex, adjacent to the area where the Kent State shootings had occurred in 1970. Protesters organized a tent city in May, which lasted into July. Several attempts were made to block construction even after the end of the tent city, including an appeal to the United States Congress and the Department of the Interior to have the area declared a National Historic Landmark, which ended up being unsuccessful. Additional rallies were held that year, including one attended by Joan Baez on August 20. After several additional unsuccessful legal challenges, construction finally began on September 19 and was finished in 1979.
In March 1991, Kent State once again made history by appointing Carol Cartwright as president of the university, the first female to hold such a position at any state university in Ohio. In 1994, Kent State was named a "Research University II" by the Carnegie Foundation. Beginning in the late 1990s, the university began a series of building renovations and construction, which included the complete renovation of the historic original campus, the construction of several new dormitories, a student recreation center, and additional academic buildings on the Kent Campus and at the regional campuses. In September 2010, the university announced its largest student body ever, with a total enrollment of 41,365. U.S. News & World Report's 2017 rankings put Kent State as tied for #188 for National Universities and tied for #101 in Top Public Schools. Kent State had a Fall 2015 acceptance rate of 85%.
Kent State University is an eight-campus system in Northeast Ohio, with the main administrative center and largest campus in Kent.
Within the Kent State University system, the main campus is officially referred to as the "Kent Campus". The Kent Campus is a landscaped suburban environment in the Greater Akron area. It covers approximately 866 acres (3.5 km), which house over 100 buildings, gardens, bike trails, and open greenery. There are also thousands of additional acres of bogs, marshes, and wildlife refuges adjacent to or near the campus. While the university's official mascot is Flash the golden eagle, the campus also has an unofficial mascot in the black squirrels, which were brought to Kent in 1961 and can be found on and around the campus. The campus is divided into North, South, and East sections but many areas have come to be referred to as Front Campus, Residential Campus, and Science Row. The main hub of activity and central point is the Student Center and Risman Plaza, which is adjacent to the twelve-story main library. The university also operated the 18-hole Kent State Golf Course until 2017, and currently operates Centennial Research Park just east of campus in Franklin Township and the 219-acre (0.9 km) Kent State University Airport in Stow.
In addition to the Kent Campus, there are seven regional campuses. The regional campuses provide open enrollment and are generally treated as in-house community colleges as opposed to the large university feel of the Kent Campus. Students at the regional campuses can begin any of Kent State's majors at their respective campus and each campus offers its own unique programs and opportunities that may or may not be available in Kent. Regional campuses include:
The Ashtabula Campus was established in 1958 and is made up of four buildings: Main Hall, a library, the Bookstore Building, and the Robert S. Morrison Health and Science Building. It is on a 125-acre (51 ha) site in Ashtabula, just south of Lake Erie. The campus offers 27 associate and bachelor's degree programs of its own, with the nursing program being the largest. Approximately 75% of registered nurses working in Ashtabula County graduated with an associate degree in nursing from Kent State at Ashtabula.
The East Liverpool Campus was established in 1965 from facilities formerly owned by the East Liverpool City School District, occupying a downtown site overlooking the Ohio River. It is composed of the Main Building, Memorial Auditorium, Mary Patterson Building, and a Commons area.
The Geauga Campus is located on an 87-acre (35 ha) campus in Burton Township, just north of the village of Burton in Geauga County. It was established in 1964 and, as of 2021, has an enrollment of 1,276 students. Six associate degree and seven baccalaureate degree programs can be taken in their entirety at the campus. The Geauga Campus also administers the Regional Academic Center, a facility located in Twinsburg, Ohio.
Kent State at Salem is located in Salem Township, just south of the city of Salem. The 100-acre (40 ha) campus features a lake, outdoor classroom, and nature walk. Kent State University at Salem also owns and operates the "City Center" facility in the former home of Salem Middle School and Salem High School, in which administrative offices, classes, and student services are located.
The Stark Campus is the largest regional campus of Kent State University, with an enrollment of over 2,900 students as of 2021. The campus serves around 11,000 students total each year through professional development and other academic coursework classes. It is located on 200-acre (81 ha) in Jackson Township in Stark County. The campus includes seven major buildings and a natural pond. Additionally, the Stark Campus includes the Corporate University and Conference Center, an advanced meeting, training, and events facility that is one of only ten such centers in the state of Ohio affiliated with the International Association of Conference Centers. The center also serves as a home to the Corporate University, which provides training and learning exercises for area businesses and organizations. Kent State University at Stark offers 24 complete degree programs, including three associate degree, 18 bachelor's degree, and three master's degree programs.
Kent State's Trumbull Campus is located just north of Warren in Champion Heights, Ohio, on SR 45 near the SR 5–SR 82 bypass. As of 2021, it has an enrollment of 1,158 students. It offers programs in 170 majors at the freshman and sophomore level, as well as 18 certificates and 15 associate degree programs. In addition, there is upper division coursework for baccalaureate degree completion in nursing, justice studies, technology, business management, Theatre, and English, as well as general studies and psychology degrees. In 2004 the campus opened a 68,000-square-foot (6,300 m) Technology Building that includes the Workforce Development and Continuing Studies Center.
The Tuscarawas Campus in New Philadelphia, Ohio offers 19 associate degrees, six bachelor's degrees, and the Master of Technology Degree. Bachelor's degrees are offered in business management, general studies, justice studies, industrial technology, nursing and technology 2+2. As of 2021, it has an enrollment of 1,245 students. The Science and Advanced Technology Center provides 50,000 square feet (5,000 m) of laboratory and classroom space for science, nursing and workforce development. The Tuscarawas Campus has constructed a 55,000-square-foot (5,100 m), $13.5 million Fine and Performing Arts center that will enable the campus to expand academic and cultural programming.
In addition to the eight campuses in northeast Ohio, Kent State operates additional facilities for programs in Cleveland, New York City, Florence, and Shanghai.
KSU Florence is an international study abroad program that grants students the opportunity to study in historic Florence, Italy at the Palazzo Vettori. Formerly, the campus was housed in Palazzo dei Cerchi, a prestigious and ancient building located in the heart of Florence at the corner of Via della Condotta and Vicolo dei Cerchi next to the famous Piazza della Signoria and the birthplace of literary genius Dante Alighieri. Kent State acquired this facility in 2003 and undertook its complete renovation. The original exterior was maintained and reflects Florence as it was in the 13th century. The restoration carefully preserved the original structure while creating an efficient space for academic purposes, with an interior that houses state-of-the-art classrooms. After using the recently restorated Palazzo Vettori since January 2016, on April 17, 2016, the Kent State University Florence campus was officially moved from Palazzo dei Cerchi and Palazzo Bartolini Baldelli to Palazzo Vettori.
The New York City Studio is located in New York City's Garment District. Surrounded by fabric and accessory shops, fashion showrooms, and designer studios; one-third of all clothing manufactured in the USA is designed and produced in this neighborhood. The District is home to fashion designers including Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, and Nicole Miller. The facility is a 4,500-square-foot (420 m) space and includes a 50-person lecture room, 12-station computer lab with instructor station, and a fashion design studio.
Kent State's Cleveland Urban Design Center is located at 1309 Euclid Ave in the downtown Cleveland Theater District neighborhood, just off of East 14th Street. The Urban Design Center was created in 1983 under the sponsorship of the Urban University Program, which supports the outreach and community service efforts of Ohio's state universities working in urban areas. Under its founding director, Foster Armstrong, the Center expanded on the existing outreach and public service activities of Kent State's architecture school, focusing primarily on historic preservation and the problems of Northeast Ohio's smaller towns and cities. In 2003, the CUDC began a collaboration with the Dresden University of Technology, Kent State's sister university in Germany, with a joint vision on the revitalization of the lower Cuyahoga Valley in Cleveland. Since then, there have been a number of faculty exchanges as the two universities seek to pool their expertise both to enhance students' experiences and to better serve their respective regions.
Admission to Kent State University is classified as "selective" by both the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and U.S. News & World Report. The Princeton Review gives Kent State an "Admissions Selectivity Rating" of 76. The college extends offers of admission to 87% of all applicants after holistic review that includes examination of academic rigor, performance and admissions test scores.
Of all matriculating students, the average high school GPA is 3.61. The interquartile range for SAT scores in math and reading are 500-600 and 500-610 respectively, while the range for ACT scores is 19–25.
Kent State has 12 academic colleges:
The university also has interdisciplinary programs in Biomedical Sciences, Digital Science, Financial Engineering, and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The College of Aeronautics and Engineering offers four aeronautics degrees; Flight Technology, Aviation Management, Air Traffic Control and Aeronautical Engineering, and holds courses via the Kent State University Airport. In 2008, the university began offering a flight training certificate program through an affiliation with Premier Flight Academy in Akron.
The Washington Program in National Issues, founded in 1973, is one of the longest running study away programs in Washington D.C. Housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, this program gives students the opportunity to live in Washington, get a closer look at public issues and policies, and work an internship of their choosing.
The Shannon Rodgers and Jerry Silverman School of Fashion Design and Merchandising has programs in Florence, Hong Kong, and New York City, and affiliations in Paris and London. It was named a top-ten fashion school in the United States by Runway Magazine.
The Liquid Crystal Institute, founded 1965, is engaged in the research and development of liquid crystal optoelectronic materials, technology, and consumer products in connection with the National Science Foundation as part of ALCOM.
The Hugh A. Glauser School of Music offers degrees in music education, music performance, music theory and composition, ethnomusicology, chamber music, and a new minor in jazz studies. The School of Music is one of the few colleges in the U.S. that offer a BM, a MM, and a PhD in music education. The Kent/Blossom Music program partners with the Cleveland Orchestra each summer for its classical music festivals.
The School Psychology Program (SPSY) is accredited by APA and NASP. The program's graduates comprise about 18% of all SPSY professionals in Ohio. Kent is the only institution in Ohio to offer a degree in Library and Information Science, Kent is ranked 20th by U.S. News & World Report. Kent State has a complete undergraduate, master's, and doctoral sequence in translation and the only dual master's degree program in the nation.
Faculty, staff and students collaborate at The Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence (ISPV). The Center for Peaceful Change, a response to the Kent State shootings of 1970, was established in 1971 "as a living memorial to the events of May 4, 1970." Now known as The Center for Applied Conflict Management (CACM), it developed one of the earliest conflict resolution undergraduate degree programs in the United States.
The university operates the Kent State University Press, which is located in the main library building and publishes 30 to 35 titles a year. It is a member of the Association of University Presses, which includes over 100 university-sponsored scholarly presses. The Press was established in 1965, and initially published literary criticism; in 1972 its publishing program was expanded to include regional studies and ethnomusicology. Further expansion began in 1985 when the Press began publishing works related to the American Civil War and Ohio history.
In the 2023 U.S. News & World Report rankings, Kent was tied for the No. 217 national university in the United States, and the university has received several other positive rankings at both the national and global level.
For several years, Kent has also gained recognition for LGBTQ inclusion. For instance, Kent has been ranked as one of the best campuses for LGBTQ students in the country for multiple years. In 2022, Kent retained their top national ranking for LGBTQ inclusion.
The university offers a large number of opportunities for student involvement at all its campuses, including student and professional associations, service organizations, performing ensembles, student publications, student government, and intramural and club athletics.
Through the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music and the School of Theatre and Dance, the university offers performance opportunities in the performing arts, including three concert bands (Wind Ensemble, Concert Band, and Communiversity Band), Athletic Bands (Marching Golden Flashes and Flasher Brass), three jazz ensembles (Jazz Ensemble I, Jazz Ensemble II, and Jazz Lab Band), six choral ensembles (Kent Chorus, KSU Chorale, Women's Chorus, Men's Coro Cantare, Gospel Choir, and Nova Jazz Singers), one orchestra (KSU Orchestra), World Music Ensembles, as well as theater and dance opportunities. The Trumbull, Stark, and Tuscarawas campuses have theatre seasons featuring student actors. Each regional campus also offers their own performing arts opportunities.
Kent State offers several student government options, the largest of which is the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), which represents students from all campuses of the university and has been in some form of operation since 1924. The current 25 person governing body was formed after the merger of the All-Campus Programming Board (ACPB) and the Undergraduate Student Senate (USS). USG is led by an executive director and is composed of eight directors, ten college senators, one senator for residence hall students, one senator for commuter and off-campus students, one senator for undergraduate studies, and 3 senators-at-large. USG oversees the USG Programming Board which hosts various concerts, comedians, and performers, as well as the USG Allocations Committee which disburses conference and programming funds to the over 250 registered student organizations on the Kent Campus. Elections for USG are held annually in March, and officers are typically inaugurated in late April. In addition to the USG, Kent State also has the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) and a residence hall association named Kent Interhall Council (KIC). KIC represents students who live in the on-campus residence halls and deals with policies and activities. Within the KIC is a programming board and individual councils for each residence hall.
Kent State operates twenty-four on-campus residence halls, all of which are located on the main campus in Kent. Each hall is a part of a larger group, usually bound by a common name or a common central area. They are:
Within the University Housing Residence Halls, there are currently 15 Living-Learning Programs. Available Living-Learning Programs are as follows:
Kent State University Culinary Services operates two dining halls, located in Eastway Center and the Design and Innovation Hub. Kent State also operates the Rosie's Diner located in the Tr-Towers Rotunda, the Student Center Hub dining offerings, the Summit Street Café, the George T. Simon III Café, and the Fork In The Road food truck. Alongside their main dining offerings, Kent State Culinary runs two market locations on campus where students can purchase grocery products and some personal care/hygiene products. These are located in the Eastway Center and Tri-Towers Rotunda spaces.
4 Paws for Ability University Program provides university students with an opportunity to foster and socialize service dogs-in-training before they begin their professional training at the 4 Paws for Ability facility in Xenia, Ohio. A chapter was founded at Kent State in August 2016 with three service dogs-in-training; it became an official organization a year later. The chapter and organization was founded by Maxwell Newberry. As of August 2017, 4 Paws for Ability Kent State has 25 dogs on campus at a time. However, the number of sitters, co-handlers, and volunteers is not capped. The chapter has approximately 325 volunteers on their e-mail list, about 30 sitters, and over 50 co-handlers. The organization shares custody of the small fenced-in discus area at the outdoor track along Johnston Drive. Discussion and plans began in late 2017 to create a separate field for the organization.
In recent years, Kent State has developed extensive services to support people with autism, with many of its programs nationally recognized in different areas. Neurotypical students who wish to be involved with these activities are paired with students with autism, and one sorority is directly involved with these services. In a 2018 story, the university's autism outreach coordinator told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland that about 30 autistic students were registered as such with the university, but estimated that close to 500 students with autism used the school's services. These services contributed to Kent State becoming the first NCAA Division I member to sign a recruit known to be diagnosed as autistic to a National Letter of Intent in a team sport in November of that year, when Kalin Bennett committed to play for the men's basketball team starting in 2019–20, making his debut with the team in November 2019.
Greek life at Kent State is overseen by the Center for Student Involvement located in the Kent Student Center. Organizations belong to one of three governing councils, the Panhellenic Council, the Interfraternity Council and the Integrated Greek Council. Sorority houses are primarily located on Fraternity Drive located across the street from the main library and fraternity houses are located throughout the city of Kent. The university set aside land for the development of a Greek fraternity village in 2008, on land near the Student Recreation and Wellness Center. Sigma Nu built a new chapter house in 2008 on this land, but is now and empty house on fraternity circle. . Kent State's Greek life claims numerous famous and well-known figures in society including Lou Holtz, a brother of the Kent Delta Upsilon chapter and Drew Carey, a brother of the Kent Delta Tau Delta chapter.
Kent State's athletic teams are called the Golden Flashes and the school colors are shades of navy blue and gold, officially "Kent State blue" and "Kent State gold". The university sponsors 16 varsity athletic teams who compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division I level with football in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). Kent State is a member of the Mid-American Conference (MAC) East division and has been a member of the conference since 1951. The university athletic facilities are mainly on campus, featuring the 25,319-seat Dix Stadium and the 6,327-seat Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center, one of the oldest arenas in Division I college basketball.
Through the 2014–2015 season, in MAC play, Kent State has won the Reese Cup for best men's athletic program eight times, winning in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The Flashes have also won the Jacoby Cup for best women's athletic program eight times, winning in 1989, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2010, and 2014. In 2002 the Men's Basketball team advanced to NCAA "Elite Eight", while the baseball team, women's basketball, gymnastics, men's golf, and women's golf teams have won numerous MAC titles and advanced to NCAA tournament play.
Some notable athletic alumni include: Alabama Crimson Tide head football coach and five-time national champion head coach Nick Saban, former Missouri Tigers head football coach Gary Pinkel, 2003 British Open Champion and current PGA member Ben Curtis, former New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, Thomas Jefferson 1984 200m Olympic bronze medalist, former Pittsburgh Steelers Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker and four-time Super Bowl champion Jack Lambert, Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker and two-time Super Bowl champion James Harrison, ESPN Analyst and former college football national champion head coach Lou Holtz, New England Patriots Wide Receiver and Super Bowl champion Julian Edelman, former San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers All-Pro tight end Antonio Gates (who played basketball at KSU, not football), former Cleveland Browns and Indianapolis Colts All Pro return specialist Joshua Cribbs, former San Diego Padres pitcher Dustin Hermanson, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Andy Sonnanstine, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Matt Guerrier. pitcher Joe Crawford, New York Mets.
Kent State owns public radio station WKSU (89.7 FM), the NPR member for both the Akron metropolitan area and Greater Cleveland. WKSU was established by the university in 1950 as an extension of the Kent State Radio Workshop, which up to that point produced scripted radio programs for broadcast on commercial radio stations dating back to 1935. Originally student operated, WKSU joined NPR in 1973 and subsequently evolved into a conventional public radio outlet. Since 2021, Ideastream Public Media has operated WKSU and its regional network of four satellite stations in Wooster, New Philadelphia, Thompson and Norwalk, all of which remain owned by the university (a fifth station, WCPN in Lorain, is owned directly by Ideastream). Ideastream also hosts an internship program for Kent State journalism students.
Kent State counts 270,000 living alumni as of 2023. It has produced a number of individuals in the entertainment industry including comedian and current Price is Right host Drew Carey, comedian and talk show host Arsenio Hall, Steve Harvey, actors John de Lancie, Michael Keaton, and Ray Wise, actresses Alaina Reed Hall and Alice Ripley, Phenomenon star Angela Funovits, boxing promoter Don King, 30 Rock producer Jeff Richmond, and That 70s Show creator Bonnie Turner. Musicians from Kent State include several members of the band Devo, which was formed at Kent State in 1973, including Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Lewis, and Gerald Casale. Additional musicians include singers Chrissie Hynde, Jeff Timmons of 98 Degrees, Debra Byrd of American Idol, guitarist Joe Walsh, and drummer Chris Vrenna.
In politics and government, several politicians in Ohio attended Kent State including former judge and United States Representative Robert E. Cook, former minority leader C.J. Prentiss, current United States House of Representatives member Betty Sutton, former representative, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor Nancy Hollister, and Supreme Court of Ohio justice Terrence O'Donnell. Other politicians include Allen Buckley of Georgia, Ohio politician Jeffrey Dean, Pennsylvania state representative Allen Kukovich, and George Petak of Wisconsin. Politician activists from Kent State include anti-war activist Alan Canfora and former Students for a Democratic Society leaders Ken Hammond and Carl Oglesby.
Literary and journalism alumni include Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft writer Tom Batiuk, Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey, and columnists Connie Schultz and Regina Brett. Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland writer and educator Michael Glaser.
Television journalism alumni include CNN anchor Carol Costello, Cleveland news anchors Ted Henry, Wayne Dawson, sportscaster Jeff Phelps, and ESPN Dream Job winner Dave Holmes.
A number of professional athletes are Kent State alumni including WWE wrestlers Dolph Ziggler and Dana Brooke, National Football League players James Harrison, Josh Cribbs, Julian Edelman, Don Nottingham, Jack Lambert, and Antonio Gates, along with Canadian Football League standouts Jay McNeil, Tony Martino, and Canadian Football Hall of Fame and former Kent State football head coach Jim Corrigall. College football coaches Nick Saban, Gary Pinkel, and Lou Holtz are also Kent State alumni. James Steen, a 1971 Kent State graduate on the swim team, served as a swim coach at Kenyon College where his teams won a combined 50 Division III NCAA championships.
Major League Baseball players to come from Kent State include Emmanuel Burriss, Matt Guerrier, Andy Sonnanstine, Gene Michael, Rich Rollins, Dustin Hermanson, Steve Stone, and Thurman Munson. Additional athletic alumni include Canadian professional golfers Corey Conners, Mackenzie Hughes, Jon Mills, Taylor Pendrith, and Ryan Yip, American professional golfer Ben Curtis, and Olympians Betty-Jean Maycock in gymnastics and Gerald Tinker in track and field.
|
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"text": "Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio located in Ashtabula, Burton, East Liverpool, Jackson Township, New Philadelphia, Salem, and Warren, along with additional regional and international facilities in Cleveland, Independence, and Twinsburg, Ohio; New York City; and Florence, Italy.",
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"text": "The university was established in 1910 as a normal school. The first classes were held in 1912 at various locations and in temporary buildings in Kent and the first buildings of the original campus opened the following year. Since that time the university has grown to include many additional baccalaureate and graduate programs of study in the arts and sciences, research opportunities, as well as over 1,000 acres (405 ha) and 119 buildings on the Kent campus. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the university was known internationally for its student activism in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, due mainly to the Kent State shootings in 1970.",
"title": ""
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"text": "As of 2022, Kent State was the third-largest university in Ohio with an enrollment of over 34,000 students in the eight-campus system and over 25,000 students at the main campus in Kent. Kent State offers over 300 degree programs, among them 250 baccalaureate, 40 associate, 50 master's, and 23 doctoral programs of study, which include such notable programs as nursing, business, history, library science, aeronautics, journalism, architecture, fashion design and the Liquid Crystal Institute. It is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education among \"R1: Doctoral Universities – very high research activity\".",
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"text": "Kent State University was established in 1910 as an institution for training public school teachers. It was part of the Lowry Bill, which also created a sister school in Bowling Green, Ohio – now known as Bowling Green State University. It was initially known under the working name of the Ohio State Normal College At Kent, but was named Kent State Normal School in 1911 in honor of William S. Kent (son of Kent, Ohio, namesake Marvin Kent), who donated the 53 acres (21 ha) used for the original campus. The first president was John Edward McGilvrey, who served from 1912 to 1926. McGilvrey had an ambitious vision for the school as a large university, instructing architect George F. Hammond, who designed the original campus buildings, to produce a master plan. Classes began in 1912 before any buildings had been completed at the campus in Kent. These classes were held at extension centers in 25 cities around the region. By May 1913, classes were being held on the campus in Kent with the opening of Merrill Hall. The school graduated 34 students in its first commencement on July 29, 1914. In 1915, the school was renamed Kent State Normal College due to the addition of four-year degrees. By then additional buildings had been added or were under construction. Kent State's enrollment growth was particularly notable during its summer terms. In 1924, the school's registration for summer classes was the largest of any teacher-training school in the United States. In 1929, the state of Ohio changed the name to Kent State College as it allowed the school to establish a college of arts and sciences.",
"title": "History"
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{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "McGilvrey's vision for Kent was not shared by many others outside the school, particularly at the state level and at other state schools. His efforts to have the state funding formula changed created opposition, particularly from Ohio State University and its president William Oxley Thompson. This resulted in a 1923 \"credit war\" where Ohio State refused Kent transfer credits and spread to several other schools taking similar action. It was this development – along with several other factors – which led to the firing of McGilvrey in January 1926. McGilvrey was succeeded first by David Allen Anderson (1926–1928) and James Ozro Engleman from 1928 to 1938, though he continued to be involved with the school for several years as president emeritus and as head of alumni relations from 1934 to 1945. He was present in Columbus on May 17, 1935, when Kent native Governor Martin L. Davey signed a bill that allowed Kent State and Bowling Green to add schools of business administration and graduate programs, giving them each university status; the college's name was thus changed to Kent State University.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "From 1944 to 1963, the university was led by President George Bowman. During his tenure, the student senate, faculty senate and graduate council were organized. Although it had served Stark County from the 1920s, in 1946, the university's first regional campus, the Stark Campus, was established in Canton, Ohio. In the fall of 1947, Bowman appointed Oscar W. Ritchie as a full-time faculty member. Ritchie's appointment to the faculty made him the first African American to serve on the faculty at Kent State and also made him the first African American professor to serve on the faculty of any state university in Ohio. In 1977, the former Student Union, which had been built in 1949, was rededicated as Oscar Ritchie Hall in his honor. Recently renovated, Oscar Ritchie Hall currently houses the department of Pan-African Studies the Center of Pan-African Culture, the Henry Dumas Library, the Institute for African American Affairs, the Garrett Morgan Computer Lab and the African Community Theatre.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The 1950s and 1960s saw continued growth in both enrollment and in the physical size of the campus. Several new dorms and academic buildings were built during this time, including the establishment of additional regional campuses in Warren (1954), Ashtabula (1957), New Philadelphia (1962), Salem (1962), Burton (1964), and East Liverpool, Ohio (1965). In 1961, grounds superintendent Larry Wooddell and Biff Staples of the Davey Tree Expert Company released ten cages of black squirrels obtained from Victoria Park in London, Ontario, Canada, onto the Kent State campus. By 1964 their estimated population was around 150 and today they have spread in and around Kent and have become unofficial mascots of both the city and university. Since 1981, the annual Black Squirrel Festival is held every fall on campus.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 1965, chemistry professor Glenn H. Brown established the Liquid Crystal Institute, a world leader in the research and development of the multibillion-dollar liquid crystal industry. James Fergason invented and patented the basic TN LCD in 1969 and ten liquid crystal companies have been spun off from the institute.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1967, Kent State became the first university to run an independent, student-operated Campus Bus Service. It was unique in that it provided jobs for students, receiving funding from student fees rather than bus fares. Campus Bus Service was the largest such operation in the country until it merged with the Portage Area Regional Transportation Authority in 2004. 1969 saw the opening of a new Memorial Stadium on the far eastern edge of campus and the closure and dismantling of the old Memorial Stadium.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Kent State gained international attention on May 4, 1970, when an Ohio Army National Guard unit fired at students during an anti-war protest on campus, killing four and wounding nine. The Guard had been called into Kent after several protests in and around campus had become violent, including a riot in downtown Kent and the burning of the ROTC building. The main cause of the protests was the United States' invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The shootings caused an immediate closure of the campus with students and faculty given just 60 minutes to pack belongings. Around the country, many college campuses canceled classes or closed for fear of similar violent protests. In Kent, schools were closed and the National Guard restricted entry into the city limits, patrolling the area until May 8. With the campus closed, faculty members came up with a variety of solutions—including holding classes in their homes, at public buildings and places, via telephone, or through the mail—to allow their students to complete the term, which was only a few weeks away at the time.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In 1971, the university established the Center for Peaceful Change, now known as the Center for Applied Conflict Management, as a \"living memorial\" to the students who had died. It offers degree programs in Peace and Conflict Studies and Conflict Resolution and is one of the earliest such programs in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "In response to, and protest of, the Kent State shootings, Neil Young wrote the song \"Ohio\" which was performed by the folk rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. In remembrance of the tragedy, a group of professors and students created a website that features a map with oral histories and eyewitness accounts of the event.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Also in 1970, the university opened its 12-story library, moving from the previous home of Rockwell Hall to the tallest building in Portage County. Dedicated in 1971, the library became a member of the Association of Research Libraries in 1973. Kent State joined with the University of Akron and Youngstown State University in establishing the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine in 1973. It was the world's first medical consortium. Today it includes a college of pharmacy and Cleveland State University as an additional consortium member.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Kent State was again in the national spotlight in 1977 when construction was set to begin on the Memorial Gym Annex, adjacent to the area where the Kent State shootings had occurred in 1970. Protesters organized a tent city in May, which lasted into July. Several attempts were made to block construction even after the end of the tent city, including an appeal to the United States Congress and the Department of the Interior to have the area declared a National Historic Landmark, which ended up being unsuccessful. Additional rallies were held that year, including one attended by Joan Baez on August 20. After several additional unsuccessful legal challenges, construction finally began on September 19 and was finished in 1979.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "In March 1991, Kent State once again made history by appointing Carol Cartwright as president of the university, the first female to hold such a position at any state university in Ohio. In 1994, Kent State was named a \"Research University II\" by the Carnegie Foundation. Beginning in the late 1990s, the university began a series of building renovations and construction, which included the complete renovation of the historic original campus, the construction of several new dormitories, a student recreation center, and additional academic buildings on the Kent Campus and at the regional campuses. In September 2010, the university announced its largest student body ever, with a total enrollment of 41,365. U.S. News & World Report's 2017 rankings put Kent State as tied for #188 for National Universities and tied for #101 in Top Public Schools. Kent State had a Fall 2015 acceptance rate of 85%.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Kent State University is an eight-campus system in Northeast Ohio, with the main administrative center and largest campus in Kent.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Within the Kent State University system, the main campus is officially referred to as the \"Kent Campus\". The Kent Campus is a landscaped suburban environment in the Greater Akron area. It covers approximately 866 acres (3.5 km), which house over 100 buildings, gardens, bike trails, and open greenery. There are also thousands of additional acres of bogs, marshes, and wildlife refuges adjacent to or near the campus. While the university's official mascot is Flash the golden eagle, the campus also has an unofficial mascot in the black squirrels, which were brought to Kent in 1961 and can be found on and around the campus. The campus is divided into North, South, and East sections but many areas have come to be referred to as Front Campus, Residential Campus, and Science Row. The main hub of activity and central point is the Student Center and Risman Plaza, which is adjacent to the twelve-story main library. The university also operated the 18-hole Kent State Golf Course until 2017, and currently operates Centennial Research Park just east of campus in Franklin Township and the 219-acre (0.9 km) Kent State University Airport in Stow.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "In addition to the Kent Campus, there are seven regional campuses. The regional campuses provide open enrollment and are generally treated as in-house community colleges as opposed to the large university feel of the Kent Campus. Students at the regional campuses can begin any of Kent State's majors at their respective campus and each campus offers its own unique programs and opportunities that may or may not be available in Kent. Regional campuses include:",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "The Ashtabula Campus was established in 1958 and is made up of four buildings: Main Hall, a library, the Bookstore Building, and the Robert S. Morrison Health and Science Building. It is on a 125-acre (51 ha) site in Ashtabula, just south of Lake Erie. The campus offers 27 associate and bachelor's degree programs of its own, with the nursing program being the largest. Approximately 75% of registered nurses working in Ashtabula County graduated with an associate degree in nursing from Kent State at Ashtabula.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "The East Liverpool Campus was established in 1965 from facilities formerly owned by the East Liverpool City School District, occupying a downtown site overlooking the Ohio River. It is composed of the Main Building, Memorial Auditorium, Mary Patterson Building, and a Commons area.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "The Geauga Campus is located on an 87-acre (35 ha) campus in Burton Township, just north of the village of Burton in Geauga County. It was established in 1964 and, as of 2021, has an enrollment of 1,276 students. Six associate degree and seven baccalaureate degree programs can be taken in their entirety at the campus. The Geauga Campus also administers the Regional Academic Center, a facility located in Twinsburg, Ohio.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kent State at Salem is located in Salem Township, just south of the city of Salem. The 100-acre (40 ha) campus features a lake, outdoor classroom, and nature walk. Kent State University at Salem also owns and operates the \"City Center\" facility in the former home of Salem Middle School and Salem High School, in which administrative offices, classes, and student services are located.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The Stark Campus is the largest regional campus of Kent State University, with an enrollment of over 2,900 students as of 2021. The campus serves around 11,000 students total each year through professional development and other academic coursework classes. It is located on 200-acre (81 ha) in Jackson Township in Stark County. The campus includes seven major buildings and a natural pond. Additionally, the Stark Campus includes the Corporate University and Conference Center, an advanced meeting, training, and events facility that is one of only ten such centers in the state of Ohio affiliated with the International Association of Conference Centers. The center also serves as a home to the Corporate University, which provides training and learning exercises for area businesses and organizations. Kent State University at Stark offers 24 complete degree programs, including three associate degree, 18 bachelor's degree, and three master's degree programs.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Kent State's Trumbull Campus is located just north of Warren in Champion Heights, Ohio, on SR 45 near the SR 5–SR 82 bypass. As of 2021, it has an enrollment of 1,158 students. It offers programs in 170 majors at the freshman and sophomore level, as well as 18 certificates and 15 associate degree programs. In addition, there is upper division coursework for baccalaureate degree completion in nursing, justice studies, technology, business management, Theatre, and English, as well as general studies and psychology degrees. In 2004 the campus opened a 68,000-square-foot (6,300 m) Technology Building that includes the Workforce Development and Continuing Studies Center.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "The Tuscarawas Campus in New Philadelphia, Ohio offers 19 associate degrees, six bachelor's degrees, and the Master of Technology Degree. Bachelor's degrees are offered in business management, general studies, justice studies, industrial technology, nursing and technology 2+2. As of 2021, it has an enrollment of 1,245 students. The Science and Advanced Technology Center provides 50,000 square feet (5,000 m) of laboratory and classroom space for science, nursing and workforce development. The Tuscarawas Campus has constructed a 55,000-square-foot (5,100 m), $13.5 million Fine and Performing Arts center that will enable the campus to expand academic and cultural programming.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "In addition to the eight campuses in northeast Ohio, Kent State operates additional facilities for programs in Cleveland, New York City, Florence, and Shanghai.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "KSU Florence is an international study abroad program that grants students the opportunity to study in historic Florence, Italy at the Palazzo Vettori. Formerly, the campus was housed in Palazzo dei Cerchi, a prestigious and ancient building located in the heart of Florence at the corner of Via della Condotta and Vicolo dei Cerchi next to the famous Piazza della Signoria and the birthplace of literary genius Dante Alighieri. Kent State acquired this facility in 2003 and undertook its complete renovation. The original exterior was maintained and reflects Florence as it was in the 13th century. The restoration carefully preserved the original structure while creating an efficient space for academic purposes, with an interior that houses state-of-the-art classrooms. After using the recently restorated Palazzo Vettori since January 2016, on April 17, 2016, the Kent State University Florence campus was officially moved from Palazzo dei Cerchi and Palazzo Bartolini Baldelli to Palazzo Vettori.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "The New York City Studio is located in New York City's Garment District. Surrounded by fabric and accessory shops, fashion showrooms, and designer studios; one-third of all clothing manufactured in the USA is designed and produced in this neighborhood. The District is home to fashion designers including Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, and Nicole Miller. The facility is a 4,500-square-foot (420 m) space and includes a 50-person lecture room, 12-station computer lab with instructor station, and a fashion design studio.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kent State's Cleveland Urban Design Center is located at 1309 Euclid Ave in the downtown Cleveland Theater District neighborhood, just off of East 14th Street. The Urban Design Center was created in 1983 under the sponsorship of the Urban University Program, which supports the outreach and community service efforts of Ohio's state universities working in urban areas. Under its founding director, Foster Armstrong, the Center expanded on the existing outreach and public service activities of Kent State's architecture school, focusing primarily on historic preservation and the problems of Northeast Ohio's smaller towns and cities. In 2003, the CUDC began a collaboration with the Dresden University of Technology, Kent State's sister university in Germany, with a joint vision on the revitalization of the lower Cuyahoga Valley in Cleveland. Since then, there have been a number of faculty exchanges as the two universities seek to pool their expertise both to enhance students' experiences and to better serve their respective regions.",
"title": "Campuses"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Admission to Kent State University is classified as \"selective\" by both the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and U.S. News & World Report. The Princeton Review gives Kent State an \"Admissions Selectivity Rating\" of 76. The college extends offers of admission to 87% of all applicants after holistic review that includes examination of academic rigor, performance and admissions test scores.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Of all matriculating students, the average high school GPA is 3.61. The interquartile range for SAT scores in math and reading are 500-600 and 500-610 respectively, while the range for ACT scores is 19–25.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kent State has 12 academic colleges:",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The university also has interdisciplinary programs in Biomedical Sciences, Digital Science, Financial Engineering, and Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The College of Aeronautics and Engineering offers four aeronautics degrees; Flight Technology, Aviation Management, Air Traffic Control and Aeronautical Engineering, and holds courses via the Kent State University Airport. In 2008, the university began offering a flight training certificate program through an affiliation with Premier Flight Academy in Akron.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "The Washington Program in National Issues, founded in 1973, is one of the longest running study away programs in Washington D.C. Housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, this program gives students the opportunity to live in Washington, get a closer look at public issues and policies, and work an internship of their choosing.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "The Shannon Rodgers and Jerry Silverman School of Fashion Design and Merchandising has programs in Florence, Hong Kong, and New York City, and affiliations in Paris and London. It was named a top-ten fashion school in the United States by Runway Magazine.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "The Liquid Crystal Institute, founded 1965, is engaged in the research and development of liquid crystal optoelectronic materials, technology, and consumer products in connection with the National Science Foundation as part of ALCOM.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "The Hugh A. Glauser School of Music offers degrees in music education, music performance, music theory and composition, ethnomusicology, chamber music, and a new minor in jazz studies. The School of Music is one of the few colleges in the U.S. that offer a BM, a MM, and a PhD in music education. The Kent/Blossom Music program partners with the Cleveland Orchestra each summer for its classical music festivals.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "The School Psychology Program (SPSY) is accredited by APA and NASP. The program's graduates comprise about 18% of all SPSY professionals in Ohio. Kent is the only institution in Ohio to offer a degree in Library and Information Science, Kent is ranked 20th by U.S. News & World Report. Kent State has a complete undergraduate, master's, and doctoral sequence in translation and the only dual master's degree program in the nation.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Faculty, staff and students collaborate at The Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence (ISPV). The Center for Peaceful Change, a response to the Kent State shootings of 1970, was established in 1971 \"as a living memorial to the events of May 4, 1970.\" Now known as The Center for Applied Conflict Management (CACM), it developed one of the earliest conflict resolution undergraduate degree programs in the United States.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "The university operates the Kent State University Press, which is located in the main library building and publishes 30 to 35 titles a year. It is a member of the Association of University Presses, which includes over 100 university-sponsored scholarly presses. The Press was established in 1965, and initially published literary criticism; in 1972 its publishing program was expanded to include regional studies and ethnomusicology. Further expansion began in 1985 when the Press began publishing works related to the American Civil War and Ohio history.",
"title": "Academics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "In the 2023 U.S. News & World Report rankings, Kent was tied for the No. 217 national university in the United States, and the university has received several other positive rankings at both the national and global level.",
"title": "Rankings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "For several years, Kent has also gained recognition for LGBTQ inclusion. For instance, Kent has been ranked as one of the best campuses for LGBTQ students in the country for multiple years. In 2022, Kent retained their top national ranking for LGBTQ inclusion.",
"title": "Rankings"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "The university offers a large number of opportunities for student involvement at all its campuses, including student and professional associations, service organizations, performing ensembles, student publications, student government, and intramural and club athletics.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Through the Hugh A. Glauser School of Music and the School of Theatre and Dance, the university offers performance opportunities in the performing arts, including three concert bands (Wind Ensemble, Concert Band, and Communiversity Band), Athletic Bands (Marching Golden Flashes and Flasher Brass), three jazz ensembles (Jazz Ensemble I, Jazz Ensemble II, and Jazz Lab Band), six choral ensembles (Kent Chorus, KSU Chorale, Women's Chorus, Men's Coro Cantare, Gospel Choir, and Nova Jazz Singers), one orchestra (KSU Orchestra), World Music Ensembles, as well as theater and dance opportunities. The Trumbull, Stark, and Tuscarawas campuses have theatre seasons featuring student actors. Each regional campus also offers their own performing arts opportunities.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "Kent State offers several student government options, the largest of which is the Undergraduate Student Government (USG), which represents students from all campuses of the university and has been in some form of operation since 1924. The current 25 person governing body was formed after the merger of the All-Campus Programming Board (ACPB) and the Undergraduate Student Senate (USS). USG is led by an executive director and is composed of eight directors, ten college senators, one senator for residence hall students, one senator for commuter and off-campus students, one senator for undergraduate studies, and 3 senators-at-large. USG oversees the USG Programming Board which hosts various concerts, comedians, and performers, as well as the USG Allocations Committee which disburses conference and programming funds to the over 250 registered student organizations on the Kent Campus. Elections for USG are held annually in March, and officers are typically inaugurated in late April. In addition to the USG, Kent State also has the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) and a residence hall association named Kent Interhall Council (KIC). KIC represents students who live in the on-campus residence halls and deals with policies and activities. Within the KIC is a programming board and individual councils for each residence hall.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Kent State operates twenty-four on-campus residence halls, all of which are located on the main campus in Kent. Each hall is a part of a larger group, usually bound by a common name or a common central area. They are:",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "Within the University Housing Residence Halls, there are currently 15 Living-Learning Programs. Available Living-Learning Programs are as follows:",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Kent State University Culinary Services operates two dining halls, located in Eastway Center and the Design and Innovation Hub. Kent State also operates the Rosie's Diner located in the Tr-Towers Rotunda, the Student Center Hub dining offerings, the Summit Street Café, the George T. Simon III Café, and the Fork In The Road food truck. Alongside their main dining offerings, Kent State Culinary runs two market locations on campus where students can purchase grocery products and some personal care/hygiene products. These are located in the Eastway Center and Tri-Towers Rotunda spaces.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "4 Paws for Ability University Program provides university students with an opportunity to foster and socialize service dogs-in-training before they begin their professional training at the 4 Paws for Ability facility in Xenia, Ohio. A chapter was founded at Kent State in August 2016 with three service dogs-in-training; it became an official organization a year later. The chapter and organization was founded by Maxwell Newberry. As of August 2017, 4 Paws for Ability Kent State has 25 dogs on campus at a time. However, the number of sitters, co-handlers, and volunteers is not capped. The chapter has approximately 325 volunteers on their e-mail list, about 30 sitters, and over 50 co-handlers. The organization shares custody of the small fenced-in discus area at the outdoor track along Johnston Drive. Discussion and plans began in late 2017 to create a separate field for the organization.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "In recent years, Kent State has developed extensive services to support people with autism, with many of its programs nationally recognized in different areas. Neurotypical students who wish to be involved with these activities are paired with students with autism, and one sorority is directly involved with these services. In a 2018 story, the university's autism outreach coordinator told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland that about 30 autistic students were registered as such with the university, but estimated that close to 500 students with autism used the school's services. These services contributed to Kent State becoming the first NCAA Division I member to sign a recruit known to be diagnosed as autistic to a National Letter of Intent in a team sport in November of that year, when Kalin Bennett committed to play for the men's basketball team starting in 2019–20, making his debut with the team in November 2019.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Greek life at Kent State is overseen by the Center for Student Involvement located in the Kent Student Center. Organizations belong to one of three governing councils, the Panhellenic Council, the Interfraternity Council and the Integrated Greek Council. Sorority houses are primarily located on Fraternity Drive located across the street from the main library and fraternity houses are located throughout the city of Kent. The university set aside land for the development of a Greek fraternity village in 2008, on land near the Student Recreation and Wellness Center. Sigma Nu built a new chapter house in 2008 on this land, but is now and empty house on fraternity circle. . Kent State's Greek life claims numerous famous and well-known figures in society including Lou Holtz, a brother of the Kent Delta Upsilon chapter and Drew Carey, a brother of the Kent Delta Tau Delta chapter.",
"title": "Student life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Kent State's athletic teams are called the Golden Flashes and the school colors are shades of navy blue and gold, officially \"Kent State blue\" and \"Kent State gold\". The university sponsors 16 varsity athletic teams who compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) at the Division I level with football in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). Kent State is a member of the Mid-American Conference (MAC) East division and has been a member of the conference since 1951. The university athletic facilities are mainly on campus, featuring the 25,319-seat Dix Stadium and the 6,327-seat Memorial Athletic and Convocation Center, one of the oldest arenas in Division I college basketball.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Through the 2014–2015 season, in MAC play, Kent State has won the Reese Cup for best men's athletic program eight times, winning in 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The Flashes have also won the Jacoby Cup for best women's athletic program eight times, winning in 1989, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2010, and 2014. In 2002 the Men's Basketball team advanced to NCAA \"Elite Eight\", while the baseball team, women's basketball, gymnastics, men's golf, and women's golf teams have won numerous MAC titles and advanced to NCAA tournament play.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "Some notable athletic alumni include: Alabama Crimson Tide head football coach and five-time national champion head coach Nick Saban, former Missouri Tigers head football coach Gary Pinkel, 2003 British Open Champion and current PGA member Ben Curtis, former New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, Thomas Jefferson 1984 200m Olympic bronze medalist, former Pittsburgh Steelers Pro Football Hall of Fame linebacker and four-time Super Bowl champion Jack Lambert, Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker and two-time Super Bowl champion James Harrison, ESPN Analyst and former college football national champion head coach Lou Holtz, New England Patriots Wide Receiver and Super Bowl champion Julian Edelman, former San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers All-Pro tight end Antonio Gates (who played basketball at KSU, not football), former Cleveland Browns and Indianapolis Colts All Pro return specialist Joshua Cribbs, former San Diego Padres pitcher Dustin Hermanson, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher Andy Sonnanstine, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Matt Guerrier. pitcher Joe Crawford, New York Mets.",
"title": "Athletics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "Kent State owns public radio station WKSU (89.7 FM), the NPR member for both the Akron metropolitan area and Greater Cleveland. WKSU was established by the university in 1950 as an extension of the Kent State Radio Workshop, which up to that point produced scripted radio programs for broadcast on commercial radio stations dating back to 1935. Originally student operated, WKSU joined NPR in 1973 and subsequently evolved into a conventional public radio outlet. Since 2021, Ideastream Public Media has operated WKSU and its regional network of four satellite stations in Wooster, New Philadelphia, Thompson and Norwalk, all of which remain owned by the university (a fifth station, WCPN in Lorain, is owned directly by Ideastream). Ideastream also hosts an internship program for Kent State journalism students.",
"title": "Affiliated media"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "Kent State counts 270,000 living alumni as of 2023. It has produced a number of individuals in the entertainment industry including comedian and current Price is Right host Drew Carey, comedian and talk show host Arsenio Hall, Steve Harvey, actors John de Lancie, Michael Keaton, and Ray Wise, actresses Alaina Reed Hall and Alice Ripley, Phenomenon star Angela Funovits, boxing promoter Don King, 30 Rock producer Jeff Richmond, and That 70s Show creator Bonnie Turner. Musicians from Kent State include several members of the band Devo, which was formed at Kent State in 1973, including Mark Mothersbaugh, Bob Lewis, and Gerald Casale. Additional musicians include singers Chrissie Hynde, Jeff Timmons of 98 Degrees, Debra Byrd of American Idol, guitarist Joe Walsh, and drummer Chris Vrenna.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "In politics and government, several politicians in Ohio attended Kent State including former judge and United States Representative Robert E. Cook, former minority leader C.J. Prentiss, current United States House of Representatives member Betty Sutton, former representative, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor Nancy Hollister, and Supreme Court of Ohio justice Terrence O'Donnell. Other politicians include Allen Buckley of Georgia, Ohio politician Jeffrey Dean, Pennsylvania state representative Allen Kukovich, and George Petak of Wisconsin. Politician activists from Kent State include anti-war activist Alan Canfora and former Students for a Democratic Society leaders Ken Hammond and Carl Oglesby.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Literary and journalism alumni include Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft writer Tom Batiuk, Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey, and columnists Connie Schultz and Regina Brett. Poet Laureate of the state of Maryland writer and educator Michael Glaser.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Television journalism alumni include CNN anchor Carol Costello, Cleveland news anchors Ted Henry, Wayne Dawson, sportscaster Jeff Phelps, and ESPN Dream Job winner Dave Holmes.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "A number of professional athletes are Kent State alumni including WWE wrestlers Dolph Ziggler and Dana Brooke, National Football League players James Harrison, Josh Cribbs, Julian Edelman, Don Nottingham, Jack Lambert, and Antonio Gates, along with Canadian Football League standouts Jay McNeil, Tony Martino, and Canadian Football Hall of Fame and former Kent State football head coach Jim Corrigall. College football coaches Nick Saban, Gary Pinkel, and Lou Holtz are also Kent State alumni. James Steen, a 1971 Kent State graduate on the swim team, served as a swim coach at Kenyon College where his teams won a combined 50 Division III NCAA championships.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "Major League Baseball players to come from Kent State include Emmanuel Burriss, Matt Guerrier, Andy Sonnanstine, Gene Michael, Rich Rollins, Dustin Hermanson, Steve Stone, and Thurman Munson. Additional athletic alumni include Canadian professional golfers Corey Conners, Mackenzie Hughes, Jon Mills, Taylor Pendrith, and Ryan Yip, American professional golfer Ben Curtis, and Olympians Betty-Jean Maycock in gymnastics and Gerald Tinker in track and field.",
"title": "Notable alumni"
}
] |
Kent State University (KSU) is a public research university in Kent, Ohio, United States. The university includes seven regional campuses in Northeast Ohio located in Ashtabula, Burton, East Liverpool, Jackson Township, New Philadelphia, Salem, and Warren, along with additional regional and international facilities in Cleveland, Independence, and Twinsburg, Ohio; New York City; and Florence, Italy. The university was established in 1910 as a normal school. The first classes were held in 1912 at various locations and in temporary buildings in Kent and the first buildings of the original campus opened the following year. Since that time the university has grown to include many additional baccalaureate and graduate programs of study in the arts and sciences, research opportunities, as well as over 1,000 acres (405 ha) and 119 buildings on the Kent campus. During the late 1960s and early 1970s the university was known internationally for its student activism in opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, due mainly to the Kent State shootings in 1970. As of 2022, Kent State was the third-largest university in Ohio with an enrollment of over 34,000 students in the eight-campus system and over 25,000 students at the main campus in Kent. Kent State offers over 300 degree programs, among them 250 baccalaureate, 40 associate, 50 master's, and 23 doctoral programs of study, which include such notable programs as nursing, business, history, library science, aeronautics, journalism, architecture, fashion design and the Liquid Crystal Institute. It is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education among "R1: Doctoral Universities – very high research activity".
|
2001-10-15T16:59:14Z
|
2023-12-07T05:01:08Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_University
|
16,987 |
Kelly Freas
|
Frank Kelly Freas (August 27, 1922 – January 2, 2005) was an American science fiction and fantasy artist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He was known as the "Dean of Science Fiction Artists" and he was the second artist inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
Born in Hornell, New York, Freas (pronounced like "freeze") was the son of two photographers, and was raised in Canada. He was educated at Lafayette High School in Buffalo, where he received training from long-time art teacher Elizabeth Weiffenbach. He entered the United States Army Air Forces right out of high school (Crystal Beach, Ontario, Canada). He flew as camera man for reconnaissance in the South Pacific and painted bomber noses during World War II. He then worked for Curtiss-Wright for a brief period, then went to study at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh and began to work in advertising. His first marriage was in 1948 to Nina Vaccaro, though they later divorced. He later married Pauline (Polly) Bussard in 1952; they had two children, Jacqui and Jerry. Polly died of cancer in January 1987. In 1988 he married (and is survived by) Dr. Laura Brodian.
Freas began his work as a commercial artist in the late 1940s, mostly for television. His goal was to become a science fiction artist.
The fantasy magazine Weird Tales published the first cover art by Freas on its November 1950 issue: "The Piper" illustrating "The Third Shadow" by H. Russell Wakefield. His second was a year later in the same magazine, followed by several Planet Stories or Weird Tales covers and interior illustrations for three Gnome Press books in 1952. With his illustrating career underway, he continued to devise unique and imaginative concepts for other fantasy and science fiction magazines of that period. In a field where airbrushing is common practice, paintings by Freas are notable for his use of bold brush strokes, and a study of his work reveals his experimentation with a wide variety of tools and techniques.
Over the next five decades, he created covers for hundreds of books and magazines (and much more interior artwork), notably Astounding Science Fiction, both before and after its title change to Analog, from 1953 to 2003. He started at Mad magazine in February 1957 and by July 1958 was the magazine's new cover artist; he painted most of its covers until October 1962 (featuring the iconic character, Alfred E. Neuman). He also created cover illustrations for DAW, Signet, Ballantine Books, Avon, all 58 Laser Books (which are now collectors' items), and over 90 covers for Ace books alone. He was editor and artist for the first ten Starblaze books. He illustrated the cover of Jean Shepherd, Ian Ballantine, and Theodore Sturgeon's literary hoax, I, Libertine (Ballantine Books, 1956). That same year he drew cartoon illustrations for Bernard Shir-Cliff's The Wild Reader.
Freas also painted insignia and posters for Skylab I; pinup girls on bombers while in the United States Army Air Forces; comic book covers; the covers of the GURPS worldbooks Lensman and Planet Krishna; and more than 500 saints' portraits for the Franciscans executed simultaneously with his portraits of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad. He was very active in gaming and medical illustration. His cover of Queen's album News of the World (1977) was a pastiche of his October 1953 cover illustration for Tom Godwin's "The Gulf Between" for Astounding Science Fiction magazine.
Freas published several collections of his color and black-and-white artwork in the volumes Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction and Frank Kelly Freas: As Others See it, as well as in a spiral-bound collection of his black-and-white illustrations from Astounding Science Fiction. He also frequently gave art presentations, and his work appeared in numerous exhibitions. He was among several of the inaugural recipients of the Hugo Award for Best Artist in 1955 and was recipient under different names of the next three conferred in 1956, 1958, and 1959. With six more Hugo awards to his name (1970 and 1972–76), he became the first person to receive ten Hugo awards (he was nominated 20 times). No other artist in science fiction has consistently matched his record and output.
Freas was twice a Guest of Honor at Worldcon, at Chicon IV in 1982 and at Torcon 3 in 2003, although a fall suffered shortly before the latter convention precluded him from attending.
He died in West Hills, California and is buried in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth.
Freas's achievements include the Doctor of Arts, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, December 2003. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2006, the second artist after Chesley Bonestell.
Biography and criticism
Bibliography and works
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Frank Kelly Freas (August 27, 1922 – January 2, 2005) was an American science fiction and fantasy artist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He was known as the \"Dean of Science Fiction Artists\" and he was the second artist inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Born in Hornell, New York, Freas (pronounced like \"freeze\") was the son of two photographers, and was raised in Canada. He was educated at Lafayette High School in Buffalo, where he received training from long-time art teacher Elizabeth Weiffenbach. He entered the United States Army Air Forces right out of high school (Crystal Beach, Ontario, Canada). He flew as camera man for reconnaissance in the South Pacific and painted bomber noses during World War II. He then worked for Curtiss-Wright for a brief period, then went to study at The Art Institute of Pittsburgh and began to work in advertising. His first marriage was in 1948 to Nina Vaccaro, though they later divorced. He later married Pauline (Polly) Bussard in 1952; they had two children, Jacqui and Jerry. Polly died of cancer in January 1987. In 1988 he married (and is survived by) Dr. Laura Brodian.",
"title": "Early life, education, and personal life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Freas began his work as a commercial artist in the late 1940s, mostly for television. His goal was to become a science fiction artist.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "The fantasy magazine Weird Tales published the first cover art by Freas on its November 1950 issue: \"The Piper\" illustrating \"The Third Shadow\" by H. Russell Wakefield. His second was a year later in the same magazine, followed by several Planet Stories or Weird Tales covers and interior illustrations for three Gnome Press books in 1952. With his illustrating career underway, he continued to devise unique and imaginative concepts for other fantasy and science fiction magazines of that period. In a field where airbrushing is common practice, paintings by Freas are notable for his use of bold brush strokes, and a study of his work reveals his experimentation with a wide variety of tools and techniques.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Over the next five decades, he created covers for hundreds of books and magazines (and much more interior artwork), notably Astounding Science Fiction, both before and after its title change to Analog, from 1953 to 2003. He started at Mad magazine in February 1957 and by July 1958 was the magazine's new cover artist; he painted most of its covers until October 1962 (featuring the iconic character, Alfred E. Neuman). He also created cover illustrations for DAW, Signet, Ballantine Books, Avon, all 58 Laser Books (which are now collectors' items), and over 90 covers for Ace books alone. He was editor and artist for the first ten Starblaze books. He illustrated the cover of Jean Shepherd, Ian Ballantine, and Theodore Sturgeon's literary hoax, I, Libertine (Ballantine Books, 1956). That same year he drew cartoon illustrations for Bernard Shir-Cliff's The Wild Reader.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Freas also painted insignia and posters for Skylab I; pinup girls on bombers while in the United States Army Air Forces; comic book covers; the covers of the GURPS worldbooks Lensman and Planet Krishna; and more than 500 saints' portraits for the Franciscans executed simultaneously with his portraits of Alfred E. Neuman for Mad. He was very active in gaming and medical illustration. His cover of Queen's album News of the World (1977) was a pastiche of his October 1953 cover illustration for Tom Godwin's \"The Gulf Between\" for Astounding Science Fiction magazine.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Freas published several collections of his color and black-and-white artwork in the volumes Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction and Frank Kelly Freas: As Others See it, as well as in a spiral-bound collection of his black-and-white illustrations from Astounding Science Fiction. He also frequently gave art presentations, and his work appeared in numerous exhibitions. He was among several of the inaugural recipients of the Hugo Award for Best Artist in 1955 and was recipient under different names of the next three conferred in 1956, 1958, and 1959. With six more Hugo awards to his name (1970 and 1972–76), he became the first person to receive ten Hugo awards (he was nominated 20 times). No other artist in science fiction has consistently matched his record and output.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Freas was twice a Guest of Honor at Worldcon, at Chicon IV in 1982 and at Torcon 3 in 2003, although a fall suffered shortly before the latter convention precluded him from attending.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "He died in West Hills, California and is buried in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "Freas's achievements include the Doctor of Arts, Art Institute of Pittsburgh, December 2003. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted him in 2006, the second artist after Chesley Bonestell.",
"title": "Awards"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Biography and criticism",
"title": "External links"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Bibliography and works",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Frank Kelly Freas was an American science fiction and fantasy artist with a career spanning more than 50 years. He was known as the "Dean of Science Fiction Artists" and he was the second artist inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
|
2001-10-13T19:39:37Z
|
2023-12-22T04:32:49Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Freas
|
16,988 |
Knock-knock joke
|
The knock-knock joke is a type of audience-participation joke cycle, typically ending with a pun; knock-knock jokes are primarily seen as children's jokes, though there are exceptions.
The scenario is of a person knocking on the front door to a house. The teller of the joke says, "Knock, knock!"; the recipient responds, "Who's there?" The teller gives a name (such as "Noah"), a description (such as "Police"), or something that purports to be a name (such as "Needle"). The other person then responds by asking the caller's surname ("Noah who?" / "Police who?" / "Needle who?"), to which the joke-teller delivers a pun involving the name ("Noah place I can spend the night?" / "Police let me in—it's cold out here!" / "Needle little help with the groceries!").
The formula of the joke is usually followed strictly, though there are cases where it is subverted.
A possible source of the joke is William Shakespeare's Macbeth; first performed in 1606. In Act 2, Scene 3, the porter is very hungover from the previous night. During his monologue, he uses "Knock, knock! Who's there" as a refrain while he is speaking:
Knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you'll sweat for't. Knock, knock! Who's there, in the other devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator.
Writing in the Oakland Tribune, Merely McEvoy recalled a style of joke from around 1900 where a person would ask a question such as "Do you know Arthur?", the unsuspecting listener responding with "Arthur who?" and the joke teller answering "Arthurmometer!"
A variation of the format in the form of a children's game was described in 1929. In the game of Buff, a child with a stick thumps it on the ground, and the dialogue ensues:
Knock, knock! Who's there? Buff. What says Buff? Buff says Buff to all his men, And I say Buff to you again.
In 1936, Bob Dunn authored the book Knock Knock: Featuring Enoch Knox, and he is regarded by some as having invented the modern knock-knock joke.
In 1936, the standard knock-knock joke format was used in a newspaper advertisement. That joke was:
Knock, knock! Who's there? Rufus. Rufus who? Rufus the most important part of your house.
A 1936 Associated Press newspaper article said that "What's This?" had given way to "Knock Knock!" as a favorite parlor game. The article also said that "knock knock" seemed to be an outgrowth of making up sentences with difficult words, an old parlor favorite. A popular joke of 1936 (the year of Edward VIII's brief reign) was "Knock knock. Who's there? Edward Rex. Edward Rex who? Edward Rex the Coronation." Fred Allen's 30 December 1936 radio broadcast included a humorous wrapup of the year's least important events, including a supposed interview with the man who "invented a negative craze" on 1 April: "Ramrod Dank... the first man to coin a Knock Knock."
"Knock knock" was the catchphrase of music hall performer Wee Georgie Wood, who was recorded in 1936 saying it in a radio play, but he simply used the words as a reference to his surname and did not use it as part of the well-known joke formula. The format was well known in the UK and US in the 1950s and 1960s before falling out of favor. It then enjoyed a renaissance after the jokes became a regular part of the badinage on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "The knock-knock joke is a type of audience-participation joke cycle, typically ending with a pun; knock-knock jokes are primarily seen as children's jokes, though there are exceptions.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "The scenario is of a person knocking on the front door to a house. The teller of the joke says, \"Knock, knock!\"; the recipient responds, \"Who's there?\" The teller gives a name (such as \"Noah\"), a description (such as \"Police\"), or something that purports to be a name (such as \"Needle\"). The other person then responds by asking the caller's surname (\"Noah who?\" / \"Police who?\" / \"Needle who?\"), to which the joke-teller delivers a pun involving the name (\"Noah place I can spend the night?\" / \"Police let me in—it's cold out here!\" / \"Needle little help with the groceries!\").",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The formula of the joke is usually followed strictly, though there are cases where it is subverted.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "A possible source of the joke is William Shakespeare's Macbeth; first performed in 1606. In Act 2, Scene 3, the porter is very hungover from the previous night. During his monologue, he uses \"Knock, knock! Who's there\" as a refrain while he is speaking:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Knock, knock! Who's there, i' the name of Beelzebub? Here's a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you'll sweat for't. Knock, knock! Who's there, in the other devil's name? Faith, here's an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Writing in the Oakland Tribune, Merely McEvoy recalled a style of joke from around 1900 where a person would ask a question such as \"Do you know Arthur?\", the unsuspecting listener responding with \"Arthur who?\" and the joke teller answering \"Arthurmometer!\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "A variation of the format in the form of a children's game was described in 1929. In the game of Buff, a child with a stick thumps it on the ground, and the dialogue ensues:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Knock, knock! Who's there? Buff. What says Buff? Buff says Buff to all his men, And I say Buff to you again.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "In 1936, Bob Dunn authored the book Knock Knock: Featuring Enoch Knox, and he is regarded by some as having invented the modern knock-knock joke.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "In 1936, the standard knock-knock joke format was used in a newspaper advertisement. That joke was:",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Knock, knock! Who's there? Rufus. Rufus who? Rufus the most important part of your house.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "A 1936 Associated Press newspaper article said that \"What's This?\" had given way to \"Knock Knock!\" as a favorite parlor game. The article also said that \"knock knock\" seemed to be an outgrowth of making up sentences with difficult words, an old parlor favorite. A popular joke of 1936 (the year of Edward VIII's brief reign) was \"Knock knock. Who's there? Edward Rex. Edward Rex who? Edward Rex the Coronation.\" Fred Allen's 30 December 1936 radio broadcast included a humorous wrapup of the year's least important events, including a supposed interview with the man who \"invented a negative craze\" on 1 April: \"Ramrod Dank... the first man to coin a Knock Knock.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "\"Knock knock\" was the catchphrase of music hall performer Wee Georgie Wood, who was recorded in 1936 saying it in a radio play, but he simply used the words as a reference to his surname and did not use it as part of the well-known joke formula. The format was well known in the UK and US in the 1950s and 1960s before falling out of favor. It then enjoyed a renaissance after the jokes became a regular part of the badinage on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.",
"title": "Popular culture"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "",
"title": "References"
}
] |
The knock-knock joke is a type of audience-participation joke cycle, typically ending with a pun; knock-knock jokes are primarily seen as children's jokes, though there are exceptions. The scenario is of a person knocking on the front door to a house. The teller of the joke says, "Knock, knock!"; the recipient responds, "Who's there?" The teller gives a name, a description, or something that purports to be a name. The other person then responds by asking the caller's surname, to which the joke-teller delivers a pun involving the name. The formula of the joke is usually followed strictly, though there are cases where it is subverted.
|
2001-10-15T20:01:38Z
|
2023-12-21T20:16:11Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock-knock_joke
|
16,989 |
Kangol
|
Kangol is a British clothing company famous for its headwear. The name Kangol reflects the original materials for production, the K coming from the word 'silK' (a recent attribution to 'Knitting' is incorrect), the ANG from 'ANGora', and the OL from 'woOL'. Although no Kangol hat has ever actually been manufactured in Australia, the Kangaroo logo was adopted by Kangol in 1983 because Americans commonly asked where they could get "the Kangaroo hat".
Founded in 1938 by a Polish Jew, Jacques Spreiregen, Kangol produced hats for workers, golfers, and especially soldiers. Spreiregen, born Jacob Henryk Spreiregen in Warsaw in 1893, emigrated with his family to Paris in 1906. He then moved to London in 1914, where he worked as an importer and seller of various products that included wool, woollen goods, and berets. He served in the British Army in World War I, joining the Labour Corps to drive ambulances, and obtained British nationality in 1920. In 1938 he was joined by his nephew Joseph Meisner to open and run the first Kangol factory at Cleator, Cumbria, England. A second factory was opened at nearby Frizington, and later, under the direction of Spreiregen's younger nephew Sylvain Meisner, a third factory, manufacturing motorcycle helmets and seat belts in Carlisle. Kangol was the major supplier of berets for the armed forces during World War II; the company also provided the berets for the British Olympic Team in 1948.
Kangol has been owned by Sports Direct since 2006, when it acquired the brand from private-equity fund August Equity Trust. Licences to manufacture and sell Kangol apparel have been sold to many different companies, including D2 and Topshop. In 2002, the Kangol apparel brand was acquired by Kangol Clothing North America LLC, a subsidiary of Chesterfield Manufacturing Corp in Charlotte North Carolina. In 2003, Chesterfield was acquired by Tomasello Inc., which was wholly owned and led by David W. Tomasello. The global rights to Kangol hats have been held by American hatmakers Bollman Hat Company since 2002.
It was announced in February 2009 that Bollman were reviewing their worldwide operations, putting 33 jobs and the future of the Kangol head office in Cleator in doubt. On 6 April 2009, it was announced that the original factory would be converted to a warehouse with the loss of 25 jobs. No employees now remain employed at the company's original site as the outlet shop closed at the end of August 2009. The site in Frizington is now a housing estate, whilst the original Cleator site has been partly demolished to provide a Park & Ride facility for nearby Sellafield and to facilitate other potential redevelopment. However, hats will continue to be made at their sites in Eastern Europe and the United States.
In the 1960s, designers Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin worked with the company, whose products graced the heads of the rich and famous, including the Beatles and Arnold Palmer, and later Diana, Princess of Wales. The company also supplied uniformed organisations such as the Scout Association.
In the 1980s Kangol berets entered a new phase of fashion history with their adoption by members of the hip-hop community, such as Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, Kangol Kid of UTFO, and The Notorious B.I.G.
The brand was popularised even more by the 1991 movie New Jack City. The release of more consciously stylish products in the 1990s such as the furgora (angora-wool mix) Spitfire, was helped by its presence upon the head of Samuel L. Jackson in 1997. Kevin Eubanks, bandleader for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, sported a Kangol beret on an almost nightly basis.
In 2009, Eminem wore the Cotton Twill Army Cap Kangol hat on his Beautiful video.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kangol is a British clothing company famous for its headwear. The name Kangol reflects the original materials for production, the K coming from the word 'silK' (a recent attribution to 'Knitting' is incorrect), the ANG from 'ANGora', and the OL from 'woOL'. Although no Kangol hat has ever actually been manufactured in Australia, the Kangaroo logo was adopted by Kangol in 1983 because Americans commonly asked where they could get \"the Kangaroo hat\".",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Founded in 1938 by a Polish Jew, Jacques Spreiregen, Kangol produced hats for workers, golfers, and especially soldiers. Spreiregen, born Jacob Henryk Spreiregen in Warsaw in 1893, emigrated with his family to Paris in 1906. He then moved to London in 1914, where he worked as an importer and seller of various products that included wool, woollen goods, and berets. He served in the British Army in World War I, joining the Labour Corps to drive ambulances, and obtained British nationality in 1920. In 1938 he was joined by his nephew Joseph Meisner to open and run the first Kangol factory at Cleator, Cumbria, England. A second factory was opened at nearby Frizington, and later, under the direction of Spreiregen's younger nephew Sylvain Meisner, a third factory, manufacturing motorcycle helmets and seat belts in Carlisle. Kangol was the major supplier of berets for the armed forces during World War II; the company also provided the berets for the British Olympic Team in 1948.",
"title": "Early history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kangol has been owned by Sports Direct since 2006, when it acquired the brand from private-equity fund August Equity Trust. Licences to manufacture and sell Kangol apparel have been sold to many different companies, including D2 and Topshop. In 2002, the Kangol apparel brand was acquired by Kangol Clothing North America LLC, a subsidiary of Chesterfield Manufacturing Corp in Charlotte North Carolina. In 2003, Chesterfield was acquired by Tomasello Inc., which was wholly owned and led by David W. Tomasello. The global rights to Kangol hats have been held by American hatmakers Bollman Hat Company since 2002.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "It was announced in February 2009 that Bollman were reviewing their worldwide operations, putting 33 jobs and the future of the Kangol head office in Cleator in doubt. On 6 April 2009, it was announced that the original factory would be converted to a warehouse with the loss of 25 jobs. No employees now remain employed at the company's original site as the outlet shop closed at the end of August 2009. The site in Frizington is now a housing estate, whilst the original Cleator site has been partly demolished to provide a Park & Ride facility for nearby Sellafield and to facilitate other potential redevelopment. However, hats will continue to be made at their sites in Eastern Europe and the United States.",
"title": "Recent history"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "In the 1960s, designers Mary Quant and Pierre Cardin worked with the company, whose products graced the heads of the rich and famous, including the Beatles and Arnold Palmer, and later Diana, Princess of Wales. The company also supplied uniformed organisations such as the Scout Association.",
"title": "Pop fashion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "In the 1980s Kangol berets entered a new phase of fashion history with their adoption by members of the hip-hop community, such as Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Slick Rick, Kangol Kid of UTFO, and The Notorious B.I.G.",
"title": "Pop fashion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "The brand was popularised even more by the 1991 movie New Jack City. The release of more consciously stylish products in the 1990s such as the furgora (angora-wool mix) Spitfire, was helped by its presence upon the head of Samuel L. Jackson in 1997. Kevin Eubanks, bandleader for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, sported a Kangol beret on an almost nightly basis.",
"title": "Pop fashion"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "In 2009, Eminem wore the Cotton Twill Army Cap Kangol hat on his Beautiful video.",
"title": "Pop fashion"
}
] |
Kangol is a British clothing company famous for its headwear. The name Kangol reflects the original materials for production, the K coming from the word 'silK', the ANG from 'ANGora', and the OL from 'woOL'. Although no Kangol hat has ever actually been manufactured in Australia, the Kangaroo logo was adopted by Kangol in 1983 because Americans commonly asked where they could get "the Kangaroo hat".
|
2001-10-15T13:13:54Z
|
2023-11-17T09:06:15Z
|
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Keith Moon
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Keith John Moon (23 August 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English musician who was the drummer for the rock band the Who. Regarded as one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock music, he was noted for his unique style of playing and his eccentric, often self-destructive behaviour.
Moon grew up in Wembley and took up the drums during the early 1960s. After playing with a local band, the Beachcombers, he joined the Who in 1964 before they recorded their first single. Moon was recognised for his drumming style, which emphasised tom-toms, cymbal crashes, and drum fills. Throughout his tenure with the Who, his drum kit steadily grew in size, and (along with Ginger Baker) he has been credited as one of the earliest rock drummers to regularly employ double bass drums in his setup. Moon occasionally collaborated with other musicians and later appeared in films, but considered playing in the Who his primary occupation, and remained a member of the band until his death. In addition to his talent as a drummer, Moon developed a reputation for smashing his kit on stage and destroying hotel rooms on tour. He was fascinated with blowing up toilets with cherry bombs or dynamite, and destroying television sets. Moon also enjoyed touring and socialising, and became bored and restless when the Who were inactive. His 21st birthday party in Flint, Michigan, has been cited as a notorious example of decadent behaviour by rock groups.
Moon suffered a number of setbacks during the 1970s, most notably the accidental death of chauffeur Neil Boland and the breakdown of his marriage. He suffered from alcoholism and acquired a reputation for decadence and dark humour; his nickname was "Moon the Loon". While touring with the Who, on several occasions he passed out on stage and was hospitalised. By the time of their final tour with him in 1976, and particularly during production of The Kids Are Alright and Who Are You, the drummer's deterioration was evident. Moon moved back to London from Los Angeles in 1978, dying that September from an overdose of clomethiazole, a drug intended to treat or prevent symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.
Moon's drumming continues to be praised by critics and musicians. He was posthumously inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1982, becoming the second rock drummer to be chosen, and in 2011 he was voted the second-greatest drummer in history by a Rolling Stone readers' poll. Moon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 as a member of the Who.
Keith John Moon was born to Alfred Charles (Alf) and Kathleen Winifred (Kit) Moon on 23 August 1946 at Central Middlesex Hospital in northwest London; he grew up in Wembley. Moon was hyperactive as a boy, with a restless imagination and a particular fondness for music and The Goon Show. Moon attended Alperton Secondary Modern School after failing his eleven plus exam, which precluded his attending a grammar school. His art teacher said in a report: "Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects." His music teacher wrote that Moon "has great ability, but must guard against a tendency to show off."
Moon joined his local Sea Cadet Corps band at the age of twelve on the bugle, but found the instrument too difficult to learn and decided to take up drums instead. He was interested in practical jokes and home science kits, with a particular fondness for explosions. On his way home from school, Moon would often go to Macari's Music Studio on Ealing Road to practise on the drums there, learning his basic skills on the instrument. He left school around Easter 1961, at age 14. Moon then enrolled at Harrow Technical College; this led to a job as a radio repairman, enabling him to buy his first drum kit.
Moon took lessons from one of the loudest contemporary drummers, Screaming Lord Sutch's Carlo Little, at ten shillings per lesson. His early style was influenced by jazz, American surf music and rhythm and blues, exemplified by noted Los Angeles studio drummer Hal Blaine. His favourite musicians were jazz artists, particularly Gene Krupa (whose flamboyant style he subsequently copied). He also admired Elvis Presley's original drummer DJ Fontana, The Shadows' original drummer Tony Meehan and the Pretty Things' Viv Prince. Moon also enjoyed singing, with a particular interest in Motown. Moon idolised the Beach Boys; Roger Daltrey later said that given the opportunity, Moon would have left to play for the California band even at the peak of the Who's fame.
During this time Moon joined his first serious band, the Escorts, replacing his best friend Gerry Evans. In December 1962 he joined the Beachcombers, a semi-professional London cover band playing hits by groups such as The Shadows. During his time in the group Moon incorporated theatrical tricks into his act, including "shooting" the group's lead singer with a starter pistol. The Beachcombers all had day jobs; Moon, who worked in the sales department at British Gypsum, had the keenest interest in turning professional. In April 1964, aged 17, he auditioned for the Who as a replacement for Doug Sandom. The Beachcombers continued as a local cover band after his departure.
A commonly cited story of how Moon joined the Who is that he appeared at a show shortly after Sandom's departure, where a session drummer was used. Dressed in ginger clothes and with his hair dyed ginger (future bandmate Pete Townshend later described him as a "ginger vision"), he claimed to his would-be bandmates that he could play better; he played in the set's second half, nearly demolishing the drum kit in the process.
As Moon later recounted: "[T]hey said go ahead, and I got behind this other guy's drums and did one song—'Road Runner.' I'd several drinks to get me courage up and when I got onstage I went arrgggGhhhh on the drums, broke the bass drum pedal and two skins, and got off. I figured that was it. I was scared to death. Afterwards I was sitting at the bar and Pete came over. He said: 'You ... come 'ere.' I said, mild as you please: 'Yes, yes?' And Roger, who was the spokesman then, said: 'What are you doing next Monday?' I said: 'Nothing.' I was working during the day, selling plaster. He said: 'You'll have to give up work ... there's this gig on Monday. If you want to come, we'll pick you up in the van.' I said: 'Right.' And that was it." Moon later claimed that he was never formally invited to join the Who permanently; when Ringo Starr asked how he had joined the band, he said he had "just been filling in for the last fifteen years."
Moon's arrival in the Who changed the dynamics of the group. Sandom had generally been the peacemaker as Daltrey and Townshend feuded between themselves, but because of Moon's temperament the group now had four members frequently in conflict. "We used to fight regularly", remembered Moon in later years. "John [Entwistle] and I used to have fights–it wasn't very serious, it was more of an emotional spur-of-the moment thing." Moon also clashed with Daltrey and Townshend: "We really have absolutely nothing in common apart from music", he said in a later interview. Although Townshend described him as a "completely different person to anyone I've ever met", the pair had a rapport in the early years and enjoyed practical jokes and improvised comedy. Moon's drumming style affected the band's musical structure; although Entwistle initially found Moon's lack of conventional timekeeping problematic, it created an original sound.
Moon was particularly fond of touring since it was his only chance to regularly socialise with his bandmates, and was generally restless and bored when not playing live. This later carried over to other aspects of his life, as he acted them out (according to journalist and Who biographer Dave Marsh) "as if his life were one long tour." These antics earned him the nickname "Moon the Loon".
I suppose as a drummer, I'm adequate. I've got no real aspirations to be a great drummer. I just want to play drums for the Who and that's it.
—Keith Moon, Melody Maker, September 1970
Moon's style of drumming was considered unique by his bandmates, although they sometimes found his unconventional playing frustrating; Entwistle noted that he tended to play faster or slower according to his mood. "He wouldn't play across his kit", he later added. "He'd play zig-zag. That's why he had two sets of tom-toms. He'd move his arms forward like a skier." Daltrey said that Moon "just instinctively put drum fills in places that other people would never have thought of putting them."
Who biographer John Atkins wrote that the group's early test sessions for Pye Records in 1964 show that "they seemed to have understood just how important was ... Moon's contribution." Contemporary critics questioned his ability to keep time, with biographer Tony Fletcher suggesting that the timing on Tommy was "all over the place." Who producer Jon Astley said, "You didn't think he was keeping time, but he was." In the opinion of Atkins, early recordings of Moon's drumming sound tinny and disorganised; it was not until the recording of Who's Next, with Glyn Johns' no-nonsense production techniques and the need to keep time to a synthesizer track, that Moon began developing more discipline in the studio. Fletcher considers the drumming on this album to be the best of Moon's career.
Unlike contemporary rock drummers such as Ginger Baker and John Bonham, Moon hated drum solos and refused to play them in concert. At a Madison Square Garden show during The Who's 1974 tour, Townshend and Entwistle decided to spontaneously stop playing during "Waspman" to listen to Moon's drum solo. Moon continued briefly and then stopped, shouting, "Drum solos are boring!" On 23 June 1977, he made a guest appearance at a Led Zeppelin concert in Los Angeles.
Moon also aspired to sing lead vocal on some songs. While the other three members handled most of the onstage vocals, Moon would attempt to sing backup (particularly on "I Can't Explain"). He provided humorous commentary during song announcements, although sound engineer Bob Pridden preferred to mute his vocal microphone on the mixing desk whenever possible. Moon's knack for making his bandmates laugh around the microphone led them to banish him from the studio when vocals were being recorded; this led to a game in which Moon would sneak in to join the singing. At the end of "Happy Jack", Townshend can be heard saying, "I saw ya!" to Moon as he tries to sneak into the studio. The drummer's interest in surf music and his desire to sing led to his performing lead vocals on several early tracks, including "Bucket T" and "Barbara Ann" (Ready Steady Who EP, 1966) and high backing vocals on other songs, such as "Pictures of Lily". His performance on "Bell Boy" (Quadrophenia, 1973) saw him abandon "serious" vocal performances to sing in character, which gave him (in Fletcher's words) "full licence to live up to his reputation as a lecherous drunk"; it was "exactly the kind of performance the Who needed from him to bring them back down to earth."
Moon composed "I Need You", the instrumental "Cobwebs and Strange" (from the album A Quick One, 1966), the single B-sides "In The City" (co-written with Entwistle) and "Girl's Eyes" (from The Who Sell Out sessions featured on Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and a 1995 re-release of The Who Sell Out), "Dogs Part Two" (1969), "Tommy's Holiday Camp" (1969) and "Waspman" (1972). Moon also co-composed "The Ox" (an instrumental from their debut album, My Generation) with Townshend, Entwistle and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. The setting for "Tommy's Holiday Camp" (from Tommy) was credited to Moon; the song was primarily written by Townshend and, although there is a misconception that Moon sings on it, the album version is Townshend's demo.
Moon produced the violin solo on "Baba O'Riley". Moon sat in on congas with East of Eden at London's Lyceum Ballroom, and afterwards suggested to violinist Dave Arbus that he play on the track.
Moon played a four- and later a five-piece drum kit during his early career. During much of 1964 and 1965 his setups consisted of Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals. He began to endorse Premier Drums in late 1965 and remained a loyal customer of the company. His first Premier kit was in red sparkle and featured two high toms. In 1966, Moon moved to an even larger kit, but without the customary hi-hat—at the time he preferred keeping ride rhythms with ride and crash cymbals, but he later reinstated the hi-hats. His new larger configuration was notable for the presence of two bass drums; he, along with Ginger Baker, has been credited as one of the early pioneers of double bass drumming in rock. This kit was not used at the Who's performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. From 1967 to 1969, Moon used the "Pictures of Lily" drum kit (named for its artwork), which had two 22-inch (56 cm) bass drums, two 16-inch (41 cm) floor toms and three mounted toms. In recognition of his loyalty to the company, Premier reissued the kit in 2006 as the "Spirit of Lily".
By 1970, Moon had begun to use timbales, gongs and timpani, and these were included in his setup for the rest of his career. In 1973, Premier's marketing manager, Eddie Haynes, began consulting Moon about specific requirements. At one point, Moon asked Premier to make a white kit with gold-plated fittings. When Haynes said that it would be prohibitively expensive, Moon replied: "Dear boy, do exactly as you feel it should be, but that's the way I want it." The kit was eventually fitted with copper fittings and later given to a young Zak Starkey.
At an early show at the Railway Tavern in Harrow, Townshend smashed his guitar after accidentally breaking it. When the audience demanded he do it again, Moon kicked over his drum kit. Subsequent live sets culminated in what the band later described as "auto-destructive art", in which band members (particularly Moon and Townshend) elaborately destroyed their equipment. Moon developed a habit of kicking over his drums, claiming that he did so in exasperation at an audience's indifference. Townshend later said, "A set of skins is about $300 [then £96] and after every show he'd just go bang, bang, bang and then kick the whole thing over."
In May 1966, Moon discovered that the Beach Boys' Bruce Johnston was visiting London. After the pair socialised for a few days, Moon and Entwistle brought Johnston to the set of Ready Steady Go!, which made them late for a show with the Who that evening. During the finale of "My Generation", an altercation broke out on stage between Moon and Townshend which was reported on the front page of the New Musical Express the following week. Moon and Entwistle left the Who for a week (with Moon hoping to join the Animals or the Nashville Teens), but they changed their minds and returned.
On the Who's early US package tour at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in New York in March and April 1967, Moon performed two or three shows a day, kicking over his drum kit after every show. Later that year, during their appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he bribed a stagehand to load gunpowder into one of his bass drums; the stagehand used about ten times the standard amount. During the finale of "My Generation", he set off the charge. The intensity of the explosion singed Townshend's hair and embedded a piece of cymbal in Moon's arm. A clip of the incident became the opening scene for the film The Kids Are Alright.
Although Moon was known for kicking over his drum kit, Haynes claimed that it was done carefully and the kit rarely needed repairs. However, stands and foot pedals were frequently replaced; the drummer "would go through them like a knife through butter".
While Moon generally said he was only interested in working with the Who, he participated in outside musical projects. In 1966, he worked with Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck, pianist Nicky Hopkins and future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones on the instrumental "Beck's Bolero", which was the B-side to "Hi Ho Silver Lining" and appeared on the album Truth. Moon also played timpani on another track, a cover of Jerome Kern's "Ol' Man River". He was credited on the album as "You Know Who".
Moon may have inspired the name for Led Zeppelin when he supposedly briefly considered leaving the Who in 1966 and spoke with Entwistle and Page about forming a supergroup; Moon (or Entwistle) remarked that a particular suggestion had gone down like a "lead zeppelin" (a play on "lead balloon"). Although this supergroup was never formed, Page remembered the phrase and later adapted it as the name of his new band.
The Beatles became friends with Moon, and this led to occasional collaborations. In 1967, he contributed backing vocals to "All You Need Is Love". On 15 December 1969, Moon joined John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band for a live performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London for a UNICEF charity concert. In 1972, the performance was released as a companion disc to Lennon and Ono's album Some Time in New York City.
Moon's friendship with Entwistle led to an appearance on Smash Your Head Against the Wall, Entwistle's first solo album and the first by a member of the Who. Moon did not play drums on the album; Jerry Shirley did, with Moon providing percussion. Rolling Stone's John Hoegel appreciated Entwistle's decision not to let Moon drum, saying that it distanced his album from the familiar sound of the Who.
Moon became involved in solo work when he moved to Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. Track Records-MCA released a Moon solo single in 1974, comprising cover versions of the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry, Baby" and "Teenage Idol". The following year he released his only solo album, entitled Two Sides of the Moon. Although it featured Moon on vocals, he played drums on only three tracks; most of the drumming was left to others (including Ringo Starr, session musicians Curly Smith and Jim Keltner, and actor-musician Miguel Ferrer). The album was received poorly by critics. New Musical Express's Roy Carr wrote, "Moonie, if you didn't have talent, I wouldn't care; but you have, which is why I'm not about to accept Two Sides of the Moon." Dave Marsh, reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, wrote: "There isn't any legitimate reason for this album's existence." During one of his few televised solo drum performances (for ABC's Wide World), Moon played a five-minute drum solo dressed as a cat on transparent acrylic drums filled with water and goldfish. When asked by an audience member what would happen to the kit, he joked that "even the best drummers get hungry." His performance was not appreciated by animal lovers, several of whom called the station with complaints.
In the 2007 documentary film Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, Daltrey and Townshend reminisced about Moon's talent for dressing as (and embodying) a variety of characters. They remembered his dream of getting out of music and becoming a Hollywood film actor, although Daltrey did not think Moon had the patience and work ethic required of a professional actor. Who manager Bill Curbishley agreed that Moon "wasn't disciplined enough to actually turn up or commit to doing the stuff."
Nevertheless, the drummer landed several acting roles. His first was in 1971, a cameo in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels as a nun afraid of dying from a drug overdose. Although it only took 13 days to film, fellow cast member Howard Kaylan remembers Moon spending off-camera time at the Kensington Garden Hotel bar instead of sleeping. Moon's next film role was J.D. Clover, drummer for the fictional Stormy Tempest (played by Billy Fury) at a holiday camp during the early days of British rock 'n' roll, in 1973's That'll Be the Day. He reprised the role for the film's 1974 sequel, Stardust, in Jim MacLaine's (David Essex) backing band the Stray Cats and played Uncle Ernie in Ken Russell's 1975 film adaptation of Tommy. Moon's last film appearance was in 1978's Sextette.
When you've got money and you do the kind of things I get up to, people laugh and say that you're eccentric, which is a polite way of saying you're fucking mad.
—Keith Moon
Moon led a destructive lifestyle. During the Who's early days he began taking amphetamines, and in a NME interview said his favourite food was "French Blues". He spent his share of the band's income quickly, and was a regular at London clubs such as the Speakeasy (where manager Roy Flynn recalls having to throw him out on three occasions) and The Bag O'Nails. The combination of pills and alcohol escalated into alcoholism and drug addiction later in his life. "[We] went through the same stages everybody goes through – the bloody drug corridor", he later reflected. "Drinking suited the group a lot better."
According to Townshend, Moon began destroying hotel rooms when the Who stayed at the Berlin Hilton on tour in late 1966. In addition to hotel rooms, Moon destroyed friends' homes—and even his own—including throwing furniture from upper-storey windows. Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent estimated that his destruction of hotel toilets and plumbing cost as much as £300,000 ($500,000). These acts, often fuelled by drugs and alcohol, were Moon's way of demonstrating his eccentricity and he enjoyed shocking the public with them. Longtime friend and personal assistant, Dougal Butler, observed: "He was trying to make people laugh and be Mr Funny; he wanted people to love him and enjoy him, but he would go so far. Like a train ride you couldn't stop."
In a limousine on the way to the airport, Moon insisted they return to their hotel, saying "I forgot something." At the hotel he ran back to his room, grabbed the television and threw it out of the window into the swimming pool below. He then jumped back into the limo, saying "I nearly forgot."
Fletcher argues that the Who's lengthy break (15 December 1971 – 11 August 1972) between the end of their 1971 Who's Next Tour and the beginning of the Quadrophenia sessions devastated Moon's health, as without the rigours of lengthy shows and regular touring that had previously kept him in shape, his hard-partying lifestyle took a greater toll on his body. He did not keep a drum kit or practise at Tara, and began to deteriorate physically as a result of his lifestyle. Around the same time he became a severe alcoholic, starting the day with drinks. He changed from the "lovable boozer" he presented himself as to a "boorish drunk". David Puttnam recalled, "The drinking went from being a joke to being a problem. On That'll Be the Day it was social drinking. By the time Stardust came round it was hard drinking."
Moon's favourite stunt was to flush powerful explosives down toilets. According to Fletcher, Moon's toilet pyrotechnics began in 1965 when he purchased a case of 500 cherry bombs. Townshend remembers walking into the bathroom of Moon's hotel room and noticing the toilet had disappeared, with only the S-bend remaining. The drummer explained that since a cherry bomb was about to explode, he had thrown it down the toilet and showed Townshend the case of cherry bombs. "And of course from that moment on," the guitarist remembered, "we got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in."
Moon moved from cherry bombs to M-80 fireworks to sticks of dynamite, which became his explosive of choice. "All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable," Moon remembered. "I never realised dynamite was so powerful. I'd been used to penny bangers before." He quickly developed a reputation for destroying bathrooms and blowing up toilets. The destruction mesmerised him, and enhanced his public image as rock's premier hell-raiser. Tony Fletcher wrote that "no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe" until Moon had exhausted his supply of explosives.
Entwistle recalled being close to Moon on tour and both were often involved in blowing up toilets. In a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview he admitted, "A lot of times when Keith was blowing up toilets I was standing behind him with the matches."
Once, a hotel manager called Moon in his room and asked him to lower the volume on his cassette recorder because it made "too much noise." In response the drummer asked him up to his room, excused himself to go to the bathroom, put a lit stick of dynamite in the toilet and shut the bathroom door. Upon returning, he asked the manager to stay for a moment, as he wanted to explain something. Following the explosion, Moon turned the recorder back on and said, "That, dear boy, was noise. This is the 'Oo.'"
On 23 August 1967, on tour opening for Herman's Hermits, Moon celebrated what he said was his 21st birthday (although it was thought at the time to be his 20th) at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan. Entwistle later said, "He decided that if it was a publicised fact that it was his 21st birthday, he would be able to drink."
The drummer immediately began drinking upon his arrival in Flint. The Who spent the afternoon visiting local radio stations with Nancy Lewis (then the band's publicist), and Moon posed for a photo outside the hotel in front of a "Happy Birthday Keith" sign put up by the hotel management. According to Lewis, Moon was drunk by the time the band went onstage at Atwood Stadium.
Returning to the hotel, Moon started a food fight and soon cake began flying through the air. The drummer knocked out part of his front tooth; at the hospital, doctors could not give him an anaesthetic (due to his inebriation) before removing the remainder of the tooth. Back at the hotel, a mêlée erupted; fire extinguishers were set off, guests (and objects) thrown into the swimming pool and a piano reportedly destroyed. The chaos ended only when police arrived with guns drawn.
A furious Holiday Inn management presented the groups with a bill for $24,000, which was reportedly settled by Herman's Hermits tour manager Edd McCann. Townshend claimed that the Who were banned for life from all of the hotel's properties, but Fletcher wrote that they stayed at a Holiday Inn in Rochester, New York, a week later. He also disputed a widely held belief that Moon drove a Lincoln Continental into the hotel's swimming pool, as claimed by the drummer in a 1972 Rolling Stone interview. However, Roger Daltrey, in an interview on BBC's Top Gear, stated that the group was banned from "an entire state's worth of Holiday Inns", presumably then Michigan. He also claimed that, while he had not personally seen a car in a swimming pool, he had seen a bill for damages and removal.
Moon's lifestyle began to undermine his health and reliability. During the 1973 Quadrophenia tour, at the Who's debut US date at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, Moon ingested a mixture of tranquillisers and brandy. During the concert, Moon passed out on his drum kit during "Won't Get Fooled Again". The band stopped playing, and a group of roadies carried Moon offstage. They gave him a shower and an injection of cortisone, sending him back onstage after a thirty-minute delay. Moon passed out again during "Magic Bus", and was again removed from the stage. The band continued without him for several songs before Townshend asked, "Can anyone play the drums? – I mean somebody good?" A drummer in the audience, Scot Halpin, came up and played the rest of the show.
During the opening date of the band's March 1976 US tour at the Boston Garden, Moon passed out over his drum kit after two numbers and the show was rescheduled. The next evening, Moon systematically destroyed everything in his hotel room, cut himself doing so, and passed out. He was discovered by manager Bill Curbishley, who took him to a hospital, telling him "I'm gonna get the doctor to get you nice and fit, so you're back within two days. Because I want to break your fucking jaw ... You have fucked this band around so many times and I'm not having it any more." Doctors told Curbishley that if he had not intervened, Moon would have bled to death. Marsh suggested that at this point Daltrey and Entwistle seriously considered firing Moon, but decided that doing so would make his life worse.
Entwistle has said that Moon and the Who reached their live peak in 1975–76. At the end of the 1976 US tour in Miami that August, Moon became delirious and was treated in Hollywood Memorial Hospital for eight days. The group was concerned that he would be unable to complete the last leg of the tour, which ended at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on 21 October (Moon's last public show). During the band's recording sabbatical between 1976 and 1978, Moon gained a considerable amount of weight. By the time of the Who's invitation-only show at the Gaumont State Cinema on 15 December 1977 for The Kids are Alright, Moon was visibly overweight and had difficulty sustaining a solid performance. After recording Who Are You, Townshend refused to follow the album with a tour unless Moon stopped drinking and said that if Moon's playing did not improve he would be fired. Daltrey later denied threatening to fire him, but said that by this time Moon was out of control. Entwistle said Moon frequently relieved himself while behind his drum set to the disgust of band members and studio personnel.
Because the Who's early stage act relied on smashing instruments and owing to Moon's enthusiasm for damaging hotels, the group were in debt for much of the 1960s; Entwistle estimated they lost about £150,000. Even when the group became relatively financially stable after Tommy, Moon continued to rack up debts. He bought a number of cars and gadgets and flirted with bankruptcy. Moon's recklessness with money reduced his profit from the group's 1975 UK tour to £47.35 (equivalent to £423 in 2021).
Before the 1998 release of Tony Fletcher's Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon, Moon's date of birth was presumed to be 23 August 1947. This erroneous date appeared in several otherwise-reliable sources, including the Townshend-authorised biography Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who. The incorrect date had been supplied by Moon in interviews before it was corrected by Fletcher to 1946.
Moon's first serious relationship was with Kim Kerrigan, whom he started dating in January 1965 after she saw the Who play at Le Disque a Go! Go! in Bournemouth. By the end of the year she discovered she was pregnant. Her parents, who were furious, met with the Moons to discuss their options, and she moved into the Moon family home in Wembley. She and Moon were married on 17 March 1966 at Brent Register Office, and their daughter Amanda was born on 12 July. The marriage (and child) were kept secret from the press until May 1968. Moon was occasionally violent towards Kim: "if we went out after I had Mandy", she later said, "if someone talked to me, he'd lose it. We'd go home and he'd start a fight with me." He loved Amanda, but his absences due to touring and fondness for practical jokes made their relationship uneasy when she was very young. "He had no idea how to be a father", Kim said. "He was too much of a child himself."
From 1971 to 1975 Moon owned Tara, a home in Chertsey where he initially lived with his wife and daughter. The Moons entertained extravagantly at home, and owned a number of cars. Jack McCullogh, then working for Track Records (the Who's label), recalls Moon ordering him to purchase a milk float to store in the garage at Tara.
In 1973 Kim, convinced that neither she nor anyone else could moderate Keith's behaviour, left her husband and took Amanda; she sued for divorce in 1975 and later married Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan. Marsh believes that Moon never truly recovered from the loss of his family. Butler agrees; despite his relationship with Annette Walter-Lax, he believes that Kim was the only woman Moon loved. McLagan commented that Moon "couldn't handle it." Moon would harass them with phone calls, and on one occasion before Kim sued for divorce, he invited McLagan for a drink at a Richmond pub and sent several "heavies" to break into McLagan's home on Fife Road and look for Kim, forcing her to hide in a walk-in closet. She died in a car accident in Austin, Texas, on 2 August 2006.
In 1975 Moon began a relationship with Swedish model Annette Walter-Lax, who later said that Moon was "so sweet when he was sober, that I was just living with him in the hope that he would kick all this craziness." She begged Malibu neighbour Larry Hagman to check Moon into a clinic to dry out (as he had attempted to do before), but when doctors recorded Moon's chemical intake at breakfast, a bottle of champagne, Courvoisier and amphetamines, they concluded that there was no hope for his rehabilitation.
Moon enjoyed being the life of the party. Bill Curbishley remembered that "he wouldn't walk into any room and just listen. He was an attention seeker and he had to have it."
Early in the Who's career, Moon got to know the Beatles. He would join them at clubs, forming a particularly close friendship with Ringo Starr. Moon later became friends with Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band members Vivian Stanshall and "Legs" Larry Smith, and the trio would drink and play practical jokes together. Smith remembers one occasion where he and Moon tore apart a pair of trousers, with an accomplice later looking for one-legged trousers. In the early 1970s, Moon helped Stanshall with his "Radio Flashes" radio show for BBC Radio 1, filling in for the vacationing John Peel. Moon filled in for Peel in 1973's "A Touch of the Moon", a series of four programmes produced by John Walters.
Guitarist Joe Walsh enjoyed socialising with Moon. In an interview with Guitar World magazine, he recalled that the drummer "taught me how to break things." In 1974, Moon struck up a friendship with actor Oliver Reed while working on the film version of Tommy. Although Reed matched Moon drink for drink, he appeared on set the next morning ready to perform; Moon, on the other hand, would cost several hours of filming time. Reed later said that Moon "showed me the way to insanity."
Peter "Dougal" Butler began working for the Who in 1967, becoming Moon's personal assistant the following year to help him stay out of trouble. He remembers managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp saying, "We trust you with Keith but if you ever want any time off, for a holiday or some sort of rest, let us know and we'll pay for it." Butler never took them up on the offer.
He followed Moon when the drummer relocated to Los Angeles, but felt that the drug culture prevalent at the time was bad for Moon: "My job was to have eyes in the back of my head." Townshend agreed, saying that by 1975 Butler had "no influence over him whatsoever." Although he was a loyal companion to Moon, the lifestyle eventually became too much for him; he phoned Curbishley, saying that they needed to move back to England or one of them might die. Butler quit in 1978, and later wrote of his experiences in a book entitled Full Moon: The Amazing Rock and Roll Life of Keith Moon.
On 4 January 1970, Moon accidentally killed his friend, driver and bodyguard, Neil Boland, outside the Red Lion pub in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Pub patrons had begun to attack his Bentley; Moon, drunk, began driving to escape them and hit Boland. After an investigation, the coroner ruled Boland's death an accident; Moon, having been charged with a number of offences, received an absolute discharge.
Those close to Moon said that he was haunted by Boland's death for the rest of his life. According to Pamela Des Barres, Moon had nightmares (which woke them both) about the incident and said he had no right to be alive.
In mid-1978, Moon moved into Flat 12, 9 Curzon Place (later Curzon Square), Shepherd Market, Mayfair, London, renting from Harry Nilsson. Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died there four years earlier, at the age of 32; Nilsson was concerned about letting the flat to Moon, believing it was cursed. Townshend disagreed, assuring him that "lightning wouldn't strike the same place twice".
After moving in, Moon began a prescribed course of Heminevrin (clomethiazole, a sedative) to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. He wanted to get sober, but because of his fear of psychiatric hospitals, he wanted to do it at home. Clomethiazole is discouraged for unsupervised detoxification because of its addictive potential, its tendency to induce tolerance, and its risk of death when mixed with alcohol. The pills were prescribed by Geoffrey Dymond, a physician who was unaware of Moon's lifestyle. Dymond prescribed a bottle of 100 pills, instructing him to take one pill when he felt a craving for alcohol but not more than three pills per day.
By September 1978, Moon was having difficulty playing the drums, according to roadie Dave "Cy" Langston. After seeing Moon in the studio trying to overdub drums for The Kids Are Alright, he said, "After two or three hours, he got more and more sluggish, he could barely hold a drum stick."
On 6 September, Moon and Walter-Lax were guests of Paul and Linda McCartney at a preview of a film, The Buddy Holly Story. After dining with the McCartneys at Peppermint Park in Covent Garden, Moon and Walter-Lax returned to their flat. He watched a film (The Abominable Dr. Phibes), and asked Walter-Lax to cook him lamb cutlets (which Walter-Lax had stated was his favourite meal). When she objected, Moon replied, "If you don't like it, you can fuck off!" These were his last words. Moon then took some clomethiazole tablets. When Walter-Lax checked on him the following afternoon, she discovered he was dead.
Curbishley phoned the flat at around 5:00 p.m. looking for Moon, and Dymond gave him the news. Curbishley told Townshend, who informed the rest of the band. Entwistle was giving an interview to two journalists when he was interrupted by a phone call with the news of Moon's death. When asked about the band's future plans, Entwistle burst into tears and quickly ended the interview.
Moon's death came shortly after the release of Who Are You. On the album cover, he is straddling a chair to hide his weight gain; the words "Not to be taken away" are on the back of the chair. Police determined that there were 32 clomethiazole pills in Moon's system. Six were digested, sufficient to cause his death; the other 26 were undigested when he died. Max Glatt, an authority on alcoholism, wrote in The Sunday Times that Moon should never have been given the drug. Moon was cremated on 13 September 1978 at Golders Green Crematorium in London, and his ashes were scattered in its Gardens of Remembrance.
Townshend persuaded Daltrey and Entwistle to carry on touring as The Who, although he later said that it was his means of coping with Moon's death and "completely irrational, bordering on insane". AllMusic's Bruce Eder said, "When Keith Moon died, the Who carried on and were far more competent and reliable musically, but that wasn't what sold rock records." In November 1978, Faces drummer Kenney Jones joined the Who. Townshend later said that Jones "was one of the few British drummers who could fill Keith's shoes"; Daltrey was less enthusiastic, saying that Jones "wasn't the right style". Keyboardist John "Rabbit" Bundrick, who had rehearsed with Moon earlier in the year, joined the live band as an unofficial member.
Jones left the Who in 1988, and drummer Simon Phillips (who praised Moon's ability to drum over the backing track of "Baba O'Riley") toured with the band the following year. Since 1996, the Who's drummer has been Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey who, as a child, had been given a drum kit by Moon (whom he called "Uncle Keith"). Starkey had previously toured in 1994 with Roger Daltrey.
The London 2012 Summer Olympic Committee contacted Curbishley about Moon performing at the games, 34 years after his death. In an interview with The Times Curbishley quipped, "I emailed back saying Keith now resides in Golders Green Crematorium, having lived up to the Who's anthemic line 'I hope I die before I get old' ... If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him."
Moon's drumming has been praised by critics. Author Nick Talevski described him as "the greatest drummer in rock", adding that "he was to the drums what Jimi Hendrix was to the guitar." Holly George-Warren, editor and author of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First 25 Years, said: "With the death of Keith Moon in 1978, rock arguably lost its single greatest drummer." According to AllMusic critic Bruce Eder, "Moon, with his manic, lunatic side, and his life of excessive drinking, partying, and other indulgences, probably represented the youthful, zany side of rock & roll, as well as its self-destructive side, better than anyone else on the planet." The New Book of Rock Lists ranked Moon No. 1 on its list of "50 Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Drummers", and he was ranked No. 2 on the 2011 Rolling Stone "Best Drummers of All Time" readers' poll. In 2016, the same magazine ranked him No. 2 in their list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, behind John Bonham. Adam Budofsky, editor of Drummer magazine, said that Moon's performances on Who's Next and Quadrophenia "represent a perfect balance of technique and passion" and "there's been no drummer who's touched his unique slant on rock and rhythm since."
Several rock drummers, including Neil Peart have cited Moon as an influence. The Jam paid homage to Moon on the second single from their third album, "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight"; the B-side of the single is a Who cover ("So Sad About Us"), and the back cover of the record has a photo of Moon's face. The Jam's single was released about a month after Moon's death. Animal, one of Jim Henson's Muppet characters, may have been based on Keith Moon due to their similar hair, eyebrows, personality and drumming style. Jazz drummer Elvin Jones praised Moon's work during "Underture", as integral to the song's effect.
Ray Davies notably lauded Moon's drumming during his speech for the Kinks' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1990: "... Keith Moon changed the sound of drumming."
"God bless his beautiful heart ..." Ozzy Osbourne told Sounds a month after the drummer's death. "People will be talking about Keith Moon 'til they die, man. Someone somewhere will say, 'Remember Keith Moon?' Who will remember Joe Bloggs who got killed in a car crash? No one. He's dead, so what? He didn't do anything to talk of."
Clem Burke of Blondie has said "Early on all I cared about was Keith Moon and the Who. When I was about eleven or twelve, my favourite part of drum lessons was the last ten minutes, when I'd get to sit at the drumset and play along to my favourite record. I'd bring in 'My Generation'. At the end of the song, the drums go nuts. 'My Generation' was a turning point for me because before that it was all the Charlie Watts and Ringo type of thing."
In 1998 Tony Fletcher published a biography of Moon, Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon, in the United Kingdom. The phrase "Dear Boy" became a catchphrase of Moon's when, influenced by Kit Lambert, he began affecting a pompous English accent. In 2000, the book was released in the US as Moon (The Life and Death of a Rock Legend). Q Magazine called the book "horrific and terrific reading", and Record Collector said it was "one of rock's great biographies."
In 2008, English Heritage declined an application for Moon to be awarded a blue plaque. Speaking to The Guardian, Christopher Frayling said they "decided that bad behaviour and overdosing on various substances wasn't a sufficient qualification." The UK's Heritage Foundation disagreed with the decision, presenting a plaque which was unveiled on 9 March 2009. Daltrey, Townshend, Robin Gibb and Moon's mother Kit were present at the ceremony.
Other appearances
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Keith John Moon (23 August 1946 – 7 September 1978) was an English musician who was the drummer for the rock band the Who. Regarded as one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock music, he was noted for his unique style of playing and his eccentric, often self-destructive behaviour.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Moon grew up in Wembley and took up the drums during the early 1960s. After playing with a local band, the Beachcombers, he joined the Who in 1964 before they recorded their first single. Moon was recognised for his drumming style, which emphasised tom-toms, cymbal crashes, and drum fills. Throughout his tenure with the Who, his drum kit steadily grew in size, and (along with Ginger Baker) he has been credited as one of the earliest rock drummers to regularly employ double bass drums in his setup. Moon occasionally collaborated with other musicians and later appeared in films, but considered playing in the Who his primary occupation, and remained a member of the band until his death. In addition to his talent as a drummer, Moon developed a reputation for smashing his kit on stage and destroying hotel rooms on tour. He was fascinated with blowing up toilets with cherry bombs or dynamite, and destroying television sets. Moon also enjoyed touring and socialising, and became bored and restless when the Who were inactive. His 21st birthday party in Flint, Michigan, has been cited as a notorious example of decadent behaviour by rock groups.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Moon suffered a number of setbacks during the 1970s, most notably the accidental death of chauffeur Neil Boland and the breakdown of his marriage. He suffered from alcoholism and acquired a reputation for decadence and dark humour; his nickname was \"Moon the Loon\". While touring with the Who, on several occasions he passed out on stage and was hospitalised. By the time of their final tour with him in 1976, and particularly during production of The Kids Are Alright and Who Are You, the drummer's deterioration was evident. Moon moved back to London from Los Angeles in 1978, dying that September from an overdose of clomethiazole, a drug intended to treat or prevent symptoms of alcohol withdrawal.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Moon's drumming continues to be praised by critics and musicians. He was posthumously inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1982, becoming the second rock drummer to be chosen, and in 2011 he was voted the second-greatest drummer in history by a Rolling Stone readers' poll. Moon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 as a member of the Who.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "Keith John Moon was born to Alfred Charles (Alf) and Kathleen Winifred (Kit) Moon on 23 August 1946 at Central Middlesex Hospital in northwest London; he grew up in Wembley. Moon was hyperactive as a boy, with a restless imagination and a particular fondness for music and The Goon Show. Moon attended Alperton Secondary Modern School after failing his eleven plus exam, which precluded his attending a grammar school. His art teacher said in a report: \"Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects.\" His music teacher wrote that Moon \"has great ability, but must guard against a tendency to show off.\"",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "Moon joined his local Sea Cadet Corps band at the age of twelve on the bugle, but found the instrument too difficult to learn and decided to take up drums instead. He was interested in practical jokes and home science kits, with a particular fondness for explosions. On his way home from school, Moon would often go to Macari's Music Studio on Ealing Road to practise on the drums there, learning his basic skills on the instrument. He left school around Easter 1961, at age 14. Moon then enrolled at Harrow Technical College; this led to a job as a radio repairman, enabling him to buy his first drum kit.",
"title": "Early life"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Moon took lessons from one of the loudest contemporary drummers, Screaming Lord Sutch's Carlo Little, at ten shillings per lesson. His early style was influenced by jazz, American surf music and rhythm and blues, exemplified by noted Los Angeles studio drummer Hal Blaine. His favourite musicians were jazz artists, particularly Gene Krupa (whose flamboyant style he subsequently copied). He also admired Elvis Presley's original drummer DJ Fontana, The Shadows' original drummer Tony Meehan and the Pretty Things' Viv Prince. Moon also enjoyed singing, with a particular interest in Motown. Moon idolised the Beach Boys; Roger Daltrey later said that given the opportunity, Moon would have left to play for the California band even at the peak of the Who's fame.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "During this time Moon joined his first serious band, the Escorts, replacing his best friend Gerry Evans. In December 1962 he joined the Beachcombers, a semi-professional London cover band playing hits by groups such as The Shadows. During his time in the group Moon incorporated theatrical tricks into his act, including \"shooting\" the group's lead singer with a starter pistol. The Beachcombers all had day jobs; Moon, who worked in the sales department at British Gypsum, had the keenest interest in turning professional. In April 1964, aged 17, he auditioned for the Who as a replacement for Doug Sandom. The Beachcombers continued as a local cover band after his departure.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "A commonly cited story of how Moon joined the Who is that he appeared at a show shortly after Sandom's departure, where a session drummer was used. Dressed in ginger clothes and with his hair dyed ginger (future bandmate Pete Townshend later described him as a \"ginger vision\"), he claimed to his would-be bandmates that he could play better; he played in the set's second half, nearly demolishing the drum kit in the process.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "As Moon later recounted: \"[T]hey said go ahead, and I got behind this other guy's drums and did one song—'Road Runner.' I'd several drinks to get me courage up and when I got onstage I went arrgggGhhhh on the drums, broke the bass drum pedal and two skins, and got off. I figured that was it. I was scared to death. Afterwards I was sitting at the bar and Pete came over. He said: 'You ... come 'ere.' I said, mild as you please: 'Yes, yes?' And Roger, who was the spokesman then, said: 'What are you doing next Monday?' I said: 'Nothing.' I was working during the day, selling plaster. He said: 'You'll have to give up work ... there's this gig on Monday. If you want to come, we'll pick you up in the van.' I said: 'Right.' And that was it.\" Moon later claimed that he was never formally invited to join the Who permanently; when Ringo Starr asked how he had joined the band, he said he had \"just been filling in for the last fifteen years.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Moon's arrival in the Who changed the dynamics of the group. Sandom had generally been the peacemaker as Daltrey and Townshend feuded between themselves, but because of Moon's temperament the group now had four members frequently in conflict. \"We used to fight regularly\", remembered Moon in later years. \"John [Entwistle] and I used to have fights–it wasn't very serious, it was more of an emotional spur-of-the moment thing.\" Moon also clashed with Daltrey and Townshend: \"We really have absolutely nothing in common apart from music\", he said in a later interview. Although Townshend described him as a \"completely different person to anyone I've ever met\", the pair had a rapport in the early years and enjoyed practical jokes and improvised comedy. Moon's drumming style affected the band's musical structure; although Entwistle initially found Moon's lack of conventional timekeeping problematic, it created an original sound.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Moon was particularly fond of touring since it was his only chance to regularly socialise with his bandmates, and was generally restless and bored when not playing live. This later carried over to other aspects of his life, as he acted them out (according to journalist and Who biographer Dave Marsh) \"as if his life were one long tour.\" These antics earned him the nickname \"Moon the Loon\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "I suppose as a drummer, I'm adequate. I've got no real aspirations to be a great drummer. I just want to play drums for the Who and that's it.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "—Keith Moon, Melody Maker, September 1970",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Moon's style of drumming was considered unique by his bandmates, although they sometimes found his unconventional playing frustrating; Entwistle noted that he tended to play faster or slower according to his mood. \"He wouldn't play across his kit\", he later added. \"He'd play zig-zag. That's why he had two sets of tom-toms. He'd move his arms forward like a skier.\" Daltrey said that Moon \"just instinctively put drum fills in places that other people would never have thought of putting them.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Who biographer John Atkins wrote that the group's early test sessions for Pye Records in 1964 show that \"they seemed to have understood just how important was ... Moon's contribution.\" Contemporary critics questioned his ability to keep time, with biographer Tony Fletcher suggesting that the timing on Tommy was \"all over the place.\" Who producer Jon Astley said, \"You didn't think he was keeping time, but he was.\" In the opinion of Atkins, early recordings of Moon's drumming sound tinny and disorganised; it was not until the recording of Who's Next, with Glyn Johns' no-nonsense production techniques and the need to keep time to a synthesizer track, that Moon began developing more discipline in the studio. Fletcher considers the drumming on this album to be the best of Moon's career.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Unlike contemporary rock drummers such as Ginger Baker and John Bonham, Moon hated drum solos and refused to play them in concert. At a Madison Square Garden show during The Who's 1974 tour, Townshend and Entwistle decided to spontaneously stop playing during \"Waspman\" to listen to Moon's drum solo. Moon continued briefly and then stopped, shouting, \"Drum solos are boring!\" On 23 June 1977, he made a guest appearance at a Led Zeppelin concert in Los Angeles.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Moon also aspired to sing lead vocal on some songs. While the other three members handled most of the onstage vocals, Moon would attempt to sing backup (particularly on \"I Can't Explain\"). He provided humorous commentary during song announcements, although sound engineer Bob Pridden preferred to mute his vocal microphone on the mixing desk whenever possible. Moon's knack for making his bandmates laugh around the microphone led them to banish him from the studio when vocals were being recorded; this led to a game in which Moon would sneak in to join the singing. At the end of \"Happy Jack\", Townshend can be heard saying, \"I saw ya!\" to Moon as he tries to sneak into the studio. The drummer's interest in surf music and his desire to sing led to his performing lead vocals on several early tracks, including \"Bucket T\" and \"Barbara Ann\" (Ready Steady Who EP, 1966) and high backing vocals on other songs, such as \"Pictures of Lily\". His performance on \"Bell Boy\" (Quadrophenia, 1973) saw him abandon \"serious\" vocal performances to sing in character, which gave him (in Fletcher's words) \"full licence to live up to his reputation as a lecherous drunk\"; it was \"exactly the kind of performance the Who needed from him to bring them back down to earth.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Moon composed \"I Need You\", the instrumental \"Cobwebs and Strange\" (from the album A Quick One, 1966), the single B-sides \"In The City\" (co-written with Entwistle) and \"Girl's Eyes\" (from The Who Sell Out sessions featured on Thirty Years of Maximum R&B and a 1995 re-release of The Who Sell Out), \"Dogs Part Two\" (1969), \"Tommy's Holiday Camp\" (1969) and \"Waspman\" (1972). Moon also co-composed \"The Ox\" (an instrumental from their debut album, My Generation) with Townshend, Entwistle and keyboardist Nicky Hopkins. The setting for \"Tommy's Holiday Camp\" (from Tommy) was credited to Moon; the song was primarily written by Townshend and, although there is a misconception that Moon sings on it, the album version is Townshend's demo.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Moon produced the violin solo on \"Baba O'Riley\". Moon sat in on congas with East of Eden at London's Lyceum Ballroom, and afterwards suggested to violinist Dave Arbus that he play on the track.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "Moon played a four- and later a five-piece drum kit during his early career. During much of 1964 and 1965 his setups consisted of Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals. He began to endorse Premier Drums in late 1965 and remained a loyal customer of the company. His first Premier kit was in red sparkle and featured two high toms. In 1966, Moon moved to an even larger kit, but without the customary hi-hat—at the time he preferred keeping ride rhythms with ride and crash cymbals, but he later reinstated the hi-hats. His new larger configuration was notable for the presence of two bass drums; he, along with Ginger Baker, has been credited as one of the early pioneers of double bass drumming in rock. This kit was not used at the Who's performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. From 1967 to 1969, Moon used the \"Pictures of Lily\" drum kit (named for its artwork), which had two 22-inch (56 cm) bass drums, two 16-inch (41 cm) floor toms and three mounted toms. In recognition of his loyalty to the company, Premier reissued the kit in 2006 as the \"Spirit of Lily\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "By 1970, Moon had begun to use timbales, gongs and timpani, and these were included in his setup for the rest of his career. In 1973, Premier's marketing manager, Eddie Haynes, began consulting Moon about specific requirements. At one point, Moon asked Premier to make a white kit with gold-plated fittings. When Haynes said that it would be prohibitively expensive, Moon replied: \"Dear boy, do exactly as you feel it should be, but that's the way I want it.\" The kit was eventually fitted with copper fittings and later given to a young Zak Starkey.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "At an early show at the Railway Tavern in Harrow, Townshend smashed his guitar after accidentally breaking it. When the audience demanded he do it again, Moon kicked over his drum kit. Subsequent live sets culminated in what the band later described as \"auto-destructive art\", in which band members (particularly Moon and Townshend) elaborately destroyed their equipment. Moon developed a habit of kicking over his drums, claiming that he did so in exasperation at an audience's indifference. Townshend later said, \"A set of skins is about $300 [then £96] and after every show he'd just go bang, bang, bang and then kick the whole thing over.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In May 1966, Moon discovered that the Beach Boys' Bruce Johnston was visiting London. After the pair socialised for a few days, Moon and Entwistle brought Johnston to the set of Ready Steady Go!, which made them late for a show with the Who that evening. During the finale of \"My Generation\", an altercation broke out on stage between Moon and Townshend which was reported on the front page of the New Musical Express the following week. Moon and Entwistle left the Who for a week (with Moon hoping to join the Animals or the Nashville Teens), but they changed their minds and returned.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "On the Who's early US package tour at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in New York in March and April 1967, Moon performed two or three shows a day, kicking over his drum kit after every show. Later that year, during their appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he bribed a stagehand to load gunpowder into one of his bass drums; the stagehand used about ten times the standard amount. During the finale of \"My Generation\", he set off the charge. The intensity of the explosion singed Townshend's hair and embedded a piece of cymbal in Moon's arm. A clip of the incident became the opening scene for the film The Kids Are Alright.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Although Moon was known for kicking over his drum kit, Haynes claimed that it was done carefully and the kit rarely needed repairs. However, stands and foot pedals were frequently replaced; the drummer \"would go through them like a knife through butter\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "While Moon generally said he was only interested in working with the Who, he participated in outside musical projects. In 1966, he worked with Yardbirds guitarist Jeff Beck, pianist Nicky Hopkins and future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones on the instrumental \"Beck's Bolero\", which was the B-side to \"Hi Ho Silver Lining\" and appeared on the album Truth. Moon also played timpani on another track, a cover of Jerome Kern's \"Ol' Man River\". He was credited on the album as \"You Know Who\".",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Moon may have inspired the name for Led Zeppelin when he supposedly briefly considered leaving the Who in 1966 and spoke with Entwistle and Page about forming a supergroup; Moon (or Entwistle) remarked that a particular suggestion had gone down like a \"lead zeppelin\" (a play on \"lead balloon\"). Although this supergroup was never formed, Page remembered the phrase and later adapted it as the name of his new band.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "The Beatles became friends with Moon, and this led to occasional collaborations. In 1967, he contributed backing vocals to \"All You Need Is Love\". On 15 December 1969, Moon joined John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band for a live performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London for a UNICEF charity concert. In 1972, the performance was released as a companion disc to Lennon and Ono's album Some Time in New York City.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Moon's friendship with Entwistle led to an appearance on Smash Your Head Against the Wall, Entwistle's first solo album and the first by a member of the Who. Moon did not play drums on the album; Jerry Shirley did, with Moon providing percussion. Rolling Stone's John Hoegel appreciated Entwistle's decision not to let Moon drum, saying that it distanced his album from the familiar sound of the Who.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "Moon became involved in solo work when he moved to Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. Track Records-MCA released a Moon solo single in 1974, comprising cover versions of the Beach Boys' \"Don't Worry, Baby\" and \"Teenage Idol\". The following year he released his only solo album, entitled Two Sides of the Moon. Although it featured Moon on vocals, he played drums on only three tracks; most of the drumming was left to others (including Ringo Starr, session musicians Curly Smith and Jim Keltner, and actor-musician Miguel Ferrer). The album was received poorly by critics. New Musical Express's Roy Carr wrote, \"Moonie, if you didn't have talent, I wouldn't care; but you have, which is why I'm not about to accept Two Sides of the Moon.\" Dave Marsh, reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, wrote: \"There isn't any legitimate reason for this album's existence.\" During one of his few televised solo drum performances (for ABC's Wide World), Moon played a five-minute drum solo dressed as a cat on transparent acrylic drums filled with water and goldfish. When asked by an audience member what would happen to the kit, he joked that \"even the best drummers get hungry.\" His performance was not appreciated by animal lovers, several of whom called the station with complaints.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "In the 2007 documentary film Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who, Daltrey and Townshend reminisced about Moon's talent for dressing as (and embodying) a variety of characters. They remembered his dream of getting out of music and becoming a Hollywood film actor, although Daltrey did not think Moon had the patience and work ethic required of a professional actor. Who manager Bill Curbishley agreed that Moon \"wasn't disciplined enough to actually turn up or commit to doing the stuff.\"",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Nevertheless, the drummer landed several acting roles. His first was in 1971, a cameo in Frank Zappa's 200 Motels as a nun afraid of dying from a drug overdose. Although it only took 13 days to film, fellow cast member Howard Kaylan remembers Moon spending off-camera time at the Kensington Garden Hotel bar instead of sleeping. Moon's next film role was J.D. Clover, drummer for the fictional Stormy Tempest (played by Billy Fury) at a holiday camp during the early days of British rock 'n' roll, in 1973's That'll Be the Day. He reprised the role for the film's 1974 sequel, Stardust, in Jim MacLaine's (David Essex) backing band the Stray Cats and played Uncle Ernie in Ken Russell's 1975 film adaptation of Tommy. Moon's last film appearance was in 1978's Sextette.",
"title": "Career"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "When you've got money and you do the kind of things I get up to, people laugh and say that you're eccentric, which is a polite way of saying you're fucking mad.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "—Keith Moon",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Moon led a destructive lifestyle. During the Who's early days he began taking amphetamines, and in a NME interview said his favourite food was \"French Blues\". He spent his share of the band's income quickly, and was a regular at London clubs such as the Speakeasy (where manager Roy Flynn recalls having to throw him out on three occasions) and The Bag O'Nails. The combination of pills and alcohol escalated into alcoholism and drug addiction later in his life. \"[We] went through the same stages everybody goes through – the bloody drug corridor\", he later reflected. \"Drinking suited the group a lot better.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "According to Townshend, Moon began destroying hotel rooms when the Who stayed at the Berlin Hilton on tour in late 1966. In addition to hotel rooms, Moon destroyed friends' homes—and even his own—including throwing furniture from upper-storey windows. Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent estimated that his destruction of hotel toilets and plumbing cost as much as £300,000 ($500,000). These acts, often fuelled by drugs and alcohol, were Moon's way of demonstrating his eccentricity and he enjoyed shocking the public with them. Longtime friend and personal assistant, Dougal Butler, observed: \"He was trying to make people laugh and be Mr Funny; he wanted people to love him and enjoy him, but he would go so far. Like a train ride you couldn't stop.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In a limousine on the way to the airport, Moon insisted they return to their hotel, saying \"I forgot something.\" At the hotel he ran back to his room, grabbed the television and threw it out of the window into the swimming pool below. He then jumped back into the limo, saying \"I nearly forgot.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Fletcher argues that the Who's lengthy break (15 December 1971 – 11 August 1972) between the end of their 1971 Who's Next Tour and the beginning of the Quadrophenia sessions devastated Moon's health, as without the rigours of lengthy shows and regular touring that had previously kept him in shape, his hard-partying lifestyle took a greater toll on his body. He did not keep a drum kit or practise at Tara, and began to deteriorate physically as a result of his lifestyle. Around the same time he became a severe alcoholic, starting the day with drinks. He changed from the \"lovable boozer\" he presented himself as to a \"boorish drunk\". David Puttnam recalled, \"The drinking went from being a joke to being a problem. On That'll Be the Day it was social drinking. By the time Stardust came round it was hard drinking.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Moon's favourite stunt was to flush powerful explosives down toilets. According to Fletcher, Moon's toilet pyrotechnics began in 1965 when he purchased a case of 500 cherry bombs. Townshend remembers walking into the bathroom of Moon's hotel room and noticing the toilet had disappeared, with only the S-bend remaining. The drummer explained that since a cherry bomb was about to explode, he had thrown it down the toilet and showed Townshend the case of cherry bombs. \"And of course from that moment on,\" the guitarist remembered, \"we got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Moon moved from cherry bombs to M-80 fireworks to sticks of dynamite, which became his explosive of choice. \"All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable,\" Moon remembered. \"I never realised dynamite was so powerful. I'd been used to penny bangers before.\" He quickly developed a reputation for destroying bathrooms and blowing up toilets. The destruction mesmerised him, and enhanced his public image as rock's premier hell-raiser. Tony Fletcher wrote that \"no toilet in a hotel or changing room was safe\" until Moon had exhausted his supply of explosives.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "Entwistle recalled being close to Moon on tour and both were often involved in blowing up toilets. In a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview he admitted, \"A lot of times when Keith was blowing up toilets I was standing behind him with the matches.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Once, a hotel manager called Moon in his room and asked him to lower the volume on his cassette recorder because it made \"too much noise.\" In response the drummer asked him up to his room, excused himself to go to the bathroom, put a lit stick of dynamite in the toilet and shut the bathroom door. Upon returning, he asked the manager to stay for a moment, as he wanted to explain something. Following the explosion, Moon turned the recorder back on and said, \"That, dear boy, was noise. This is the 'Oo.'\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "On 23 August 1967, on tour opening for Herman's Hermits, Moon celebrated what he said was his 21st birthday (although it was thought at the time to be his 20th) at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan. Entwistle later said, \"He decided that if it was a publicised fact that it was his 21st birthday, he would be able to drink.\"",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "The drummer immediately began drinking upon his arrival in Flint. The Who spent the afternoon visiting local radio stations with Nancy Lewis (then the band's publicist), and Moon posed for a photo outside the hotel in front of a \"Happy Birthday Keith\" sign put up by the hotel management. According to Lewis, Moon was drunk by the time the band went onstage at Atwood Stadium.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Returning to the hotel, Moon started a food fight and soon cake began flying through the air. The drummer knocked out part of his front tooth; at the hospital, doctors could not give him an anaesthetic (due to his inebriation) before removing the remainder of the tooth. Back at the hotel, a mêlée erupted; fire extinguishers were set off, guests (and objects) thrown into the swimming pool and a piano reportedly destroyed. The chaos ended only when police arrived with guns drawn.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "A furious Holiday Inn management presented the groups with a bill for $24,000, which was reportedly settled by Herman's Hermits tour manager Edd McCann. Townshend claimed that the Who were banned for life from all of the hotel's properties, but Fletcher wrote that they stayed at a Holiday Inn in Rochester, New York, a week later. He also disputed a widely held belief that Moon drove a Lincoln Continental into the hotel's swimming pool, as claimed by the drummer in a 1972 Rolling Stone interview. However, Roger Daltrey, in an interview on BBC's Top Gear, stated that the group was banned from \"an entire state's worth of Holiday Inns\", presumably then Michigan. He also claimed that, while he had not personally seen a car in a swimming pool, he had seen a bill for damages and removal.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "Moon's lifestyle began to undermine his health and reliability. During the 1973 Quadrophenia tour, at the Who's debut US date at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, Moon ingested a mixture of tranquillisers and brandy. During the concert, Moon passed out on his drum kit during \"Won't Get Fooled Again\". The band stopped playing, and a group of roadies carried Moon offstage. They gave him a shower and an injection of cortisone, sending him back onstage after a thirty-minute delay. Moon passed out again during \"Magic Bus\", and was again removed from the stage. The band continued without him for several songs before Townshend asked, \"Can anyone play the drums? – I mean somebody good?\" A drummer in the audience, Scot Halpin, came up and played the rest of the show.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "During the opening date of the band's March 1976 US tour at the Boston Garden, Moon passed out over his drum kit after two numbers and the show was rescheduled. The next evening, Moon systematically destroyed everything in his hotel room, cut himself doing so, and passed out. He was discovered by manager Bill Curbishley, who took him to a hospital, telling him \"I'm gonna get the doctor to get you nice and fit, so you're back within two days. Because I want to break your fucking jaw ... You have fucked this band around so many times and I'm not having it any more.\" Doctors told Curbishley that if he had not intervened, Moon would have bled to death. Marsh suggested that at this point Daltrey and Entwistle seriously considered firing Moon, but decided that doing so would make his life worse.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "Entwistle has said that Moon and the Who reached their live peak in 1975–76. At the end of the 1976 US tour in Miami that August, Moon became delirious and was treated in Hollywood Memorial Hospital for eight days. The group was concerned that he would be unable to complete the last leg of the tour, which ended at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on 21 October (Moon's last public show). During the band's recording sabbatical between 1976 and 1978, Moon gained a considerable amount of weight. By the time of the Who's invitation-only show at the Gaumont State Cinema on 15 December 1977 for The Kids are Alright, Moon was visibly overweight and had difficulty sustaining a solid performance. After recording Who Are You, Townshend refused to follow the album with a tour unless Moon stopped drinking and said that if Moon's playing did not improve he would be fired. Daltrey later denied threatening to fire him, but said that by this time Moon was out of control. Entwistle said Moon frequently relieved himself while behind his drum set to the disgust of band members and studio personnel.",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "Because the Who's early stage act relied on smashing instruments and owing to Moon's enthusiasm for damaging hotels, the group were in debt for much of the 1960s; Entwistle estimated they lost about £150,000. Even when the group became relatively financially stable after Tommy, Moon continued to rack up debts. He bought a number of cars and gadgets and flirted with bankruptcy. Moon's recklessness with money reduced his profit from the group's 1975 UK tour to £47.35 (equivalent to £423 in 2021).",
"title": "Destructive behaviour"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Before the 1998 release of Tony Fletcher's Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon, Moon's date of birth was presumed to be 23 August 1947. This erroneous date appeared in several otherwise-reliable sources, including the Townshend-authorised biography Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who. The incorrect date had been supplied by Moon in interviews before it was corrected by Fletcher to 1946.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "Moon's first serious relationship was with Kim Kerrigan, whom he started dating in January 1965 after she saw the Who play at Le Disque a Go! Go! in Bournemouth. By the end of the year she discovered she was pregnant. Her parents, who were furious, met with the Moons to discuss their options, and she moved into the Moon family home in Wembley. She and Moon were married on 17 March 1966 at Brent Register Office, and their daughter Amanda was born on 12 July. The marriage (and child) were kept secret from the press until May 1968. Moon was occasionally violent towards Kim: \"if we went out after I had Mandy\", she later said, \"if someone talked to me, he'd lose it. We'd go home and he'd start a fight with me.\" He loved Amanda, but his absences due to touring and fondness for practical jokes made their relationship uneasy when she was very young. \"He had no idea how to be a father\", Kim said. \"He was too much of a child himself.\"",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "From 1971 to 1975 Moon owned Tara, a home in Chertsey where he initially lived with his wife and daughter. The Moons entertained extravagantly at home, and owned a number of cars. Jack McCullogh, then working for Track Records (the Who's label), recalls Moon ordering him to purchase a milk float to store in the garage at Tara.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "In 1973 Kim, convinced that neither she nor anyone else could moderate Keith's behaviour, left her husband and took Amanda; she sued for divorce in 1975 and later married Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan. Marsh believes that Moon never truly recovered from the loss of his family. Butler agrees; despite his relationship with Annette Walter-Lax, he believes that Kim was the only woman Moon loved. McLagan commented that Moon \"couldn't handle it.\" Moon would harass them with phone calls, and on one occasion before Kim sued for divorce, he invited McLagan for a drink at a Richmond pub and sent several \"heavies\" to break into McLagan's home on Fife Road and look for Kim, forcing her to hide in a walk-in closet. She died in a car accident in Austin, Texas, on 2 August 2006.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "In 1975 Moon began a relationship with Swedish model Annette Walter-Lax, who later said that Moon was \"so sweet when he was sober, that I was just living with him in the hope that he would kick all this craziness.\" She begged Malibu neighbour Larry Hagman to check Moon into a clinic to dry out (as he had attempted to do before), but when doctors recorded Moon's chemical intake at breakfast, a bottle of champagne, Courvoisier and amphetamines, they concluded that there was no hope for his rehabilitation.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "Moon enjoyed being the life of the party. Bill Curbishley remembered that \"he wouldn't walk into any room and just listen. He was an attention seeker and he had to have it.\"",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Early in the Who's career, Moon got to know the Beatles. He would join them at clubs, forming a particularly close friendship with Ringo Starr. Moon later became friends with Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band members Vivian Stanshall and \"Legs\" Larry Smith, and the trio would drink and play practical jokes together. Smith remembers one occasion where he and Moon tore apart a pair of trousers, with an accomplice later looking for one-legged trousers. In the early 1970s, Moon helped Stanshall with his \"Radio Flashes\" radio show for BBC Radio 1, filling in for the vacationing John Peel. Moon filled in for Peel in 1973's \"A Touch of the Moon\", a series of four programmes produced by John Walters.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "Guitarist Joe Walsh enjoyed socialising with Moon. In an interview with Guitar World magazine, he recalled that the drummer \"taught me how to break things.\" In 1974, Moon struck up a friendship with actor Oliver Reed while working on the film version of Tommy. Although Reed matched Moon drink for drink, he appeared on set the next morning ready to perform; Moon, on the other hand, would cost several hours of filming time. Reed later said that Moon \"showed me the way to insanity.\"",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 59,
"text": "Peter \"Dougal\" Butler began working for the Who in 1967, becoming Moon's personal assistant the following year to help him stay out of trouble. He remembers managers Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp saying, \"We trust you with Keith but if you ever want any time off, for a holiday or some sort of rest, let us know and we'll pay for it.\" Butler never took them up on the offer.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 60,
"text": "He followed Moon when the drummer relocated to Los Angeles, but felt that the drug culture prevalent at the time was bad for Moon: \"My job was to have eyes in the back of my head.\" Townshend agreed, saying that by 1975 Butler had \"no influence over him whatsoever.\" Although he was a loyal companion to Moon, the lifestyle eventually became too much for him; he phoned Curbishley, saying that they needed to move back to England or one of them might die. Butler quit in 1978, and later wrote of his experiences in a book entitled Full Moon: The Amazing Rock and Roll Life of Keith Moon.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 61,
"text": "On 4 January 1970, Moon accidentally killed his friend, driver and bodyguard, Neil Boland, outside the Red Lion pub in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Pub patrons had begun to attack his Bentley; Moon, drunk, began driving to escape them and hit Boland. After an investigation, the coroner ruled Boland's death an accident; Moon, having been charged with a number of offences, received an absolute discharge.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 62,
"text": "Those close to Moon said that he was haunted by Boland's death for the rest of his life. According to Pamela Des Barres, Moon had nightmares (which woke them both) about the incident and said he had no right to be alive.",
"title": "Personal life and relationships"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 63,
"text": "In mid-1978, Moon moved into Flat 12, 9 Curzon Place (later Curzon Square), Shepherd Market, Mayfair, London, renting from Harry Nilsson. Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died there four years earlier, at the age of 32; Nilsson was concerned about letting the flat to Moon, believing it was cursed. Townshend disagreed, assuring him that \"lightning wouldn't strike the same place twice\".",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 64,
"text": "After moving in, Moon began a prescribed course of Heminevrin (clomethiazole, a sedative) to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. He wanted to get sober, but because of his fear of psychiatric hospitals, he wanted to do it at home. Clomethiazole is discouraged for unsupervised detoxification because of its addictive potential, its tendency to induce tolerance, and its risk of death when mixed with alcohol. The pills were prescribed by Geoffrey Dymond, a physician who was unaware of Moon's lifestyle. Dymond prescribed a bottle of 100 pills, instructing him to take one pill when he felt a craving for alcohol but not more than three pills per day.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 65,
"text": "By September 1978, Moon was having difficulty playing the drums, according to roadie Dave \"Cy\" Langston. After seeing Moon in the studio trying to overdub drums for The Kids Are Alright, he said, \"After two or three hours, he got more and more sluggish, he could barely hold a drum stick.\"",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 66,
"text": "On 6 September, Moon and Walter-Lax were guests of Paul and Linda McCartney at a preview of a film, The Buddy Holly Story. After dining with the McCartneys at Peppermint Park in Covent Garden, Moon and Walter-Lax returned to their flat. He watched a film (The Abominable Dr. Phibes), and asked Walter-Lax to cook him lamb cutlets (which Walter-Lax had stated was his favourite meal). When she objected, Moon replied, \"If you don't like it, you can fuck off!\" These were his last words. Moon then took some clomethiazole tablets. When Walter-Lax checked on him the following afternoon, she discovered he was dead.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 67,
"text": "Curbishley phoned the flat at around 5:00 p.m. looking for Moon, and Dymond gave him the news. Curbishley told Townshend, who informed the rest of the band. Entwistle was giving an interview to two journalists when he was interrupted by a phone call with the news of Moon's death. When asked about the band's future plans, Entwistle burst into tears and quickly ended the interview.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 68,
"text": "Moon's death came shortly after the release of Who Are You. On the album cover, he is straddling a chair to hide his weight gain; the words \"Not to be taken away\" are on the back of the chair. Police determined that there were 32 clomethiazole pills in Moon's system. Six were digested, sufficient to cause his death; the other 26 were undigested when he died. Max Glatt, an authority on alcoholism, wrote in The Sunday Times that Moon should never have been given the drug. Moon was cremated on 13 September 1978 at Golders Green Crematorium in London, and his ashes were scattered in its Gardens of Remembrance.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 69,
"text": "Townshend persuaded Daltrey and Entwistle to carry on touring as The Who, although he later said that it was his means of coping with Moon's death and \"completely irrational, bordering on insane\". AllMusic's Bruce Eder said, \"When Keith Moon died, the Who carried on and were far more competent and reliable musically, but that wasn't what sold rock records.\" In November 1978, Faces drummer Kenney Jones joined the Who. Townshend later said that Jones \"was one of the few British drummers who could fill Keith's shoes\"; Daltrey was less enthusiastic, saying that Jones \"wasn't the right style\". Keyboardist John \"Rabbit\" Bundrick, who had rehearsed with Moon earlier in the year, joined the live band as an unofficial member.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 70,
"text": "Jones left the Who in 1988, and drummer Simon Phillips (who praised Moon's ability to drum over the backing track of \"Baba O'Riley\") toured with the band the following year. Since 1996, the Who's drummer has been Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey who, as a child, had been given a drum kit by Moon (whom he called \"Uncle Keith\"). Starkey had previously toured in 1994 with Roger Daltrey.",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 71,
"text": "The London 2012 Summer Olympic Committee contacted Curbishley about Moon performing at the games, 34 years after his death. In an interview with The Times Curbishley quipped, \"I emailed back saying Keith now resides in Golders Green Crematorium, having lived up to the Who's anthemic line 'I hope I die before I get old' ... If they have a round table, some glasses and candles, we might contact him.\"",
"title": "Death"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 72,
"text": "Moon's drumming has been praised by critics. Author Nick Talevski described him as \"the greatest drummer in rock\", adding that \"he was to the drums what Jimi Hendrix was to the guitar.\" Holly George-Warren, editor and author of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: The First 25 Years, said: \"With the death of Keith Moon in 1978, rock arguably lost its single greatest drummer.\" According to AllMusic critic Bruce Eder, \"Moon, with his manic, lunatic side, and his life of excessive drinking, partying, and other indulgences, probably represented the youthful, zany side of rock & roll, as well as its self-destructive side, better than anyone else on the planet.\" The New Book of Rock Lists ranked Moon No. 1 on its list of \"50 Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Drummers\", and he was ranked No. 2 on the 2011 Rolling Stone \"Best Drummers of All Time\" readers' poll. In 2016, the same magazine ranked him No. 2 in their list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, behind John Bonham. Adam Budofsky, editor of Drummer magazine, said that Moon's performances on Who's Next and Quadrophenia \"represent a perfect balance of technique and passion\" and \"there's been no drummer who's touched his unique slant on rock and rhythm since.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 73,
"text": "Several rock drummers, including Neil Peart have cited Moon as an influence. The Jam paid homage to Moon on the second single from their third album, \"Down in the Tube Station at Midnight\"; the B-side of the single is a Who cover (\"So Sad About Us\"), and the back cover of the record has a photo of Moon's face. The Jam's single was released about a month after Moon's death. Animal, one of Jim Henson's Muppet characters, may have been based on Keith Moon due to their similar hair, eyebrows, personality and drumming style. Jazz drummer Elvin Jones praised Moon's work during \"Underture\", as integral to the song's effect.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 74,
"text": "Ray Davies notably lauded Moon's drumming during his speech for the Kinks' induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1990: \"... Keith Moon changed the sound of drumming.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 75,
"text": "\"God bless his beautiful heart ...\" Ozzy Osbourne told Sounds a month after the drummer's death. \"People will be talking about Keith Moon 'til they die, man. Someone somewhere will say, 'Remember Keith Moon?' Who will remember Joe Bloggs who got killed in a car crash? No one. He's dead, so what? He didn't do anything to talk of.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 76,
"text": "Clem Burke of Blondie has said \"Early on all I cared about was Keith Moon and the Who. When I was about eleven or twelve, my favourite part of drum lessons was the last ten minutes, when I'd get to sit at the drumset and play along to my favourite record. I'd bring in 'My Generation'. At the end of the song, the drums go nuts. 'My Generation' was a turning point for me because before that it was all the Charlie Watts and Ringo type of thing.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 77,
"text": "In 1998 Tony Fletcher published a biography of Moon, Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon, in the United Kingdom. The phrase \"Dear Boy\" became a catchphrase of Moon's when, influenced by Kit Lambert, he began affecting a pompous English accent. In 2000, the book was released in the US as Moon (The Life and Death of a Rock Legend). Q Magazine called the book \"horrific and terrific reading\", and Record Collector said it was \"one of rock's great biographies.\"",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 78,
"text": "In 2008, English Heritage declined an application for Moon to be awarded a blue plaque. Speaking to The Guardian, Christopher Frayling said they \"decided that bad behaviour and overdosing on various substances wasn't a sufficient qualification.\" The UK's Heritage Foundation disagreed with the decision, presenting a plaque which was unveiled on 9 March 2009. Daltrey, Townshend, Robin Gibb and Moon's mother Kit were present at the ceremony.",
"title": "Legacy"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 79,
"text": "Other appearances",
"title": "Discography"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 80,
"text": "",
"title": "External links"
}
] |
Keith John Moon was an English musician who was the drummer for the rock band the Who. Regarded as one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock music, he was noted for his unique style of playing and his eccentric, often self-destructive behaviour. Moon grew up in Wembley and took up the drums during the early 1960s. After playing with a local band, the Beachcombers, he joined the Who in 1964 before they recorded their first single. Moon was recognised for his drumming style, which emphasised tom-toms, cymbal crashes, and drum fills. Throughout his tenure with the Who, his drum kit steadily grew in size, and he has been credited as one of the earliest rock drummers to regularly employ double bass drums in his setup. Moon occasionally collaborated with other musicians and later appeared in films, but considered playing in the Who his primary occupation, and remained a member of the band until his death. In addition to his talent as a drummer, Moon developed a reputation for smashing his kit on stage and destroying hotel rooms on tour. He was fascinated with blowing up toilets with cherry bombs or dynamite, and destroying television sets. Moon also enjoyed touring and socialising, and became bored and restless when the Who were inactive. His 21st birthday party in Flint, Michigan, has been cited as a notorious example of decadent behaviour by rock groups. Moon suffered a number of setbacks during the 1970s, most notably the accidental death of chauffeur Neil Boland and the breakdown of his marriage. He suffered from alcoholism and acquired a reputation for decadence and dark humour; his nickname was "Moon the Loon". While touring with the Who, on several occasions he passed out on stage and was hospitalised. By the time of their final tour with him in 1976, and particularly during production of The Kids Are Alright and Who Are You, the drummer's deterioration was evident. Moon moved back to London from Los Angeles in 1978, dying that September from an overdose of clomethiazole, a drug intended to treat or prevent symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Moon's drumming continues to be praised by critics and musicians. He was posthumously inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1982, becoming the second rock drummer to be chosen, and in 2011 he was voted the second-greatest drummer in history by a Rolling Stone readers' poll. Moon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990 as a member of the Who.
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2001-10-15T13:19:04Z
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2023-12-30T15:01:32Z
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Kerosene
|
Kerosene, or paraffin, is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from Greek: κηρός (kērós) meaning "wax", and was registered as a trademark by Canadian geologist and inventor Abraham Gesner in 1854 before evolving into a generic trademark. It is sometimes spelled kerosine in scientific and industrial usage.
Kerosene is widely used to power jet engines of aircraft (jet fuel), as well as some rocket engines in a highly refined form called RP-1. It is also commonly used as a cooking and lighting fuel, and for fire toys such as poi. In parts of Asia, kerosene is sometimes used as fuel for small outboard motors or even motorcycles. World total kerosene consumption for all purposes is equivalent to about 5,500,000 barrels per day as of July 2023.
The term kerosene is common in much of Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, and the United States, while the term paraffin (or a closely related variant) is used in Chile, Eastern Africa, South Africa, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The term lamp oil, or the equivalent in the local languages, is common in the majority of Asia and the Southeastern United States.
Confusingly, the name paraffin is also used to refer to a number of distinct petroleum byproducts other than kerosene. For instance, liquid paraffin (called mineral oil in the US) is a more viscous and highly refined product which is used as a laxative. Paraffin wax is a waxy solid extracted from petroleum.
To prevent confusion between kerosene and the much more flammable and volatile gasoline (petrol), some jurisdictions regulate markings or colourings for containers used to store or dispense kerosene. For example, in the United States, Pennsylvania requires that portable containers used at retail service stations for kerosene be colored blue, as opposed to red (for gasoline) or yellow (for diesel).
The World Health Organization considers kerosene to be a polluting fuel and recommends that "governments and practitioners immediately stop promoting its household use". Kerosene smoke contains high levels of harmful particulate matter, and household use of kerosene is associated with higher risks of cancer, respiratory infections, asthma, tuberculosis, cataracts, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Kerosene is a low-viscosity, clear liquid formed from hydrocarbons obtained from the fractional distillation of petroleum between 150 and 275 °C (300 and 525 °F), resulting in a mixture with a density of 0.78–0.81 g/cm. It is miscible in petroleum solvents but immiscible in water. It is composed of hydrocarbon molecules that typically contain between 6 and 20 carbon atoms per molecule, predominantly containing 9 to 16 carbon atoms.
Regardless of crude oil source or processing history, kerosene's major components are branched- and straight-chain alkanes (hydrocarbon chains) and naphthenes (cycloalkanes), which normally account for at least 70% by volume. Aromatic hydrocarbons such as alkylbenzenes (single ring) and alkylnaphthalenes (double ring), do not normally exceed 25% by volume of kerosene streams. Olefins are usually not present at more than 5% by volume.
The heat of combustion of kerosene is similar to that of diesel fuel; its lower heating value is 43.1 MJ/kg (around 18,500 Btu/lb), and its higher heating value is 46.2 MJ/kg (19,900 Btu/lb).
The ASTM International standard specification D-3699-19 recognizes two grades of kerosene: grades 1-K (less than 0.04% sulfur by weight) and 2-K (0.3% sulfur by weight). 1-K-grade kerosene burns cleaner with fewer deposits, fewer toxins, and less frequent maintenance than 2-K-grade kerosene, and is the preferred grade of kerosene for indoor kerosene heaters and stoves.
In the United Kingdom, two grades of heating oil are defined. BS 2869 Class C1 is the lightest grade used for lanterns, camping stoves, wick heaters, and mixed with petrol in some vintage combustion engines as a substitute for tractor vaporising oil. BS 2869 Class C2 is a heavier distillate, which is used as domestic heating oil. Premium kerosene is usually sold in 5- or 20-liter containers from hardware, camping and garden stores, and is often dyed purple. Standard kerosene is usually dispensed in bulk by a tanker and is undyed.
National and international standards define the properties of several grades of kerosene used for jet fuel. Flash point and freezing point properties are of particular interest for operation and safety; the standards also define additives for control of static electricity and other purposes.
Kerosene is liquid around room temperature: 25 °C (77 °F). The flash point of kerosene is between 37 °C (99 °F) and 65 °C (149 °F), and its autoignition temperature is 220 °C (428 °F). The freezing point of kerosene depends on grade, with commercial aviation fuel standardized at −47 °C (−53 °F).
1-K-grade kerosene freezes around −40 °C (−40 °F, 233 K).
The process of distilling crude oil/petroleum into kerosene, as well as other hydrocarbon compounds, was first written about in the ninth century by the Persian scholar Rāzi (or Rhazes). In his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets), the physician and chemist Razi described two methods for the production of kerosene, termed naft abyad (نفط ابيض"white naphtha"), using an apparatus called an alembic. One method used clay as an absorbent, and later the other method using chemicals like ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac). The distillation process was repeated until most of the volatile hydrocarbon fractions had been removed and the final product was perfectly clear and safe to burn. Kerosene was also produced during the same period from oil shale and bitumen by heating the rock to extract the oil, which was then distilled. During the Chinese Ming Dynasty, the Chinese made use of kerosene through extracting and purifying petroleum and then converted it into lamp fuel. The Chinese made use of petroleum for lighting lamps and heating homes as early as 1500 BC.
Although "coal oil" was well known by industrial chemists at least as early as the 1700s as a byproduct of making coal gas and coal tar, it burned with a smoky flame that prevented its use for indoor illumination. In cities, much indoor illumination was provided by piped-in coal gas, but outside the cities, and for spot lighting within the cities, the lucrative market for fueling indoor lamps was supplied by whale oil, specifically that from sperm whales, which burned brighter and cleaner.
Canadian geologist Abraham Pineo Gesner claimed that in 1846, he had given a public demonstration in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island of a new process he had discovered. He heated coal in a retort, and distilled from it a clear, thin fluid that he showed made an excellent lamp fuel. He coined the name "kerosene" for his fuel, a contraction of keroselaion, meaning wax-oil. The cost of extracting kerosene from coal was high.
Gesner recalled from his extensive knowledge of New Brunswick's geology a naturally occurring asphaltum called albertite. He was blocked from using it by the New Brunswick coal conglomerate because they had coal extraction rights for the province, and he lost a court case when their experts claimed albertite was a form of coal. In 1854, Gesner moved to Newtown Creek, Long Island, New York. There, he secured backing from a group of businessmen. They formed the North American Gas Light Company, to which he assigned his patents.
Despite clear priority of discovery, Gesner did not obtain his first kerosene patent until 1854, two years after James Young's United States patent. Gesner's method of purifying the distillation products appears to have been superior to Young's, resulting in a cleaner and better-smelling fuel. Manufacture of kerosene under the Gesner patents began in New York in 1854 and later in Boston—being distilled from bituminous coal and oil shale. Gesner registered the word "Kerosene" as a trademark in 1854, and for several years, only the North American Gas Light Company and the Downer Company (to which Gesner had granted the right) were allowed to call their lamp oil "Kerosene" in the United States.
In 1848, Scottish chemist James Young experimented with oil discovered seeping in a coal mine as a source of lubricating oil and illuminating fuel. When the seep became exhausted, he experimented with the dry distillation of coal, especially the resinous "boghead coal" (torbanite). He extracted a number of useful liquids from it, one of which he named paraffine oil because at low temperatures, it congealed into a substance that resembled paraffin wax. Young took out a patent on his process and the resulting products in 1850, and built the first truly commercial oil-works in the world at Bathgate in 1851, using oil extracted from locally mined torbanite, shale, and bituminous coal. In 1852, he took out a United States patent for the same invention. These patents were subsequently upheld in both countries in a series of lawsuits, and other producers were obliged to pay him royalties.
In 1851, Samuel Martin Kier began selling lamp oil to local miners, under the name "Carbon Oil". He distilled this from crude oil by a process of his own invention. He also invented a new lamp to burn his product. He has been dubbed the Grandfather of the American Oil Industry by historians. Kier's salt wells began to be fouled with petroleum in the 1840s. At first, Kier simply dumped the oil into the nearby Pennsylvania Main Line Canal as useless waste, but later he began experimenting with several distillates of the crude oil, along with a chemist from eastern Pennsylvania.
Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist residing in Lviv, and his Hungarian partner Jan Zeh [pl] had been experimenting with different distillation techniques, trying to improve on Gesner's kerosene process, but using oil from a local petroleum seep. Many people knew of his work, but paid little attention to it. On the night of 31 July 1853, doctors at the local hospital needed to perform an emergency operation, virtually impossible by candlelight. They therefore sent a messenger for Łukasiewicz and his new lamps. The lamp burned so brightly and cleanly that the hospital officials ordered several lamps plus a large supply of fuel. Łukasiewicz realized the potential of his work and quit the pharmacy to find a business partner, and then travelled to Vienna to register his technique with the government. Łukasiewicz moved to the Gorlice region of Poland in 1854, and sank several wells across southern Poland over the following decade, setting up a refinery near Jasło in 1859.
The petroleum discovery at the Drake Well in western Pennsylvania in 1859 caused a great deal of public excitement and investment drilling in new wells, not only in Pennsylvania, but also in Canada, where petroleum had been discovered at Oil Springs, Ontario in 1858, and southern Poland, where Ignacy Łukasiewicz had been distilling lamp oil from petroleum seeps since 1852. The increased supply of petroleum allowed oil refiners to entirely side-step the oil-from-coal patents of both Young and Gesner, and produce illuminating oil from petroleum without paying royalties to anyone. As a result, the illuminating oil industry in the United States completely switched over to petroleum in the 1860s. The petroleum-based illuminating oil was widely sold as Kerosene, and the trade name soon lost its proprietary status, and became the lower-case generic product "kerosene". Because Gesner's original Kerosene had been also known as "coal oil", generic kerosene from petroleum was commonly called "coal oil" in some parts of the United States well into the 20th century.
In the United Kingdom, manufacturing oil from coal (or oil shale) continued into the early 20th century, although increasingly overshadowed by petroleum oils.
As kerosene production increased, whaling declined. The American whaling fleet, which had been steadily growing for 50 years, reached its all-time peak of 199 ships in 1858. By 1860, just two years later, the fleet had dropped to 167 ships. The Civil War cut into American whaling temporarily, but only 105 whaling ships returned to sea in 1866, the first full year of peace, and that number dwindled until only 39 American ships set out to hunt whales in 1876. Kerosene, made first from coal and oil shale, then from petroleum, had largely taken over whaling's lucrative market in lamp oil.
Electric lighting started displacing kerosene as an illuminant in the late 19th century, especially in urban areas. However, kerosene remained the predominant commercial end-use for petroleum refined in the United States until 1909, when it was exceeded by motor fuels. The rise of the gasoline-powered automobile in the early 20th century created a demand for the lighter hydrocarbon fractions, and refiners invented methods to increase their output of gasoline, while decreasing their output of kerosene. In addition, some of the heavier hydrocarbons that previously went into kerosene were incorporated into diesel fuel. Kerosene kept some market share by being increasingly used in stoves and portable heaters.
A pilot project by ETH Zurich used solar power to produce kerosene from carbon dioxide and water in July 2022. The product can be used in existing aviation applications, and "can also be blended with fossil-derived kerosene."
Kerosene is produced by fractional distillation of crude oil in an oil refinery. It condenses at a temperature intermediate between diesel fuel, which is less volatile, and naphtha and gasoline, which are more volatile.
Kerosene made up 8.5 percent by volume of petroleum refinery output in 2021 in the United States, of which nearly all was kerosene-type jet fuel (8.4 percent).
The fuel, also known as heating oil in the UK and Ireland, remains widely used in kerosene lamps and lanterns in the developing world. Although it replaced whale oil, the 1873 edition of Elements of Chemistry said, "The vapor of this substance [kerosene] mixed with air is as explosive as gunpowder." This statement may have been due to the common practice of adulterating kerosene with cheaper but more volatile hydrocarbon mixtures, such as naphtha. Kerosene was a significant fire risk; in 1880, nearly two of every five New York City fires were caused by defective kerosene lamps.
In less-developed countries kerosene is an important source of energy for cooking and lighting. It is used as a cooking fuel in portable stoves for backpackers. As a heating fuel, it is often used in portable stoves, and is sold in some filling stations. It is sometimes used as a heat source during power failures.
Kerosene is widely used in Japan and Chile as a home heating fuel for portable and installed kerosene heaters. In Chile and Japan, kerosene can be readily bought at any filling station or be delivered to homes in some cases. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, kerosene is often used as a heating fuel in areas not connected to a gas pipeline network. It is used less for cooking, with LPG being preferred because it is easier to light. Kerosene is often the fuel of choice for range cookers such as Rayburn. Additives such as RangeKlene can be put into kerosene to ensure that it burns cleaner and produces less soot when used in range cookers.
The Amish, who generally abstain from the use of electricity, rely on kerosene for lighting at night. More ubiquitous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, kerosene space heaters were often built into kitchen ranges, and kept many farm and fishing families warm and dry through the winter. At one time, citrus growers used a smudge pot fueled by kerosene to create a pall of thick smoke over a grove in an effort to prevent freezing temperatures from damaging crops. "Salamanders" are kerosene space heaters used on construction sites to dry out building materials and to warm workers. Before the days of electrically lighted road barriers, highway construction zones were marked at night by kerosene fired, pot-bellied torches. Most of these uses of kerosene created thick black smoke because of the low temperature of combustion.
A notable exception, discovered in the early 19th century, is the use of a gas mantle mounted above the wick on a kerosene lamp. Looking like a delicate woven bag above the woven cotton wick, the mantle is a residue of mineral materials (mostly thorium dioxide), heated to incandescence by the flame from the wick. The thorium and cerium oxide combination produces both a whiter light and a greater fraction of the energy in the form of visible light than a black body at the same temperature would. These types of lamps are still in use today in areas of the world without electricity, because they give a much better light than a simple wick-type lamp does. Recently, a multipurpose lantern that doubles as a cook stove has been introduced in India in areas with no electricity.
In countries such as Nigeria, kerosene is the main fuel used for cooking, especially by the poor, and kerosene stoves have replaced traditional wood-based cooking appliances. As such, increase in the price of kerosene can have a major political and environmental consequence. The Indian government subsidizes the fuel to keep the price very low, to around 15 U.S. cents per liter as of February 2007, as lower prices discourage dismantling of forests for cooking fuel. In Nigeria an attempt by the government to remove a fuel subsidy that includes kerosene met with strong opposition.
Kerosene is used as a fuel in portable stoves, especially in Primus stoves invented in 1892. Portable kerosene stoves earn a reputation of reliable and durable stove in everyday use, and perform especially well under adverse conditions. In outdoor activities and mountaineering, a decisive advantage of pressurized kerosene stoves over gas cartridge stoves is their particularly high thermal output and their ability to operate at very low temperature in winter or at high altitude. Wick stoves like Perfection's or wickless like Boss continue to be used by the Amish and off grid living and in natural disasters where there is no power available.
In the early to mid-20th century, kerosene or tractor vaporising oil (TVO) was used as a cheap fuel for tractors and hit 'n miss engines. The engine would start on gasoline, then switch over to kerosene once the engine warmed up. On some engines a heat valve on the manifold would route the exhaust gases around the intake pipe, heating the kerosene to the point where it was vaporized and could be ignited by an electric spark.
In Europe following the Second World War, automobiles were similarly modified to run on kerosene rather than gasoline, which they would have to import and pay heavy taxes on. Besides additional piping and the switch between fuels, the head gasket was replaced by a much thicker one to diminish the compression ratio (making the engine less powerful and less efficient, but able to run on kerosene). The necessary equipment was sold under the trademark "Econom".
During the fuel crisis of the 1970s, Saab-Valmet developed and series-produced the Saab 99 Petro that ran on kerosene, turpentine or gasoline. The project, codenamed "Project Lapponia", was headed by Simo Vuorio, and towards the end of the 1970s, a working prototype was produced based on the Saab 99 GL. The car was designed to run on two fuels. Gasoline was used for cold starts and when extra power was needed, but normally it ran on kerosene or turpentine. The idea was that the gasoline could be made from peat using the Fischer–Tropsch process. Between 1980 and 1984, 3,756 Saab 99 Petros and 2,385 Talbot Horizons (a version of the Chrysler Horizon that integrated many Saab components) were made. One reason to manufacture kerosene-fueled cars was that in Finland kerosene was less heavily taxed than gasoline.
Kerosene is used to fuel smaller-horsepower outboard motors built by Yamaha, Suzuki, and Tohatsu. Primarily used on small fishing craft, these are dual-fuel engines that start on gasoline and then transition to kerosene once the engine reaches optimum operating temperature. Multiple fuel Evinrude and Mercury Racing engines also burn kerosene, as well as jet fuel.
Today, kerosene is mainly used in fuel for jet engines in several grades. One highly refined form of the fuel is known as RP-1, and is often burned with liquid oxygen as rocket fuel. These fuel grade kerosenes meet specifications for smoke points and freeze points. The combustion reaction can be approximated as follows, with the molecular formula C12H26 (dodecane):
In the initial phase of liftoff, the Saturn V launch vehicle was powered by the reaction of liquid oxygen with RP-1. For the five 6.4 meganewton sea-level thrust F-1 rocket engines of the Saturn V, burning together, the reaction generated roughly 1.62 × 10 watts (J/s) (162 gigawatt) or 217 million horsepower.
Kerosene is sometimes used as an additive in diesel fuel to prevent gelling or waxing in cold temperatures.
Ultra-low sulfur kerosene is a custom-blended fuel used by the New York City Transit Authority to power its bus fleet. The transit agency started using this fuel in 2004, prior to the widespread adoption of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, which has since become the standard. In 2008, the suppliers of the custom fuel failed to tender for a renewal of the transit agency's contract, leading to a negotiated contract at a significantly increased cost.
JP-8, (for "Jet Propellant 8") a kerosene-based fuel, is used by the United States military as a replacement in diesel fueled vehicles and for powering aircraft. JP-8 is also used by the U.S. military and its NATO allies as a fuel for heaters, stoves, tanks and as a replacement for diesel fuel in the engines of nearly all tactical ground vehicles and electrical generators.
Kerosene is used as a diluent in the PUREX extraction process, but it is increasingly being supplanted by dodecane.
In X-ray crystallography, kerosene can be used to store crystals. When a hydrated crystal is left in air, dehydration may occur slowly. This makes the color of the crystal become dull. Kerosene can keep air away from the crystal.
It can be also used to prevent air from re-dissolving in a boiled liquid, and to store alkali metals such as potassium, sodium, and rubidium (with the exception of lithium, which is less dense than kerosene, causing it to float).
Kerosene is often used in the entertainment industry for fire performances, such as fire breathing, fire juggling or poi, and fire dancing. Because of its low flame temperature when burnt in free air, the risk is lower should the performer come in contact with the flame. Kerosene is generally not recommended as fuel for indoor fire dancing, as it produces an unpleasant (to some) odor, which becomes poisonous in sufficient concentration. Ethanol was sometimes used instead, but the flames it produces look less impressive, and its lower flash point poses a high risk.
As a petroleum product miscible with many industrial liquids, kerosene can be used as both a solvent, able to remove other petroleum products, such as chain grease, and as a lubricant, with less risk of combustion when compared to using gasoline. It can also be used as a cooling agent in metal production and treatment (oxygen-free conditions).
In the petroleum industry, kerosene is often used as a synthetic hydrocarbon for corrosion experiments to simulate crude oil in field conditions.
Kerosene can be used as an adhesive remover on hard-to-remove mucilage or adhesive left by stickers on a glass surface (such as in show windows of stores).
It can be used to remove candle wax that has dripped onto a glass surface; it is recommended that the excess wax be scraped off prior to applying kerosene via a soaked cloth or tissue paper.
It can be used to clean bicycle and motorcycle chains of old lubricant before relubrication.
It can also be used to thin oil-based paint used in fine art. Some artists even use it to clean their brushes; however, it leaves the bristles greasy to the touch.
It has seen use for water tank mosquito control in Australia, where a temporary thin floating layer above the water protects it until the defective tank is repaired.
The World Health Organization considers kerosene to be a polluting fuel and recommends that "governments and practitioners immediately stop promoting its household use". Kerosene smoke contains high levels of harmful particulate matter, and household use of kerosene is associated with higher risks of cancer, respiratory infections, asthma, tuberculosis, cataract, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Ingestion of kerosene is harmful. Kerosene is sometimes recommended as a folk remedy for killing head lice, but health agencies warn against this as it can cause burns and serious illness. A kerosene shampoo can even be fatal if fumes are inhaled.
People can be exposed to kerosene in the workplace by breathing it in, swallowing it, skin contact, and eye contact. The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit of 100 mg/m over an 8-hour workday.
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kerosene, or paraffin, is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from Greek: κηρός (kērós) meaning \"wax\", and was registered as a trademark by Canadian geologist and inventor Abraham Gesner in 1854 before evolving into a generic trademark. It is sometimes spelled kerosine in scientific and industrial usage.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Kerosene is widely used to power jet engines of aircraft (jet fuel), as well as some rocket engines in a highly refined form called RP-1. It is also commonly used as a cooking and lighting fuel, and for fire toys such as poi. In parts of Asia, kerosene is sometimes used as fuel for small outboard motors or even motorcycles. World total kerosene consumption for all purposes is equivalent to about 5,500,000 barrels per day as of July 2023.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "The term kerosene is common in much of Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, and the United States, while the term paraffin (or a closely related variant) is used in Chile, Eastern Africa, South Africa, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The term lamp oil, or the equivalent in the local languages, is common in the majority of Asia and the Southeastern United States.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Confusingly, the name paraffin is also used to refer to a number of distinct petroleum byproducts other than kerosene. For instance, liquid paraffin (called mineral oil in the US) is a more viscous and highly refined product which is used as a laxative. Paraffin wax is a waxy solid extracted from petroleum.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "To prevent confusion between kerosene and the much more flammable and volatile gasoline (petrol), some jurisdictions regulate markings or colourings for containers used to store or dispense kerosene. For example, in the United States, Pennsylvania requires that portable containers used at retail service stations for kerosene be colored blue, as opposed to red (for gasoline) or yellow (for diesel).",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The World Health Organization considers kerosene to be a polluting fuel and recommends that \"governments and practitioners immediately stop promoting its household use\". Kerosene smoke contains high levels of harmful particulate matter, and household use of kerosene is associated with higher risks of cancer, respiratory infections, asthma, tuberculosis, cataracts, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kerosene is a low-viscosity, clear liquid formed from hydrocarbons obtained from the fractional distillation of petroleum between 150 and 275 °C (300 and 525 °F), resulting in a mixture with a density of 0.78–0.81 g/cm. It is miscible in petroleum solvents but immiscible in water. It is composed of hydrocarbon molecules that typically contain between 6 and 20 carbon atoms per molecule, predominantly containing 9 to 16 carbon atoms.",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Regardless of crude oil source or processing history, kerosene's major components are branched- and straight-chain alkanes (hydrocarbon chains) and naphthenes (cycloalkanes), which normally account for at least 70% by volume. Aromatic hydrocarbons such as alkylbenzenes (single ring) and alkylnaphthalenes (double ring), do not normally exceed 25% by volume of kerosene streams. Olefins are usually not present at more than 5% by volume.",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The heat of combustion of kerosene is similar to that of diesel fuel; its lower heating value is 43.1 MJ/kg (around 18,500 Btu/lb), and its higher heating value is 46.2 MJ/kg (19,900 Btu/lb).",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The ASTM International standard specification D-3699-19 recognizes two grades of kerosene: grades 1-K (less than 0.04% sulfur by weight) and 2-K (0.3% sulfur by weight). 1-K-grade kerosene burns cleaner with fewer deposits, fewer toxins, and less frequent maintenance than 2-K-grade kerosene, and is the preferred grade of kerosene for indoor kerosene heaters and stoves.",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "In the United Kingdom, two grades of heating oil are defined. BS 2869 Class C1 is the lightest grade used for lanterns, camping stoves, wick heaters, and mixed with petrol in some vintage combustion engines as a substitute for tractor vaporising oil. BS 2869 Class C2 is a heavier distillate, which is used as domestic heating oil. Premium kerosene is usually sold in 5- or 20-liter containers from hardware, camping and garden stores, and is often dyed purple. Standard kerosene is usually dispensed in bulk by a tanker and is undyed.",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "National and international standards define the properties of several grades of kerosene used for jet fuel. Flash point and freezing point properties are of particular interest for operation and safety; the standards also define additives for control of static electricity and other purposes.",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kerosene is liquid around room temperature: 25 °C (77 °F). The flash point of kerosene is between 37 °C (99 °F) and 65 °C (149 °F), and its autoignition temperature is 220 °C (428 °F). The freezing point of kerosene depends on grade, with commercial aviation fuel standardized at −47 °C (−53 °F).",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "1-K-grade kerosene freezes around −40 °C (−40 °F, 233 K).",
"title": "Properties and grades"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "The process of distilling crude oil/petroleum into kerosene, as well as other hydrocarbon compounds, was first written about in the ninth century by the Persian scholar Rāzi (or Rhazes). In his Kitab al-Asrar (Book of Secrets), the physician and chemist Razi described two methods for the production of kerosene, termed naft abyad (نفط ابيض\"white naphtha\"), using an apparatus called an alembic. One method used clay as an absorbent, and later the other method using chemicals like ammonium chloride (sal ammoniac). The distillation process was repeated until most of the volatile hydrocarbon fractions had been removed and the final product was perfectly clear and safe to burn. Kerosene was also produced during the same period from oil shale and bitumen by heating the rock to extract the oil, which was then distilled. During the Chinese Ming Dynasty, the Chinese made use of kerosene through extracting and purifying petroleum and then converted it into lamp fuel. The Chinese made use of petroleum for lighting lamps and heating homes as early as 1500 BC.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "Although \"coal oil\" was well known by industrial chemists at least as early as the 1700s as a byproduct of making coal gas and coal tar, it burned with a smoky flame that prevented its use for indoor illumination. In cities, much indoor illumination was provided by piped-in coal gas, but outside the cities, and for spot lighting within the cities, the lucrative market for fueling indoor lamps was supplied by whale oil, specifically that from sperm whales, which burned brighter and cleaner.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Canadian geologist Abraham Pineo Gesner claimed that in 1846, he had given a public demonstration in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island of a new process he had discovered. He heated coal in a retort, and distilled from it a clear, thin fluid that he showed made an excellent lamp fuel. He coined the name \"kerosene\" for his fuel, a contraction of keroselaion, meaning wax-oil. The cost of extracting kerosene from coal was high.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "Gesner recalled from his extensive knowledge of New Brunswick's geology a naturally occurring asphaltum called albertite. He was blocked from using it by the New Brunswick coal conglomerate because they had coal extraction rights for the province, and he lost a court case when their experts claimed albertite was a form of coal. In 1854, Gesner moved to Newtown Creek, Long Island, New York. There, he secured backing from a group of businessmen. They formed the North American Gas Light Company, to which he assigned his patents.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Despite clear priority of discovery, Gesner did not obtain his first kerosene patent until 1854, two years after James Young's United States patent. Gesner's method of purifying the distillation products appears to have been superior to Young's, resulting in a cleaner and better-smelling fuel. Manufacture of kerosene under the Gesner patents began in New York in 1854 and later in Boston—being distilled from bituminous coal and oil shale. Gesner registered the word \"Kerosene\" as a trademark in 1854, and for several years, only the North American Gas Light Company and the Downer Company (to which Gesner had granted the right) were allowed to call their lamp oil \"Kerosene\" in the United States.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "In 1848, Scottish chemist James Young experimented with oil discovered seeping in a coal mine as a source of lubricating oil and illuminating fuel. When the seep became exhausted, he experimented with the dry distillation of coal, especially the resinous \"boghead coal\" (torbanite). He extracted a number of useful liquids from it, one of which he named paraffine oil because at low temperatures, it congealed into a substance that resembled paraffin wax. Young took out a patent on his process and the resulting products in 1850, and built the first truly commercial oil-works in the world at Bathgate in 1851, using oil extracted from locally mined torbanite, shale, and bituminous coal. In 1852, he took out a United States patent for the same invention. These patents were subsequently upheld in both countries in a series of lawsuits, and other producers were obliged to pay him royalties.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "In 1851, Samuel Martin Kier began selling lamp oil to local miners, under the name \"Carbon Oil\". He distilled this from crude oil by a process of his own invention. He also invented a new lamp to burn his product. He has been dubbed the Grandfather of the American Oil Industry by historians. Kier's salt wells began to be fouled with petroleum in the 1840s. At first, Kier simply dumped the oil into the nearby Pennsylvania Main Line Canal as useless waste, but later he began experimenting with several distillates of the crude oil, along with a chemist from eastern Pennsylvania.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist residing in Lviv, and his Hungarian partner Jan Zeh [pl] had been experimenting with different distillation techniques, trying to improve on Gesner's kerosene process, but using oil from a local petroleum seep. Many people knew of his work, but paid little attention to it. On the night of 31 July 1853, doctors at the local hospital needed to perform an emergency operation, virtually impossible by candlelight. They therefore sent a messenger for Łukasiewicz and his new lamps. The lamp burned so brightly and cleanly that the hospital officials ordered several lamps plus a large supply of fuel. Łukasiewicz realized the potential of his work and quit the pharmacy to find a business partner, and then travelled to Vienna to register his technique with the government. Łukasiewicz moved to the Gorlice region of Poland in 1854, and sank several wells across southern Poland over the following decade, setting up a refinery near Jasło in 1859.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "The petroleum discovery at the Drake Well in western Pennsylvania in 1859 caused a great deal of public excitement and investment drilling in new wells, not only in Pennsylvania, but also in Canada, where petroleum had been discovered at Oil Springs, Ontario in 1858, and southern Poland, where Ignacy Łukasiewicz had been distilling lamp oil from petroleum seeps since 1852. The increased supply of petroleum allowed oil refiners to entirely side-step the oil-from-coal patents of both Young and Gesner, and produce illuminating oil from petroleum without paying royalties to anyone. As a result, the illuminating oil industry in the United States completely switched over to petroleum in the 1860s. The petroleum-based illuminating oil was widely sold as Kerosene, and the trade name soon lost its proprietary status, and became the lower-case generic product \"kerosene\". Because Gesner's original Kerosene had been also known as \"coal oil\", generic kerosene from petroleum was commonly called \"coal oil\" in some parts of the United States well into the 20th century.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "In the United Kingdom, manufacturing oil from coal (or oil shale) continued into the early 20th century, although increasingly overshadowed by petroleum oils.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "As kerosene production increased, whaling declined. The American whaling fleet, which had been steadily growing for 50 years, reached its all-time peak of 199 ships in 1858. By 1860, just two years later, the fleet had dropped to 167 ships. The Civil War cut into American whaling temporarily, but only 105 whaling ships returned to sea in 1866, the first full year of peace, and that number dwindled until only 39 American ships set out to hunt whales in 1876. Kerosene, made first from coal and oil shale, then from petroleum, had largely taken over whaling's lucrative market in lamp oil.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Electric lighting started displacing kerosene as an illuminant in the late 19th century, especially in urban areas. However, kerosene remained the predominant commercial end-use for petroleum refined in the United States until 1909, when it was exceeded by motor fuels. The rise of the gasoline-powered automobile in the early 20th century created a demand for the lighter hydrocarbon fractions, and refiners invented methods to increase their output of gasoline, while decreasing their output of kerosene. In addition, some of the heavier hydrocarbons that previously went into kerosene were incorporated into diesel fuel. Kerosene kept some market share by being increasingly used in stoves and portable heaters.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A pilot project by ETH Zurich used solar power to produce kerosene from carbon dioxide and water in July 2022. The product can be used in existing aviation applications, and \"can also be blended with fossil-derived kerosene.\"",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Kerosene is produced by fractional distillation of crude oil in an oil refinery. It condenses at a temperature intermediate between diesel fuel, which is less volatile, and naphtha and gasoline, which are more volatile.",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "Kerosene made up 8.5 percent by volume of petroleum refinery output in 2021 in the United States, of which nearly all was kerosene-type jet fuel (8.4 percent).",
"title": "Production"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "The fuel, also known as heating oil in the UK and Ireland, remains widely used in kerosene lamps and lanterns in the developing world. Although it replaced whale oil, the 1873 edition of Elements of Chemistry said, \"The vapor of this substance [kerosene] mixed with air is as explosive as gunpowder.\" This statement may have been due to the common practice of adulterating kerosene with cheaper but more volatile hydrocarbon mixtures, such as naphtha. Kerosene was a significant fire risk; in 1880, nearly two of every five New York City fires were caused by defective kerosene lamps.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "In less-developed countries kerosene is an important source of energy for cooking and lighting. It is used as a cooking fuel in portable stoves for backpackers. As a heating fuel, it is often used in portable stoves, and is sold in some filling stations. It is sometimes used as a heat source during power failures.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Kerosene is widely used in Japan and Chile as a home heating fuel for portable and installed kerosene heaters. In Chile and Japan, kerosene can be readily bought at any filling station or be delivered to homes in some cases. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, kerosene is often used as a heating fuel in areas not connected to a gas pipeline network. It is used less for cooking, with LPG being preferred because it is easier to light. Kerosene is often the fuel of choice for range cookers such as Rayburn. Additives such as RangeKlene can be put into kerosene to ensure that it burns cleaner and produces less soot when used in range cookers.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "The Amish, who generally abstain from the use of electricity, rely on kerosene for lighting at night. More ubiquitous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, kerosene space heaters were often built into kitchen ranges, and kept many farm and fishing families warm and dry through the winter. At one time, citrus growers used a smudge pot fueled by kerosene to create a pall of thick smoke over a grove in an effort to prevent freezing temperatures from damaging crops. \"Salamanders\" are kerosene space heaters used on construction sites to dry out building materials and to warm workers. Before the days of electrically lighted road barriers, highway construction zones were marked at night by kerosene fired, pot-bellied torches. Most of these uses of kerosene created thick black smoke because of the low temperature of combustion.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A notable exception, discovered in the early 19th century, is the use of a gas mantle mounted above the wick on a kerosene lamp. Looking like a delicate woven bag above the woven cotton wick, the mantle is a residue of mineral materials (mostly thorium dioxide), heated to incandescence by the flame from the wick. The thorium and cerium oxide combination produces both a whiter light and a greater fraction of the energy in the form of visible light than a black body at the same temperature would. These types of lamps are still in use today in areas of the world without electricity, because they give a much better light than a simple wick-type lamp does. Recently, a multipurpose lantern that doubles as a cook stove has been introduced in India in areas with no electricity.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "In countries such as Nigeria, kerosene is the main fuel used for cooking, especially by the poor, and kerosene stoves have replaced traditional wood-based cooking appliances. As such, increase in the price of kerosene can have a major political and environmental consequence. The Indian government subsidizes the fuel to keep the price very low, to around 15 U.S. cents per liter as of February 2007, as lower prices discourage dismantling of forests for cooking fuel. In Nigeria an attempt by the government to remove a fuel subsidy that includes kerosene met with strong opposition.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "Kerosene is used as a fuel in portable stoves, especially in Primus stoves invented in 1892. Portable kerosene stoves earn a reputation of reliable and durable stove in everyday use, and perform especially well under adverse conditions. In outdoor activities and mountaineering, a decisive advantage of pressurized kerosene stoves over gas cartridge stoves is their particularly high thermal output and their ability to operate at very low temperature in winter or at high altitude. Wick stoves like Perfection's or wickless like Boss continue to be used by the Amish and off grid living and in natural disasters where there is no power available.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In the early to mid-20th century, kerosene or tractor vaporising oil (TVO) was used as a cheap fuel for tractors and hit 'n miss engines. The engine would start on gasoline, then switch over to kerosene once the engine warmed up. On some engines a heat valve on the manifold would route the exhaust gases around the intake pipe, heating the kerosene to the point where it was vaporized and could be ignited by an electric spark.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "In Europe following the Second World War, automobiles were similarly modified to run on kerosene rather than gasoline, which they would have to import and pay heavy taxes on. Besides additional piping and the switch between fuels, the head gasket was replaced by a much thicker one to diminish the compression ratio (making the engine less powerful and less efficient, but able to run on kerosene). The necessary equipment was sold under the trademark \"Econom\".",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "During the fuel crisis of the 1970s, Saab-Valmet developed and series-produced the Saab 99 Petro that ran on kerosene, turpentine or gasoline. The project, codenamed \"Project Lapponia\", was headed by Simo Vuorio, and towards the end of the 1970s, a working prototype was produced based on the Saab 99 GL. The car was designed to run on two fuels. Gasoline was used for cold starts and when extra power was needed, but normally it ran on kerosene or turpentine. The idea was that the gasoline could be made from peat using the Fischer–Tropsch process. Between 1980 and 1984, 3,756 Saab 99 Petros and 2,385 Talbot Horizons (a version of the Chrysler Horizon that integrated many Saab components) were made. One reason to manufacture kerosene-fueled cars was that in Finland kerosene was less heavily taxed than gasoline.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Kerosene is used to fuel smaller-horsepower outboard motors built by Yamaha, Suzuki, and Tohatsu. Primarily used on small fishing craft, these are dual-fuel engines that start on gasoline and then transition to kerosene once the engine reaches optimum operating temperature. Multiple fuel Evinrude and Mercury Racing engines also burn kerosene, as well as jet fuel.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 40,
"text": "Today, kerosene is mainly used in fuel for jet engines in several grades. One highly refined form of the fuel is known as RP-1, and is often burned with liquid oxygen as rocket fuel. These fuel grade kerosenes meet specifications for smoke points and freeze points. The combustion reaction can be approximated as follows, with the molecular formula C12H26 (dodecane):",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 41,
"text": "In the initial phase of liftoff, the Saturn V launch vehicle was powered by the reaction of liquid oxygen with RP-1. For the five 6.4 meganewton sea-level thrust F-1 rocket engines of the Saturn V, burning together, the reaction generated roughly 1.62 × 10 watts (J/s) (162 gigawatt) or 217 million horsepower.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 42,
"text": "Kerosene is sometimes used as an additive in diesel fuel to prevent gelling or waxing in cold temperatures.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 43,
"text": "Ultra-low sulfur kerosene is a custom-blended fuel used by the New York City Transit Authority to power its bus fleet. The transit agency started using this fuel in 2004, prior to the widespread adoption of ultra-low-sulfur diesel, which has since become the standard. In 2008, the suppliers of the custom fuel failed to tender for a renewal of the transit agency's contract, leading to a negotiated contract at a significantly increased cost.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 44,
"text": "JP-8, (for \"Jet Propellant 8\") a kerosene-based fuel, is used by the United States military as a replacement in diesel fueled vehicles and for powering aircraft. JP-8 is also used by the U.S. military and its NATO allies as a fuel for heaters, stoves, tanks and as a replacement for diesel fuel in the engines of nearly all tactical ground vehicles and electrical generators.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 45,
"text": "Kerosene is used as a diluent in the PUREX extraction process, but it is increasingly being supplanted by dodecane.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 46,
"text": "In X-ray crystallography, kerosene can be used to store crystals. When a hydrated crystal is left in air, dehydration may occur slowly. This makes the color of the crystal become dull. Kerosene can keep air away from the crystal.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 47,
"text": "It can be also used to prevent air from re-dissolving in a boiled liquid, and to store alkali metals such as potassium, sodium, and rubidium (with the exception of lithium, which is less dense than kerosene, causing it to float).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 48,
"text": "Kerosene is often used in the entertainment industry for fire performances, such as fire breathing, fire juggling or poi, and fire dancing. Because of its low flame temperature when burnt in free air, the risk is lower should the performer come in contact with the flame. Kerosene is generally not recommended as fuel for indoor fire dancing, as it produces an unpleasant (to some) odor, which becomes poisonous in sufficient concentration. Ethanol was sometimes used instead, but the flames it produces look less impressive, and its lower flash point poses a high risk.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 49,
"text": "As a petroleum product miscible with many industrial liquids, kerosene can be used as both a solvent, able to remove other petroleum products, such as chain grease, and as a lubricant, with less risk of combustion when compared to using gasoline. It can also be used as a cooling agent in metal production and treatment (oxygen-free conditions).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 50,
"text": "In the petroleum industry, kerosene is often used as a synthetic hydrocarbon for corrosion experiments to simulate crude oil in field conditions.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 51,
"text": "Kerosene can be used as an adhesive remover on hard-to-remove mucilage or adhesive left by stickers on a glass surface (such as in show windows of stores).",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 52,
"text": "It can be used to remove candle wax that has dripped onto a glass surface; it is recommended that the excess wax be scraped off prior to applying kerosene via a soaked cloth or tissue paper.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 53,
"text": "It can be used to clean bicycle and motorcycle chains of old lubricant before relubrication.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 54,
"text": "It can also be used to thin oil-based paint used in fine art. Some artists even use it to clean their brushes; however, it leaves the bristles greasy to the touch.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 55,
"text": "It has seen use for water tank mosquito control in Australia, where a temporary thin floating layer above the water protects it until the defective tank is repaired.",
"title": "Applications"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 56,
"text": "The World Health Organization considers kerosene to be a polluting fuel and recommends that \"governments and practitioners immediately stop promoting its household use\". Kerosene smoke contains high levels of harmful particulate matter, and household use of kerosene is associated with higher risks of cancer, respiratory infections, asthma, tuberculosis, cataract, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.",
"title": "Toxicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 57,
"text": "Ingestion of kerosene is harmful. Kerosene is sometimes recommended as a folk remedy for killing head lice, but health agencies warn against this as it can cause burns and serious illness. A kerosene shampoo can even be fatal if fumes are inhaled.",
"title": "Toxicity"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 58,
"text": "People can be exposed to kerosene in the workplace by breathing it in, swallowing it, skin contact, and eye contact. The US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit of 100 mg/m over an 8-hour workday.",
"title": "Toxicity"
}
] |
Kerosene, or paraffin, is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid which is derived from petroleum. It is widely used as a fuel in aviation as well as households. Its name derives from Greek: κηρός (kērós) meaning "wax", and was registered as a trademark by Canadian geologist and inventor Abraham Gesner in 1854 before evolving into a generic trademark. It is sometimes spelled kerosine in scientific and industrial usage. Kerosene is widely used to power jet engines of aircraft, as well as some rocket engines in a highly refined form called RP-1. It is also commonly used as a cooking and lighting fuel, and for fire toys such as poi. In parts of Asia, kerosene is sometimes used as fuel for small outboard motors or even motorcycles. World total kerosene consumption for all purposes is equivalent to about 5,500,000 barrels per day as of July 2023. The term kerosene is common in much of Argentina, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, and the United States, while the term paraffin is used in Chile, Eastern Africa, South Africa, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The term lamp oil, or the equivalent in the local languages, is common in the majority of Asia and the Southeastern United States. Confusingly, the name paraffin is also used to refer to a number of distinct petroleum byproducts other than kerosene. For instance, liquid paraffin is a more viscous and highly refined product which is used as a laxative. Paraffin wax is a waxy solid extracted from petroleum. To prevent confusion between kerosene and the much more flammable and volatile gasoline (petrol), some jurisdictions regulate markings or colourings for containers used to store or dispense kerosene. For example, in the United States, Pennsylvania requires that portable containers used at retail service stations for kerosene be colored blue, as opposed to red or yellow. The World Health Organization considers kerosene to be a polluting fuel and recommends that "governments and practitioners immediately stop promoting its household use". Kerosene smoke contains high levels of harmful particulate matter, and household use of kerosene is associated with higher risks of cancer, respiratory infections, asthma, tuberculosis, cataracts, and adverse pregnancy outcomes.
|
2001-10-15T13:27:42Z
|
2023-12-12T06:18:51Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene
|
16,994 |
Kwashiorkor
|
Kwashiorkor (/ˌkwɒʃiˈɔːrkɔːr, -kər/ KWOSH-ee-OR-kor, -kər, is also KWASH-) is a form of severe protein malnutrition characterized by edema and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. It is thought to be caused by sufficient calorie intake, but with insufficient protein consumption (or lack of good quality protein), which distinguishes it from marasmus. Recent studies have found that a lack of antioxidant micronutrients such as β-carotene, lycopene, other carotenoids, and vitamin C as well as the presence of aflatoxins may play a role in the development of the disease. However, the exact cause of kwashiorkor is still unknown. Inadequate food supply is correlated with occurrences of kwashiorkor; occurrences in high income countries are rare. It occurs amongst weaning children to ages of about five years old.
Conditions analogous to kwashiorkor were well documented around the world throughout history. However, Jamaican pediatrician Cicely Williams introduced the term in 1935, two years after she published the disease's first formal description. Williams was the first to conduct research on kwashiorkor and differentiate it from other dietary deficiencies. She was the first to suggest that this might be a deficiency of protein. The name is derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes" or "the disease of the deposed child", and reflecting the development of the condition in an older child who has been weaned from the breast when a younger sibling comes. Breast milk contains amino acids vital to a child's growth. In at-risk populations, kwashiorkor may develop after children are weaned from breast milk and begin consuming a diet high in carbohydrates, including maize, cassava or rice.
Kwashiorkor is a type of severe acute malnutrition (SAM). SAM is a category, composed of two conditions: marasmus and kwashiorkor. Both kwashiorkor and marasmus fall under the umbrella of protein–energy malnutrition (PEM). These diseases are oftentimes discussed together, but are distinctly separate conditions of malnutrition. Kwashiorkor is marked by an array of metabolic disturbances of uncertain etiology. In contrast, marasmus is more clearly a syndrome of energy deficiency, which is marked by weight loss. On physical exam, kwashiorkor is also distinguished from marasmus by the presence of edema. When children present with both kwashiorkor and marasmus, the condition is referred to as "marasmic-kwashiorkor". In general, kwashiorkor is marked by more profound serum depletions of antioxidant molecules and minerals, relative to marasmus.
Wellcome classification is a system for classifying protein-energy malnutrition in children based on weight for their age and based on presence of edema. Other classifications include Gomez classification and Waterlow classification.
The defining sign of kwashiorkor in children is bilateral pitting edema in the feet. Edema may also involve the hands, trunk, and face. Kwashiorkor is characterized by a fatty liver. This fatty liver of undernutrition phenotype is often accompanied by evidence of inflammation and fibrosis. Whereas a fatty liver of undernutrition is a consistent feature of kwashiorkor, it is only encountered sometimes in children with marasmus. In addition to this characteristic hepatic steatosis, kwashiorkor is marked by a parallel pattern of multi-organ dysfunction. Organs often affected in children with kwashiorkor include the kidneys, pancreas, heart, and nervous system. Other findings that may be encountered on physical exam include a distended abdomen, hair thinning, loss of teeth, skin or hair depigmentation, and dermatitis. Children with kwashiorkor often develop irritability and anorexia. Generally, kwashiorkor is treated by introducing a high quality source of protein to the diet. Ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) as well as F-100 and F-75 milk powders, which both include skim milk powder, are recommended for the treatment of kwashiorkor. These products are designed for use in low resource settings. The limited number of kwashiorkor cases that occur in high resource settings, where there is good access to advanced therapeutic tools, are typically treated with partially hydrolyzed or elemental enteral formulas, with parenteral nutrition provided in extreme cases.
The precise etiology of kwashiorkor remains unclear. Several hypotheses have been proposed that are associated with and explain some, but not all aspects of the pathophysiology of kwashiorkor. They include, but are not limited to protein deficiency causing hypoalbuminemia, amino acid deficiency, oxidative stress, and gut microbiome changes.
Kwashiorkor is a severe form of malnutrition associated with a low protein diet. The extreme lack of protein causes an osmotic imbalance in the gastrointestinal system causing swelling of the gut diagnosed as an edema or retention of water.
Extreme fluid retention observed in individuals suffering from kwashiorkor is accompanied by irregularities in the lymphatic system as well as disruptions of capillary exchange. The lymphatic system serves three major purposes: fluid recovery, immunity, and lipid absorption. Victims of kwashiorkor commonly exhibit reduced ability to recover fluids, immune system failure, and low lipid absorption. Fluid recovery by the lymphatic system is accomplished by re-vascularization of fluid and macromolecules from the interstitial space, allowing these constituents of whole blood to be returned to the venous circulation. Compromised fluid recovery may contribute to the phenomenon of extravascular fluid accumulation in kwashiorkor.
The low protein theory for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor has been used to teach that capillary exchange between the lymphatic system and circulating blood is impaired by a reduced oncotic (i.e. colloid osmotic pressure, COP) in the blood, as a consequence of inadequate protein intake, so that the hydrostatic pressure gradient, which favors extravasation of fluid from small vessels, is not overcome. Proteins, mainly albumin, are responsible for creating the COP observed in the blood and tissue fluids. The difference in the COP of the blood and tissue tends to favor the reentry of fluid from the extravascular space, into the circulatory system. This tendency is opposed by the venous hydrostatic pressure, which tends to favor the exit of fluid from small vessels, into the interstitial space. The low protein theory for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor held that a deficiency of serum proteins, caused by inadequate protein intake, disrupted this balance, and thus impaired the return flow of fluid from the interstitium into the capillary and venous structures. It has been taught that this is what accounts for the accumulation of extravascular fluid in kwashiorkor, and the subsequent pedal edema and abdominal distension.
The low protein theory, which relies heavily upon Starling's theory for the movement of fluid in biological systems, provided a compelling rationale for the pathogenesis of edema in kwashiorkor. What it does not explain however, is the entire array of disturbances that define the kwashiorkor syndrome. These include, irritability, anorexia, skin desquamation, skin depigmentation, hair discoloration, reduced mitochondrial respiration, impaired lipid export from the liver without an accompanying reduction of lipoprotein synthesis, 'oxidative stress', glutathione depletions, transsulfuration disturbances, diffuse DNA hypomethylation, immune dysfunction, decreased transmethylation activity, and sulfated glycosaminoglycan deficiencies. It is now generally acknowledged that by itself, the low protein theory does not adequately account for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor. More complex deficiencies are at work. These have still not been established.
Social factors are also relevant. Ignorance of nutrition can be a cause. A case was described where parents who fed their child cassava failed to recognize malnutrition because of the edema caused by the syndrome and believed the child was well-nourished despite the development of kwashiorkor.
Recent studies have attempted to pinpoint a relationship between kwashiorkor and high levels of aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are naturally occurring toxins produced by the mold Aspergillus flavus, a fungus found in areas with hot and humid climates. These toxins tend to grow and can be found in agricultural crops such as millet, maize, and rice. An analysis found that the presence of aflatoxins was found more frequently and in higher concentrations in individuals with kwashiorkor when compared to individuals with marasmus (another form of severe acute malnutrition). In particular, biological samples showed greater levels of aflatoxins in the brain, heart, kidney, liver, lungs, serum, stool, and urine. Aflatoxins were not found in liver samples of individuals with marasmus. It has been known that the liver organ is the main target of aflatoxins and chronic toxicity can result in immunosuppressive and carcinogenic effects. However, there is currently conflicting evidence to pinpoint a connection between kwashiorkor and aflatoxins. Studies have shown that not all children with kwashiorkor present with detectable aflatoxin levels. It has also been proposed that damage done by aflatoxins may be due to glutathione depletion (another proposed mechanism of the disease) in children with kwashiorkor.
Kwashiorkor is a form of protein deficiency, which can result in both osmotic imbalances and irregularities in the lymphatic system.
Kwashiorkor is most notable for peripheral edema. The presence of edema in kwashiorkor is correlated with very low albumin concentration (hypoalbuminemia). Edema results from a loss of fluid balance between the hydrostatic and oncotic pressures across the capillary blood vessel walls due to the lack of protein which affects the body's ability to draw fluid from the tissues into the bloodstream. Low albumin concentration influences negatively the strength of oncotic pressure. Failure leads to the fluid buildup in the abdomen, resulting in edema and belly distension.
Furthermore, the release of antidiuretic hormone is stimulated by hypovolemia, also leading to the development of peripheral edema. Plasma renin is also stimulated, promoting sodium retention.
It is important to distinguish the pathophysiology of marasmus and kwashiorkor when it comes to treating malnourished children who may have hypovolemic shock that is cause by an acute loss of salt and water. Children with severe albumin deficiency struggle physiologically to maintain their blood volume.
Kwashiorkor is also marked by low glutathione levels. Glutathione is used in many of the body processes on a molecule level.
It is believed to be related to high oxidant levels commonly seen in people who suffer from starvation and rarely in chronic inflammation. Glutathione serves vital functions including management of oxidative stress which is an imbalance that plays a key role in the pathogenesis of many diseases.
Evidence indicates that amino acid balance has an important effect on protein nutrition and therefore on glutathione homeostasis.
Cysteine is an essential amino acid that acts as the limiting amino acid for glutathione synthesis in humans. Factors that increase demand for glutathione may increase demand for cysteine, and hence methionine. Such demands have been hypothesized to increase risk for kwashiorkor.
A proposed experimental theory suggests that alterations in the microbiome/virone contributes to edematous malnutrition, but further studies are required to understand the mechanism.
Kwashiorkor, or edematous malnutrition, like many other malnutrition diseases, is indirectly assessed using anthropometry. Kwashiorkor is a subtype of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) characterized by bilateral peripheral pitting edema. According to the World Health Organization, the SAM diagnosis parameters are a "mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) of < 115 mm, weight-for-height/length Z-score (WHZ) of < -3Z and nutritional edema or any combination of these parameters." Additional clinical findings on physical exam include marked muscle atrophy, abdominal distension, dermatitis, and hepatomegaly.
WHO criteria for clinical assessment of malnutrition are based on the degree of wasting (MUAC), stunting (weight-for-height Z-score), and the presence of edema (mild to severe).
Because it can be difficult to measure weight-for-height Z scores (WHZ) frequently, screening is performed by physical exam, with careful examination of the child's feet to detect the presence of bilateral pitting edema. Screening for edema is essential for the diagnosis of kwashiorkor, since nearly two thirds of kwashiorkor cases do not have evidence of acute wasting (i.e. mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) < 125 mm, or WHZ < -2) when diagnosed with kwashiorkor.
As for the prevention of childhood malnutrition, there needs to be public health changes such as improving agriculture and improving access to healthcare to effectively reduce the rates of malnutrition in children. By educating individuals of childbearing age on proper nutrition and health during and after pregnancy, they can provide their children with the appropriate nutrients from a young age. By ensuring they are equipped with the proper education and resources, caretakers and infants are in better health, ultimately preventing childhood malnutrition.
Because edema can hide decreased muscle mass, it can be hard to diagnose kwashiorkor in young children; however, if cases are overlooked, children become more susceptible to infections and can ultimately lead to morbidity and mortality. To prevent this from happening, parents can be educated on proper nutrition and the importance of breastfeeding infants to ensure they receive all the nutrients they need.
A diet rich in carbohydrates, fats that make up 10% of the total caloric needs, and proteins that make up 15% of the caloric needs can prevent kwashiorkor.
Proteins can be found in the following foods
WHO guidelines outline 10 general principles for the inpatient management of severely malnourished children.
Both clinical subtypes of severe acute malnutrition (kwashiorkor and marasmus) are treated similarly. Upon initial treatment, children with kwashiorkor may experience weight loss as their edema resolves. Therefore, after concerns of refeeding syndrome have passed, children may require 120-140% of their estimated caloric needs in order to achieve catch-up growth.
The cause, type, and severity of malnutrition determines what type of treatment would be most appropriate. For primary acute malnutrition, children with no complications are treated at home and are encouraged to either continue breastfeeding (for infants) or start using ready-to-use therapeutic foods (for children). For secondary acute malnutrition, the underlying cause needs to be identified to appropriately treat children. Only after the primary disease is determined can an appropriate dietary plan be made, as fluid, vitamins, and macronutrients may need to be considered to not exacerbate the cause of the malnutrition.
Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) and F-75 and F-100 milks were created to provide appropriate nutrition and caloric intake to those experiencing malnutrition. F-75 milk would be ideal when trying to reintroduce food into a malnourished person, and F-100 milk would be used to aid in weight gain. While RUTFs and F-100 milk were made to have the same nutritional value, RUTFs are beneficial as they are dehydrated and do not require much preparation.
Kwashiorkor is associated with a high risk of mortality and long-term complications. Treatment under the guidelines of the World Health Organization has proven to reduce this mortality risk and affected children tend to recover faster than children with other severe malnutrition diseases. However, physical and intellectual capabilities are not fully restored. Growth stunting and chronic disruption of microbiota are commonly observed after recovery.
A high risk of death is identified by a brachial perimeter < 11 cm or by a weight-for-age threshold < −3 z-scores below the median of the WHO child growth standards. In practice, malnourished children with edema are suffering from potentially life-threatening severe malnutrition.
Kwashiorkor is rare in high income countries. It is mostly observed in low-income and middle income nations and regions such as Southeast Asia, Central America, Congo, Ethiopia, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, South Africa, and Uganda, where poverty is prominent. Occurrences of severe malnutrition also tend to trend higher under conditions of food insecurity, higher prevalence of infectious diseases, lack of access to appropriate care, and poor living situations with inadequate sanitation. Communities experiencing famine are affected the most especially during the rainy season. Prevalence varies, but it affects children of either sex commonly under five years old. "Globally, kwashiorkor indirected accounted for 53% of deaths among children under five between 2000 and 2003 when associated with other common childhood diseases like acute respiratory infections, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS and other causes of perinatal deaths."
When compared to marasmus in developing countries, kwashiorkor typically has a lower prevalence, "0.2%-1.6% for kwashiorkor and 1.2%-6.8% for marasmus." Factors such as "diet, geographical locations, climate and aflatoxin exposure" have been invoked as potential causes for observed differences in the prevalence for kwashiorkor and marasmus.
In general, in areas where Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) is prevalent, marasmus is more often the dominant SAM condition. However, in certain areas kwashiorkor may be more common than marasmus.
Kwashiorkor was present in the world long before 1933, when Cecily Williams published research which took the Ga name for the disease. There were already many names for the illness which referenced the cessation of breastfeeding, or the consumption of monotonous diets high in starch. However, Williams was the first to suggest that this might be a deficiency of protein or an amino acid. Despite publishing in 1933, it was only in 1949 that the World Health Organization officially recognized kwashiorkor as a public health concern. This period also correlated with the promotion of infant formula, often by European colonial powers. The substitution of formula for breastmilk contributed significantly to the increasing visibility of kwashiorkor throughout the twentieth century. Cicely Williams later described the promotion of formula as "the most criminal form of sedition, and that those deaths should be regarded as murder." These arguments underpinned the 1970s Nestlé boycott.
Those experiencing poverty-related infectious diseases (PRDs) such as malaria and tuberculosis are also likely to be malnourished. Malnutrition can affect the pharmacokinetics of various drugs used to treat PRDs by changing a drug's bioavailability, distribution, and elimination. To optimize treatment of those diseases, there needs to be more research into how severe malnutrition, specifically kwashiorkor, can affect treatment response.
Current research and recommendations to manage severe acute malnutrition (SAM), such as kwashiorkor, in children are largely based on expert opinions. Only one-third of the WHO guidelines for management of SAM are based on epidemiological and clinical research. Further studies are needed in order to "improve treatment outcomes in the large number of children with SAM."
|
[
{
"paragraph_id": 0,
"text": "Kwashiorkor (/ˌkwɒʃiˈɔːrkɔːr, -kər/ KWOSH-ee-OR-kor, -kər, is also KWASH-) is a form of severe protein malnutrition characterized by edema and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. It is thought to be caused by sufficient calorie intake, but with insufficient protein consumption (or lack of good quality protein), which distinguishes it from marasmus. Recent studies have found that a lack of antioxidant micronutrients such as β-carotene, lycopene, other carotenoids, and vitamin C as well as the presence of aflatoxins may play a role in the development of the disease. However, the exact cause of kwashiorkor is still unknown. Inadequate food supply is correlated with occurrences of kwashiorkor; occurrences in high income countries are rare. It occurs amongst weaning children to ages of about five years old.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 1,
"text": "Conditions analogous to kwashiorkor were well documented around the world throughout history. However, Jamaican pediatrician Cicely Williams introduced the term in 1935, two years after she published the disease's first formal description. Williams was the first to conduct research on kwashiorkor and differentiate it from other dietary deficiencies. She was the first to suggest that this might be a deficiency of protein. The name is derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as \"the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes\" or \"the disease of the deposed child\", and reflecting the development of the condition in an older child who has been weaned from the breast when a younger sibling comes. Breast milk contains amino acids vital to a child's growth. In at-risk populations, kwashiorkor may develop after children are weaned from breast milk and begin consuming a diet high in carbohydrates, including maize, cassava or rice.",
"title": ""
},
{
"paragraph_id": 2,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is a type of severe acute malnutrition (SAM). SAM is a category, composed of two conditions: marasmus and kwashiorkor. Both kwashiorkor and marasmus fall under the umbrella of protein–energy malnutrition (PEM). These diseases are oftentimes discussed together, but are distinctly separate conditions of malnutrition. Kwashiorkor is marked by an array of metabolic disturbances of uncertain etiology. In contrast, marasmus is more clearly a syndrome of energy deficiency, which is marked by weight loss. On physical exam, kwashiorkor is also distinguished from marasmus by the presence of edema. When children present with both kwashiorkor and marasmus, the condition is referred to as \"marasmic-kwashiorkor\". In general, kwashiorkor is marked by more profound serum depletions of antioxidant molecules and minerals, relative to marasmus.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 3,
"text": "Wellcome classification is a system for classifying protein-energy malnutrition in children based on weight for their age and based on presence of edema. Other classifications include Gomez classification and Waterlow classification.",
"title": "Classification"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 4,
"text": "The defining sign of kwashiorkor in children is bilateral pitting edema in the feet. Edema may also involve the hands, trunk, and face. Kwashiorkor is characterized by a fatty liver. This fatty liver of undernutrition phenotype is often accompanied by evidence of inflammation and fibrosis. Whereas a fatty liver of undernutrition is a consistent feature of kwashiorkor, it is only encountered sometimes in children with marasmus. In addition to this characteristic hepatic steatosis, kwashiorkor is marked by a parallel pattern of multi-organ dysfunction. Organs often affected in children with kwashiorkor include the kidneys, pancreas, heart, and nervous system. Other findings that may be encountered on physical exam include a distended abdomen, hair thinning, loss of teeth, skin or hair depigmentation, and dermatitis. Children with kwashiorkor often develop irritability and anorexia. Generally, kwashiorkor is treated by introducing a high quality source of protein to the diet. Ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) as well as F-100 and F-75 milk powders, which both include skim milk powder, are recommended for the treatment of kwashiorkor. These products are designed for use in low resource settings. The limited number of kwashiorkor cases that occur in high resource settings, where there is good access to advanced therapeutic tools, are typically treated with partially hydrolyzed or elemental enteral formulas, with parenteral nutrition provided in extreme cases.",
"title": "Signs and symptoms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 5,
"text": "The precise etiology of kwashiorkor remains unclear. Several hypotheses have been proposed that are associated with and explain some, but not all aspects of the pathophysiology of kwashiorkor. They include, but are not limited to protein deficiency causing hypoalbuminemia, amino acid deficiency, oxidative stress, and gut microbiome changes.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 6,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is a severe form of malnutrition associated with a low protein diet. The extreme lack of protein causes an osmotic imbalance in the gastrointestinal system causing swelling of the gut diagnosed as an edema or retention of water.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 7,
"text": "Extreme fluid retention observed in individuals suffering from kwashiorkor is accompanied by irregularities in the lymphatic system as well as disruptions of capillary exchange. The lymphatic system serves three major purposes: fluid recovery, immunity, and lipid absorption. Victims of kwashiorkor commonly exhibit reduced ability to recover fluids, immune system failure, and low lipid absorption. Fluid recovery by the lymphatic system is accomplished by re-vascularization of fluid and macromolecules from the interstitial space, allowing these constituents of whole blood to be returned to the venous circulation. Compromised fluid recovery may contribute to the phenomenon of extravascular fluid accumulation in kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 8,
"text": "The low protein theory for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor has been used to teach that capillary exchange between the lymphatic system and circulating blood is impaired by a reduced oncotic (i.e. colloid osmotic pressure, COP) in the blood, as a consequence of inadequate protein intake, so that the hydrostatic pressure gradient, which favors extravasation of fluid from small vessels, is not overcome. Proteins, mainly albumin, are responsible for creating the COP observed in the blood and tissue fluids. The difference in the COP of the blood and tissue tends to favor the reentry of fluid from the extravascular space, into the circulatory system. This tendency is opposed by the venous hydrostatic pressure, which tends to favor the exit of fluid from small vessels, into the interstitial space. The low protein theory for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor held that a deficiency of serum proteins, caused by inadequate protein intake, disrupted this balance, and thus impaired the return flow of fluid from the interstitium into the capillary and venous structures. It has been taught that this is what accounts for the accumulation of extravascular fluid in kwashiorkor, and the subsequent pedal edema and abdominal distension.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 9,
"text": "The low protein theory, which relies heavily upon Starling's theory for the movement of fluid in biological systems, provided a compelling rationale for the pathogenesis of edema in kwashiorkor. What it does not explain however, is the entire array of disturbances that define the kwashiorkor syndrome. These include, irritability, anorexia, skin desquamation, skin depigmentation, hair discoloration, reduced mitochondrial respiration, impaired lipid export from the liver without an accompanying reduction of lipoprotein synthesis, 'oxidative stress', glutathione depletions, transsulfuration disturbances, diffuse DNA hypomethylation, immune dysfunction, decreased transmethylation activity, and sulfated glycosaminoglycan deficiencies. It is now generally acknowledged that by itself, the low protein theory does not adequately account for the pathogenesis of kwashiorkor. More complex deficiencies are at work. These have still not been established.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 10,
"text": "Social factors are also relevant. Ignorance of nutrition can be a cause. A case was described where parents who fed their child cassava failed to recognize malnutrition because of the edema caused by the syndrome and believed the child was well-nourished despite the development of kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 11,
"text": "Recent studies have attempted to pinpoint a relationship between kwashiorkor and high levels of aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are naturally occurring toxins produced by the mold Aspergillus flavus, a fungus found in areas with hot and humid climates. These toxins tend to grow and can be found in agricultural crops such as millet, maize, and rice. An analysis found that the presence of aflatoxins was found more frequently and in higher concentrations in individuals with kwashiorkor when compared to individuals with marasmus (another form of severe acute malnutrition). In particular, biological samples showed greater levels of aflatoxins in the brain, heart, kidney, liver, lungs, serum, stool, and urine. Aflatoxins were not found in liver samples of individuals with marasmus. It has been known that the liver organ is the main target of aflatoxins and chronic toxicity can result in immunosuppressive and carcinogenic effects. However, there is currently conflicting evidence to pinpoint a connection between kwashiorkor and aflatoxins. Studies have shown that not all children with kwashiorkor present with detectable aflatoxin levels. It has also been proposed that damage done by aflatoxins may be due to glutathione depletion (another proposed mechanism of the disease) in children with kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Causes"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 12,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is a form of protein deficiency, which can result in both osmotic imbalances and irregularities in the lymphatic system.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 13,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is most notable for peripheral edema. The presence of edema in kwashiorkor is correlated with very low albumin concentration (hypoalbuminemia). Edema results from a loss of fluid balance between the hydrostatic and oncotic pressures across the capillary blood vessel walls due to the lack of protein which affects the body's ability to draw fluid from the tissues into the bloodstream. Low albumin concentration influences negatively the strength of oncotic pressure. Failure leads to the fluid buildup in the abdomen, resulting in edema and belly distension.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 14,
"text": "Furthermore, the release of antidiuretic hormone is stimulated by hypovolemia, also leading to the development of peripheral edema. Plasma renin is also stimulated, promoting sodium retention.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 15,
"text": "It is important to distinguish the pathophysiology of marasmus and kwashiorkor when it comes to treating malnourished children who may have hypovolemic shock that is cause by an acute loss of salt and water. Children with severe albumin deficiency struggle physiologically to maintain their blood volume.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 16,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is also marked by low glutathione levels. Glutathione is used in many of the body processes on a molecule level.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 17,
"text": "It is believed to be related to high oxidant levels commonly seen in people who suffer from starvation and rarely in chronic inflammation. Glutathione serves vital functions including management of oxidative stress which is an imbalance that plays a key role in the pathogenesis of many diseases.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 18,
"text": "Evidence indicates that amino acid balance has an important effect on protein nutrition and therefore on glutathione homeostasis.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 19,
"text": "Cysteine is an essential amino acid that acts as the limiting amino acid for glutathione synthesis in humans. Factors that increase demand for glutathione may increase demand for cysteine, and hence methionine. Such demands have been hypothesized to increase risk for kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 20,
"text": "A proposed experimental theory suggests that alterations in the microbiome/virone contributes to edematous malnutrition, but further studies are required to understand the mechanism.",
"title": "Mechanisms"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 21,
"text": "Kwashiorkor, or edematous malnutrition, like many other malnutrition diseases, is indirectly assessed using anthropometry. Kwashiorkor is a subtype of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) characterized by bilateral peripheral pitting edema. According to the World Health Organization, the SAM diagnosis parameters are a \"mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) of < 115 mm, weight-for-height/length Z-score (WHZ) of < -3Z and nutritional edema or any combination of these parameters.\" Additional clinical findings on physical exam include marked muscle atrophy, abdominal distension, dermatitis, and hepatomegaly.",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 22,
"text": "WHO criteria for clinical assessment of malnutrition are based on the degree of wasting (MUAC), stunting (weight-for-height Z-score), and the presence of edema (mild to severe).",
"title": "Diagnosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 23,
"text": "Because it can be difficult to measure weight-for-height Z scores (WHZ) frequently, screening is performed by physical exam, with careful examination of the child's feet to detect the presence of bilateral pitting edema. Screening for edema is essential for the diagnosis of kwashiorkor, since nearly two thirds of kwashiorkor cases do not have evidence of acute wasting (i.e. mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) < 125 mm, or WHZ < -2) when diagnosed with kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Screening"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 24,
"text": "As for the prevention of childhood malnutrition, there needs to be public health changes such as improving agriculture and improving access to healthcare to effectively reduce the rates of malnutrition in children. By educating individuals of childbearing age on proper nutrition and health during and after pregnancy, they can provide their children with the appropriate nutrients from a young age. By ensuring they are equipped with the proper education and resources, caretakers and infants are in better health, ultimately preventing childhood malnutrition.",
"title": "Prevention"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 25,
"text": "Because edema can hide decreased muscle mass, it can be hard to diagnose kwashiorkor in young children; however, if cases are overlooked, children become more susceptible to infections and can ultimately lead to morbidity and mortality. To prevent this from happening, parents can be educated on proper nutrition and the importance of breastfeeding infants to ensure they receive all the nutrients they need.",
"title": "Prevention"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 26,
"text": "A diet rich in carbohydrates, fats that make up 10% of the total caloric needs, and proteins that make up 15% of the caloric needs can prevent kwashiorkor.",
"title": "Prevention"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 27,
"text": "Proteins can be found in the following foods",
"title": "Prevention"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 28,
"text": "WHO guidelines outline 10 general principles for the inpatient management of severely malnourished children.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 29,
"text": "Both clinical subtypes of severe acute malnutrition (kwashiorkor and marasmus) are treated similarly. Upon initial treatment, children with kwashiorkor may experience weight loss as their edema resolves. Therefore, after concerns of refeeding syndrome have passed, children may require 120-140% of their estimated caloric needs in order to achieve catch-up growth.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 30,
"text": "The cause, type, and severity of malnutrition determines what type of treatment would be most appropriate. For primary acute malnutrition, children with no complications are treated at home and are encouraged to either continue breastfeeding (for infants) or start using ready-to-use therapeutic foods (for children). For secondary acute malnutrition, the underlying cause needs to be identified to appropriately treat children. Only after the primary disease is determined can an appropriate dietary plan be made, as fluid, vitamins, and macronutrients may need to be considered to not exacerbate the cause of the malnutrition.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 31,
"text": "Ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTFs) and F-75 and F-100 milks were created to provide appropriate nutrition and caloric intake to those experiencing malnutrition. F-75 milk would be ideal when trying to reintroduce food into a malnourished person, and F-100 milk would be used to aid in weight gain. While RUTFs and F-100 milk were made to have the same nutritional value, RUTFs are beneficial as they are dehydrated and do not require much preparation.",
"title": "Treatment"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 32,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is associated with a high risk of mortality and long-term complications. Treatment under the guidelines of the World Health Organization has proven to reduce this mortality risk and affected children tend to recover faster than children with other severe malnutrition diseases. However, physical and intellectual capabilities are not fully restored. Growth stunting and chronic disruption of microbiota are commonly observed after recovery.",
"title": "Prognosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 33,
"text": "A high risk of death is identified by a brachial perimeter < 11 cm or by a weight-for-age threshold < −3 z-scores below the median of the WHO child growth standards. In practice, malnourished children with edema are suffering from potentially life-threatening severe malnutrition.",
"title": "Prognosis"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 34,
"text": "Kwashiorkor is rare in high income countries. It is mostly observed in low-income and middle income nations and regions such as Southeast Asia, Central America, Congo, Ethiopia, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, South Africa, and Uganda, where poverty is prominent. Occurrences of severe malnutrition also tend to trend higher under conditions of food insecurity, higher prevalence of infectious diseases, lack of access to appropriate care, and poor living situations with inadequate sanitation. Communities experiencing famine are affected the most especially during the rainy season. Prevalence varies, but it affects children of either sex commonly under five years old. \"Globally, kwashiorkor indirected accounted for 53% of deaths among children under five between 2000 and 2003 when associated with other common childhood diseases like acute respiratory infections, malaria, measles, HIV/AIDS and other causes of perinatal deaths.\"",
"title": "Epidemiology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 35,
"text": "When compared to marasmus in developing countries, kwashiorkor typically has a lower prevalence, \"0.2%-1.6% for kwashiorkor and 1.2%-6.8% for marasmus.\" Factors such as \"diet, geographical locations, climate and aflatoxin exposure\" have been invoked as potential causes for observed differences in the prevalence for kwashiorkor and marasmus.",
"title": "Epidemiology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 36,
"text": "In general, in areas where Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) is prevalent, marasmus is more often the dominant SAM condition. However, in certain areas kwashiorkor may be more common than marasmus.",
"title": "Epidemiology"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 37,
"text": "Kwashiorkor was present in the world long before 1933, when Cecily Williams published research which took the Ga name for the disease. There were already many names for the illness which referenced the cessation of breastfeeding, or the consumption of monotonous diets high in starch. However, Williams was the first to suggest that this might be a deficiency of protein or an amino acid. Despite publishing in 1933, it was only in 1949 that the World Health Organization officially recognized kwashiorkor as a public health concern. This period also correlated with the promotion of infant formula, often by European colonial powers. The substitution of formula for breastmilk contributed significantly to the increasing visibility of kwashiorkor throughout the twentieth century. Cicely Williams later described the promotion of formula as \"the most criminal form of sedition, and that those deaths should be regarded as murder.\" These arguments underpinned the 1970s Nestlé boycott.",
"title": "History"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 38,
"text": "Those experiencing poverty-related infectious diseases (PRDs) such as malaria and tuberculosis are also likely to be malnourished. Malnutrition can affect the pharmacokinetics of various drugs used to treat PRDs by changing a drug's bioavailability, distribution, and elimination. To optimize treatment of those diseases, there needs to be more research into how severe malnutrition, specifically kwashiorkor, can affect treatment response.",
"title": "Effects on pharmacokinetics"
},
{
"paragraph_id": 39,
"text": "Current research and recommendations to manage severe acute malnutrition (SAM), such as kwashiorkor, in children are largely based on expert opinions. Only one-third of the WHO guidelines for management of SAM are based on epidemiological and clinical research. Further studies are needed in order to \"improve treatment outcomes in the large number of children with SAM.\"",
"title": "Research directions"
}
] |
Kwashiorkor is a form of severe protein malnutrition characterized by edema and an enlarged liver with fatty infiltrates. It is thought to be caused by sufficient calorie intake, but with insufficient protein consumption, which distinguishes it from marasmus. Recent studies have found that a lack of antioxidant micronutrients such as β-carotene, lycopene, other carotenoids, and vitamin C as well as the presence of aflatoxins may play a role in the development of the disease. However, the exact cause of kwashiorkor is still unknown. Inadequate food supply is correlated with occurrences of kwashiorkor; occurrences in high income countries are rare. It occurs amongst weaning children to ages of about five years old. Conditions analogous to kwashiorkor were well documented around the world throughout history. However, Jamaican pediatrician Cicely Williams introduced the term in 1935, two years after she published the disease's first formal description. Williams was the first to conduct research on kwashiorkor and differentiate it from other dietary deficiencies. She was the first to suggest that this might be a deficiency of protein. The name is derived from the Ga language of coastal Ghana, translated as "the sickness the baby gets when the new baby comes" or "the disease of the deposed child", and reflecting the development of the condition in an older child who has been weaned from the breast when a younger sibling comes. Breast milk contains amino acids vital to a child's growth. In at-risk populations, kwashiorkor may develop after children are weaned from breast milk and begin consuming a diet high in carbohydrates, including maize, cassava or rice.
|
2001-10-16T12:36:27Z
|
2023-11-26T20:33:59Z
|
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor
|
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